Social Psychology Quarterly invites papers for a special issue on the social psychology of creativity, to be edited by John Parker, Ugo Corte, and Gary Alan Fine. The deadline for submissions is November 1, 2018.
Creativity is fundamentally social, as was clearly recognized by founding sociologists from Durkheim on, but it has yet to receive the attention it deserves within sociological social psychology. When sociologists do analyze creativity, they typically focus on the influence of large social networks or the resources and infrastructure required for creative work rather than the social psychological and interpersonal processes formative of creativity. Recent developments in sociology, however, have set the stage for research that examines the foundational social psychological processes of creativity, including studies of collaborative circles, the antecedents of scientific creativity, and the new sociology of ideas. Social psychologists examine how biography interacts with local social milieus to shape creators’ identities and the content of their creative work, as does research using systems perspectives and cultural analysis to explain creativity social psychologically while situating creators within broader creative environments. Sociologists are exploring these issues through a diverse array of potentially complementary methods, including surveys, experiments, wearable computer sensors, interviews, ethnography, documentary analysis, historical comparative research, and social network analysis. We hope to draw these research streams into conversation with one another to assess the current state of knowledge and develop general concepts, methods, and theories for explaining if and how creativity arises and whether it becomes socially legitimated.
