Evaluating Creativity Through the Degrees of Solidity of Its Assessment: A Relational Approach

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a new approach to creativity assessment. Arguably, one of the main obstacles to creativity assessment is that creativity criteria are likely to change depending on what is assessed and who is making the assessment. We argue that we might be able to solve this problem by adopting a relational ontology, i.e., an ontology according to which beings of the world acquire their properties by relating to other beings. First, we present the main consequences of this ontological approach for creativity assessment: (a) Accounting for the creativity of a given object involves retracing the beings (including criteria) that relate it to its alleged creativity; (b) One can assess the creativity of this object by looking at the number of beings that substantiate this relation, i.e., by looking at what we call the "degree of solidity" of the relation; (c) One can thus account for the specificity of various forms of creativity and, at the same time, compare them in terms of solidity. Building on these ontological assumptions, we then present a new assessment technique, the Objection Counting Technique, before putting it to the test using an excerpt taken from a naturally occurring brainstorming session.

From ideas of power to the powering of ideas in organizations: Reflections from Follett and Foucault

“…The more that different ideas conflict or point in alternative directions, the more controversial work on and with them will be and the harder they might be to translate and align (Callon, 2008;van Werven, Bouwmeester, & Cornelissen, 2019). This is the case, whether we think of the focusing of organizational attention in order to achieve some desired premises as a prelude to the generation of ideas (Martine, Cooren, & Bartels, 2017); the selection and pursuit of some ideas over others as they emerge (Harrison & Rouse, 2015); the tensions between new ideas and existing practices and routines (Välikangas & Gibbert, 2015), or the contestation for future prioritization of resources committed to the maturation and realization of ideas-in-the-making (Coldevin, Carlsen, Clegg, Pitsis, & Antonacopoulou, 2019). Yet, the generative use of conflicts and the productive use of power in creativity is largely uncharted in organization studies.…”

The work of conflict mediation: Actors, vectors, and communicative relationality

“…Although conducting the latter in future studies would be useful, the goal of this exploratory research was to gain a first insight into how textual and human actors make differences in situations by carrying or conveying what other actors are saying, doing, thinking, and feeling, and through their vector effects, contribute to the composition of the nature of relations. Hence, the method we used to analyze our data parallels the method other scholars have used in studies of communicative relationality (see Cooren, 2018a ; Cooren et al, 2017 ; Kuhn et al, 2017 ; Martine et al, 2019 ).…”

Distant Temporal Distance and Creative Thinking: The Mediating Role of Promotion Motivation

“…Both of them have found that distant temporal distance had a beneficial effect on creative thinking (Förster et al, 2004;Chiu, 2012). However, in the area of creativity research, there exists a common dilemma -a disparity in creativity measurement methods often produces dissimilar results (Hennessey and Amabile, 2010;Martine et al, 2017). Thus, to improve the validity of the result regarding the effect of distant temporal distance on creative thinking, the present study sought to test this effect by using more different types of creative thinking measurement tools.…”