The present article argues for the need to incorporate a theory of identity in the study of creativity and develops a socio-cultural framework of creative identity drawing inspiration from work on social representations. Creative identities are considered representational projects emerging in the interaction between self (the creator), multiple others (different audiences), and notions of creativity informed by societal discourses. An important temporal dimension is added to this model making the self–other–object triad expand into time and highlighting the changing nature of our representations of creativity and creative people. A basic typology of creative identities is proposed and illustrated with examples ranging from the work of artists and TV show hosts to everyday contexts such as the school and ordinary practices like craft activities. Promoted, denied and problematic identities are defined and contrasted in order to gain a better understanding of how identity – a simultaneously individual and collective project – fosters or, on the contrary, can impede creative work. In the end, a more comprehensive vision of creative identities as social, dynamic, contextual, multiple and mediated is formulated and arguments offered for why this perspective is important for both theory and practice.
“The psychologists' problem is that of creative personality” – a key part of Guilford's APA presidential address to the community of psychologists more than six decades ago (Guilford, 1950, p. 444). Lamenting the scarcity of research in this area, and arguing for the importance of creativity in education and for society at large, Guilford's call for a more systematic investigation of the phenomenon was not left unheard. Indeed, the decades that followed showed a substantial increase in creativity studies (Runco, 2004) while keeping relatively faithful to this initial formulation of creativity as a system of personality traits and cognitive abilities. In other words, the paradigmatic model for studying creativity has, by and large, revolved around the creative person and, ‘within’ the person, a strong emphasis placed on cognition and individual attributes ( Amabile, 1996 and Glăveanu, 2010a). On the one hand, this conceptualisation was very fruitful for psychological research, emphasising measurement and facilitating both correlational and experimental studies of creativity ( Barron and Harrington, 1981 and Finke et al., 1992). On the other hand, a person-centric formulation disconnects the creator from his/her wider environment. This critique, gaining prominence after the 1980s ( Csikszentmihalyi, 1988 and Montuori and Purser, 1995), led to systemic approaches that, without denying the creative person, consider it always in relation to a context (something often acknowledged by research done in applied fields such as education or organisations). For these researchers, reducing creativity to personality is indeed a ‘psychologist's problem’, one that is still looking for (creative) theoretical and methodological solutions.
This paper aims to advance one possible way of moving past the intrinsic individualism specific for the mainstream psychology of creativity by trying to (re)conceptualise the notion of creative identity and exemplify when, how and with what consequences people build identities as ‘creators’. It proposes a conception of identity that draws largely on the theory of social representations (Moscovici, 1981 and Moscovici, 1984) and articulates a socio-cultural model of creative identities. From this perspective, being a ‘creator’ involves identity work and identity itself is fundamentally a social category. The creative person therefore, far from existing as an isolated unit, is a social actor able to co-construct his or her own sense of creative value in communication with others and in relation to societal discourses about what creativity is. In the end, there is creativity in identity construction just as there is identity construction in the most mundane forms of creative expression. Most importantly, identities conducive for creative performance are not just ‘given’ but built over time in interactions that are often marked by struggles and acts of resistance. We will exemplify here some of these processes and suggest a basic typology of creative identities in the second part of the article. It is our hope that such an attempt will stimulate further elaborations and thus begin to expose the big (identity) elephant sitting comfortably in the room of creativity research.
