ABSTRACT

In his book Doing Things Together, sociologist Howard Becker wrote of his experience as a jazz musician to illustrate the process of collaborative creativity. If players don’t share certain core understandings, they can never play a song or improvise together. This chapter addresses how this fundamental premise explains many kinds of collaborative effort—in creative expression, scientific research, business, and so on. It also contradicts beliefs that individualism and competition are necessary components of creative endeavor. Business groups saw this in the 1950s practice of “brainstorming” developed by Alex Osborn. These days, a broad movement is gaining momentum to encourage people to work together in the interest of innovation, rather than secreting their work in “silos” of separate (and often duplicate) efforts. Leading scholars and policymakers around the world now encourage the concepts of “distributed creativity” (Petre Glăveanu) and a “sharing economy” (Joseph Stiglitz) as a way of moving forward. Others discussed include Teresa Amabile, Claire Bishop, Mikhail Bakhtin, Chris Csíkszentmihályi, Grant Kester, and Jean-Luc Nancy.