ABSTRACT
Why, after almost 50 years of focused study, does creativity remain so elusive yet fascinating a topic? There is no denying the valued role creativity plays in spurring individual, organizational, and social change. Yet after half a century’s effort, we are little closer to prescribing the process. In Greek mythology, the Chimera is a fire-breathing monster with a lion’s head and a goat’s body. One reason for creativity’s continued allure, this chapter suggests, is that it is a chimera. Not in the first sense, as a figment of the imagination or wildly unrealistic idea, but in the second, as an organism made of two completely different genetic materials. Its vainglorious lion’s head reflects creativity as an intensely personal process of deviating from the conformity of shared custom and culture, of rebelling against a traditionbound social system. Its humble goat’s body reflects a backstage process that is intensely social, rooted in established social systems and ultimately seeking acceptance within those systems for its own set of ideas. To explore this tension between the personal and the social, between front-stage defiance and backstage dependence, this chapter introduces the perspective of microsociology, which is concerned with understanding how individuals are shaped by and in turn shape their social surrounds.
