ABSTRACT
This chapter deepens the description and critical analysis of socio-cultural creativity. It does so by focusing on approaches to creativity that throughout its history have exhibited systemic features of connectedness between elements and awareness of their interactions, internally or externally to creators as human beings. A generic systems model of creators living with ‘messes’ is proposed, and detailed analysis and critique are made of contemporary systems approaches to creativity including Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s model. It is argued that the latter could be enriched by exploring in more depth how creators could better deal with tensions or contradictions encountered in their journeys or projects. These tensions and contradictions could emerge at both the individual (creator) and contextual (domains, fields of knowledge) level.
