Explaining Creativity: The Science Of Human Innovation - Softcover

Sawyer, R. Keith

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0199737576 ISBN 13: 9780199737574

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2012

Synopsis

Explaining Creativity is an accessible introduction to the latest scientific research on creativity. The book summarizes and integrates a broad range of research in psychology and related scientific fields. In the last 40 years, psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists have devoted increased attention to creativity; we now know more about creativity than at any point in history. Explaining Creativity considers not only arts like painting and writing, but also science, stage performance, business innovation, and creativity in everyday life.

Sawyer's approach is interdisciplinary. In addition to examining psychological studies on creativity, he draws on anthropologists' research on creativity in non-Western cultures, sociologists' research on the situations, contexts, and networks of creative activity, and cognitive neuroscientists' studies of the brain. He moves beyond the individual to consider the social and cultural contexts of creativity, including the role of collaboration in the creative process.

About this title

About the Author

Dr. Keith Sawyer is one of the world's leading scientific experts on creativity, innovation, and learning. In his first job after graduating from MIT, he designed videogames for Atari. He then worked for 6 years as a management consultant in Boston and New York, advising large corporations on the strategic use of information technology. He's been a jazz pianist for over 30 years, and performed with several improv theater groups in Chicago, as part of his research into jazz and improvisational theater. 

His other books include GROUP GENIUS and ZIG ZAG: THE SURPRISING PATH TO GREATER CREATIVITY, and he has published over 80 scientific articles.

Dr. Sawyer is the Morgan Distinguished Professor in Educational Innovations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Review

"Sawyer has put together a mountain of research from a variety of fields to create a unified approach to understanding how people manage to do something different. His book is readable and learned, origninal, but mindful of its relation to all that other work, and well worth the attention of anyone who wants to think seriously about innovation in the arts and in social organizations."
--Howard S. Becker, author of Art Worlds, Tricks of the Trade, and Outsiders

"An extremely knowledgable, wide-ranging, integrative summary of how the social sciences understand creativity. Keith Sawyer has again produced an intelligent and valuable contribution to knowledge. This is a volume that any scholar or lay-person interested in what creativity entails will want to have."
--Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Founding Co-Director, Quality of Life Research Center, and Distinguised Professor of Psychology and Management, School of Behavioral & Organizational Sciences, Claremont Graduate University

"With the publication of Explaining Creativity, Keith Sawyer has emerged as the leading young scholar and proponent of a sociocultural approach to the study of creativity. And with his remarkable grasp of this young field, Professor Sawyer has written the most comprehensive and compelling work on creativity studies in years."
--David Henry Feldman, Professor, Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development, Tufts University, and author of Changing the World

"Without doubt Explaining Creativity is the most comprehensive single-volume presentation of what we know about the creative process, person, and product. Besides that, the book is extremely well written. It would be my first recommendation for anyone fascinated with creativity in all of its complexities and manifestations. There's simply nothing better out there for either specialist or general reader."
--Dean Keith Simonton, Distinguished Professor, Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis, and author of Origins of Genius

"R. Keith Sawyer's second edition of Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation is so expanded that it is a truly different book from the first edition. The first edition was (correctly) praised and appreciated; the second edition is required reading for anyone interested in the topic. In a just world, Sawyer's thorough and nuanced volume would be the best seller... Sawyer's book is easily the most thorough creativity text on the market." -- James C. Kaufman and Alexander S. McKay, PsycCRITIQUES

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0199737576
• ISBN 13: 9780199737574
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 568