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Historically considered a "gift" from an other-worldly source, today creativity is championed by politicians and business leaders for its economic value. Yet we know relatively little about how people and ideas come to be viewed as creative in real-world business organizations. In this dissertation, I examine the social process of recognizing creativity through an investigation of a quintessential creative industry--advertising. Using a mixed methodological approach, I draw on original data collected through a survey of a probability sample of U.S. advertising agencies, semi-structured interviews with survey respondents, and several months of participant observation in an agency. I find that social exclusion shapes the recognition of creativity in these ostensibly open and tolerant sectors of the labor market. Socioeconomic status and gender affect occupational entry and advancement through evaluations that rely on familiarity with high-status culture and identity characteristics that match artistic stereotypes to signal creativity. Additionally, the assessment of creative work itself is used as a form of boundary work to exclude those outside the profession from making contributions considered creative. Taken together, this dissertation suggests that although creativity has been widely heralded as a force for expanding opportunity and social progress, inequality plays an enduring role in the formation and maintenance of this workforce.

Published Article / The Humanities, Social Sciences and the creative arts are somewhat marginalised within the broader conceptualisation of the South African Universities of Technology and this could lead to a paucity of engagement with the critical challenges facing them. Globalisation, for example, is taken as desirable and neutral and that culture and context are relatively unimportant to their ongoing development. The challenges of globalisation and culture are explored as a critique on the fundamental conceptualisation of the institution-type and as a way of arguing for a more critical role for the Humanities, Social Sciences and the Creative Arts.

The goals of the dissertation studies were to allow for psychologists and educators to better understand the relationship between non-clinical narcissism and creativity, and to develop two promising creativity measures. The results confirmed the hypothesis that there would be a positive, moderate correlation between non-clinical narcissism and creativity. Consequently, this could allow for researchers to more fully understand the components of creativity, and support the need for creativity measures to better account for non-clinical narcissism. Two measures were introduced to consider creativity in terms of feelings and thoughts, and non-clinical narcissism attributes of past creative individuals. The Creativity Attributes List (CAL) and the Creative Individual Assessment (CIA) differ from previously established creativity measurements, which use the current impressions of the achievements of contemporary people as their criterion. There were 147 participants in a study that examined the two measures and the relationship between non-clinical narcissism and creativity. Additionally, the experimenter attempted to increase short-term creativity by exposing participants to photographs of paintings with unconventional shape designs that depict both the mindsets and art of creative persons; albeit, the results did not indicate a significant difference in the movement of creativity scores for either the experimental or control group. The double-blind experiment with 80 participants was conducted independently from the aforementioned studies. The Appendices include three papers that were based on the data collected from the psychometric studies and experiment. They were submitted to refereed psychology journals. The first paper pertains to emotional arousal and creativity, the second paper pertains to sleep deprivation in graduate school students, and the third paper explores variables that have a significant relationship with creativity in graduate students. There are graphs and tables in the Appendices that explain the MANOVA and correlation results of the CIA attributes that had a significant relationship to either the Khatena Torrance - Creative Perception Inventory Something About Myself measurement (KTCPI-SAM) and/or the Khatena - Morse Multitalent Perception Inventory Creative Imagination scale (KMMPI - CI). Additionally, tables in the Appendices present the results of multiple regression analyses performed on selected attributes from the CAL assessment and factor analyses of the measurements introduced in the studies.

