Creativity as a Sociocultural Act

The present article introduces, develops, and illustrates a perspectival framework for the creative process drawing on current developments within the cultural psychology of creativity and the social theory of George Herbert Mead. The creative process is conceptualized as a form of action by which actors, materially and symbolically, alone and in collaboration with others, move between different positions and, in this process, imaginatively construct new perspectives on their course of action which afford greater reflexivity and the emergence of novelty. The article begins by locating this approach within a broader conception of distributed creativity and the role of difference—social, material, and temporal—for creative expression. It then outlines four key premises of the perspectival framework before illustrating it with the help of a subjective camera study of a painter's creative activity. In the end, some important questions are raised concerning the theoretical and practical implications of this new model.