Nr 15 Kreativitet: PDF-version - Populär Poesi

the created started to be seen as an individual ability
and the product of this ability. To this day we have not
moved away from that view. There have been
however, a wide range of theories all claiming
something slightly different, starting with a five-step-
model proposed by Graham Wallas in 1926 and
diverged into the convergent-divergent theory, the
creative cognition approach, the explicit-implicit
interaction theory,
conceptual blending
approach, the honing
theory and many other
less prominent theories.
However many views on
creativity there are they
all have one thing in
common: they all focus on the individual and take the
cognitive process that takes place within the individual
as leading in their research. As a sociologist, I see a
major gap in an approach of this sort. It tends to
downplay the fact that man is, in essence, social. This
article will therefore take another approach, it will
ignore the individual cognitive process altogether and
will try to find the source of creativity solely in the
‘social’.
The Social Creativity
Reframing creativity should be understood as moving
away from attributing the ‘created’ completely to the
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‘creator’. One should – perhaps first and foremost –
take the collective personal ties (or social relations)
the ‘creator’ entertains as the object of interest.
However, I understand I cannot make this claim
without explaining the paradigm it is grounded in.
The social networks paradigm, originating mainly
from the work of Georg Simmel who believed that
dyadic relationships (a relation between two people)
did not grasp social
behaviour as sufficient
as the triadic relation-
ship (a triangle of
relations between
three individuals),
assumes that individu-
al social behavior is
orchestrated. Many theorists expanded on this work
stating that not only the triad was of interest but also
the relations people entertained outside the triad, the
friends of friends. Sociologists like Mark Granovetter
argued that we should distinguish between relations
and Scott Feld urged us to look at activities as expla-
nation for the way networks are arranged. This wide
range of research has led to a matured paradigm of
social action capable of explaining behaviour (like that
of the creative) within the social world.
Actors tend to adjust their attitudes, opinions and
beliefs to the observed behavior of other members of
the social system in which they participate. The behav-