This research investigates the position of creativity within graphic design education in general, and within the Omani educational context specifically. It situates itself among three realms: education, design, and creativity, investigating the relationships, effectiveness, and interrogations among these three topics. Creativity is defined within this research and in relation to graphic design education as problem solving , which is explained also as a cultural activity, or a cultural production. Graphic designers can involve themselves effectively in solving communication, social, and cultural problems that are classified as wicked problems , which usually require creative solutions. It is argued that Omani graphic designers should be creative problem solvers and able to find effective solutions for these problems. Yet this is not the case in Oman, at least from an educational point of view. The research problem is that the Omani design education system lacks a framework that recognises creativity as an important concept in education. Such a lack creates a twofold problem: 1) underestimating the importance of creativity in Omani design education; and 2) a shortage of pedagogical structured programmes that can enhance students creativity. It is argued that this problem is a result of the neglected situation of creativity in Arabic traditional education in general. Traditional education usually does not support creative thinking in design students, which consequently minimises their roles in social and cultural change. Based on the above, this research aims to develop a pedagogical model that can enhance and promote creative potential within Omani graphic design students. This aim can be achieved through re-establishing the position of creativity within Omani design education and valuing creativity as integrated part of graphic design. It proposes that the pedagogical model can offer a systematic approach for lecturers, to guide them into the best practice to enhance the creative potential of their students. Therefore, this research, and the proposed model, is the first step towards improving the position of creativity in Omani design educational systems in general. The model would propose to help Omani graphic design students to develop their creative problem solving abilities, which can allow them to effectively find solutions for several social and cultural wicked problems faced in Oman, such as the increased rate of car accidents nationally). The model will contain some creative-thinking techniques, and some pedagogical strategies that are already used internationally in education to improve creativity. The relevant literature has been reviewed to study the techniques and strategies used internationally to improve the creative potential of graphic design students. A qualitative interpretative methodology was used to answer the research questions and fulfil the aims. A survey approach was used for this research, implementing two methods: questionnaires and interviews. The online questionnaire was conducted with 33 international participants. It investigated how creativity is defined within graphic design contexts; whether creativity can be taught or enhanced; if yes, How, and by which techniques and strategies? Which curriculum contents are most suitable and effective? And how to assess creativity within graphic design education?. The same set of questions was asked in face-to-face interviews conducted with 39 design lecturers. The participants in these interviews were local lecturers who teach graphic design courses at six Omani institutions. All of the collected data were analysed by a thematic analysis method, by coding and categorising them according to different themes that had been extracted earlier from the literature. The contribution of this research is in defining the concept of creativity through scientific research; more specifically by practical research conducting an international survey and local interviews. Through this approach, this research has collected ideas, insights and trends about creativity in graphic design and how it can be developed. Also, this research has advanced knowledge of the relationships among graphic design, creativity, and education, specifically in the Arabic region. It is an attempt to emphasise this new field. Moreover, this research has given a snapshot of differing views regarding creativity in design education as perceived by international lecturers versus Omani lecturers, through conducting a cross-cultural study by asking these two groups the same questions, which was an interesting comparison. Finally, the collected data were utilised to develop the proposed pedagogical model designed for graphic design lecturers who teach design courses within Omani design education. The pedagogical model is the main contribution of this research. It would be suggested to the Omani Ministry of Higher Education that the model should be part of the Omani undergraduate graphic design curriculum.

The promotion of creative culture in the higher education classroom holds the potential to prepare students for their contemporary roles in an increasingly diverse and demanding modern world. A premise of this work is that education should strive to encourage creativity with process-oriented curricula that actively engage students in (a) tasks that are collaborative and novel, (b) the interpretation of new and meaningful experiences, and (c) the synthesis and critical evaluation of ideas at individual, collective, and global levels. This dissertation study identifies aspects of pedagogical design and teaching practice that enable the building of students’ creative capacities. These enhanced capacities, in turn, can lead to transformative experiences that inspire and shape participants’ personal and professional lives. I adopted a dual role as researcher and student to conduct an exploratory study in the context of a PhD level Education course, Contemporary Curriculum Theory. Findings from this exploratory study informed a multiple-case study that involved the observation of two graduate level courses, Professionals in Rural Practice and The Lived Experience of Disability, which together form the unit of analysis for the study. Data sources included: (a) a Learning Activities Survey, modified from King’s (2009) original work; (b) a Creativity Checklist, modified from Munro’s (n.d.) instrument; (c) field observations and field notes; and (d) individual interviews with students and instructors from each course. Data were analyzed by three creative drivers that enabled transformation: (a) multiple ways of knowing, (b) adult conversation, and (c) the storied self. Through this examination of university-level courses of varied disciplines, this research study addresses creativity as a catalyst for transforming the ways in which teachers and students experience knowledge-making in post-secondary education. / Thesis (Ph.D, Education) -- Queen's University, 2013-12-05 12:37:25.474

Local diversity is often credited with being a driver of creative economic activity. Comparative research on this topic is often however highly structural in nature and does little to address questions of agency. This work seeks to link the traditional regional science approach to questions of potential advantages of local diversity with a more bottom-up view of the creative process. From a theoretical perspective this involves incorporating the social psychology literature on the creative process as well as concepts from social network analysis with more aggregated spatial notions of creativity and diversity. More specifically, it addresses how different knowledge is connected through social interaction and how this fuels the creation of new ideas and ultimately creative economic activity. A number of empirical innovations are made in order to test these theoretical constructs beginning with an agent-model/simulation which illuminates how social networks form and evolve over space and time. These artificial networks suggest how agents embedded in diverse local contexts have a creative advantage by possessing greater access to a variety of knowledge. Subsequent statistical analysis of large secondary datasets seeks to provide external validity to the agent-model. The first demonstrates a strong relationship between local diversity and the concentration of creative economic activities across 140 Canadian city-regions. A key implication of this finding is that local diversity is more closely associated with certain types of economic activity, rather than overall economic performance. The second statistical analysis uses the Canadian General Social Survey to compare the social network characteristics of individuals. This analysis shows that people engaged in creative industries and occupations tend to have larger, more dynamic, and more diverse sets of social relations than any other category of worker. The dissertation concludes with a model that suggests policy interventions should focus on developing local environments that provide the necessary conditions in which creative activity can thrive, rather than attempting to intervene directly in the creative process itself.

This dissertation interrogates the nature of composers as aesthetic agents re-orienting from the socio-cultural contexts of the Weimar Republic (1919-1932) to those of the Third Reich in Germany (1933-1945). Work in the sociology of culture, sociology of arts and sociology of music has focused on cultural consumption, including music, as bound up in the reflexive projects by individuals and groups to constitute and reconstitute their social reality. Within my research I focus on the creation of cultural artefacts, in this case ‘works’ in the Western art music tradition, as central to processes of aesthetic agency where composers are engaged in reflexive projects of constituting and reconstituting their social reality and acting within those constructs. To begin the opening historical chaper, ‘Mortification of Modernism’, uses Goffman’s work in Asylums (1968) to contextualize the cultural policies and activities of the Weimar Republic, considered the classical era of modernism, as a home world from which those involved in modernist ventures developed presenting cultures supported by bespoke institutions established in the early post WWI years. During the waning years of the Republic and the rise of National Socialism, these support structures, including the individuals that made up the cooperative networks of modernism, were destroyed removing most connections to the Weimar Republic modernist home world. In the first years of the Third Reich through numerous denunciations, dismissals, policies, etc. the presenting culture of Weimar modernists was mortified through abasements, degradations and humiliations. Having identified – through qualitative mapping of concert programmes, music reviews and festival participation – composers involved in modernist circles in the Weimar Republic, their career paths and compositional outputs were traced throughout the years of the Third Reich to interrogate the aesthetic agency of composers in light of significant situational and perspectival incongruity. The dissertation then considers each of five composers in depth in separate chapters – Paul Hindemith, Rudolf Wagner-Regeny, Ernst Pepping, Heinrich Kaminski and Wolfgang Fortner. The five were selected based on four criteria: a high degree of activity in Weimar modernist circles (festivals, concerts, societies); continued presence in Germany for a significant portion of the Third Reich; continued professional activity as composers during the Third Reich; access to relevant source material both secondary (biographies, reviews, stylistic analyses, etc.) and primary (scores, letters, diaries, authored texts, etc.) from the subjects. The data illumines complex repertoires of adaptive strategies these individuals engaged in – with, through and to musical products – and how music is not only shaped by wider socio-cultural contexts, but how its construction is a primary resource for agents to respond to and structure the socio-cultural contexts around them. Key findings include the constitution of music as resource for showing both complicity with and subversion against the Nazi Kulturpolitik; as a resource for proxy presence in multiple social spaces (private homes, concert halls, opera houses, etc.) affording the construction and dissemination of composer identity and philosophy; as a technology of self for personal therapy; and in total as a resource for weltanschauung - world-building activity where composers construct and re-construct their social realities through musical creation – music as an active tool in and reflexive resource for individual social reality.

During our university studies we learned about the importance of play for children'sdevelopment. During play children practice many elements, such as social andcommunication skills and they learn easier. This because play is fun and they use theirimagination and creativity to develop their play, creating new games - this isimportant for their learning and development. Therefore, we know that play is anexcellent teaching tool, but I wonder what do pedagogues think of play?I also wonder what factors influence children's play and how important the "oldfashionedplay" or play without modern toys such as electronic toys or gadgets are forchildren's development? Therefore, I travelled to a small village in India, where there is no modern technology,to carry out this study about play. Over the course of ten days I observed childrenplaying and interviewed three teachers in a private school to study how thecircumstances make children create their own toys to play with, and how importantthis play and these toys are for the children's' lives and development. As a result ofthis study I came to the conclusion that economic, religious, cultural and genderfactors influence children's play in this village in India. Creating their own toysdevelops children´s creativity and fine motor skills, and helps them socialize whilethey are teaching each other how to create the toy. In a multicultural society like ours in Sweden, we have many first- and secondgenerationimmigrants in our schools, therefore it is important to learn and understandhow other cultures play and how we as pedagogues see and adopt this kind of playand different games to teach. In this study I want to show another perspective of playto understand our own play in Sweden. I believe that this multicultural perspectivewill only enrich our profession.

This paper examines a computational account about higher-level creativity proposed by Margaret A. Boden, a female psychologist and philosopher. She uses an interesting computational concept the “conceptual space” – known as “the box” in our everyday language – to measure levels of creativeness and to explain how higher-level creativity is achieved. In this paper, I mainly seek to look into detail and analyze her answers to the following two questions: “What does Boden mean by the ‘conceptual space?” and “How is it possible to think outside of the ‘conceptual space?” To that end, I have researched papers that commented on Boden’s computational account, and have come up with hypothetical cases to flesh out my arguments and to appeal to the readers’ intuitions. The conclusion of this paper is that the knowledge of yourself being inside particular boxes and the knowledge of what limits and potential a given conceptual space has are neither sufficient nor necessary for producing the kind of rule-breaking “outside-the-box” ideas, but the idea of a “conceptual space” remains useful in evaluating the quality of ideas after their generation. The philosophy of creativity is such an intriguing topic to me – we all value creativity as a society and have put “outside-the-box” type of thinking on the pedestal since the age of Plato. Yet when we think more about the idea of “outside-the-box” thinking, much ambiguity arises. This topic greatly sparks my interest in the philosophy of mind, and through research and self-introspection, I have not only learned more about the concept of creativity, but also discovered more about my own thinking style.