R K Sawyer
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 1432 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | R K Sawyer |
| NOMBRES | R K |
| APELLIDO | Sawyer |
| FIRMA | SAWYER R K |
| AFILIACIONES | Washington University in St. Louis |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5410-461X |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 35 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 316 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 35 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1995 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
Creativity and Emergence in Improvisational Theater and in Social Life
This paper presents the theory of improvisational emergence , an account of how social phenomena emerge from improvisational processes. I build outward from the small-group improvisational encounter to provide an account of the relationship between individuals, groups, and societies. Social entities, including groups and societies, emerge from people engaged in group improvisation. But even though social entities emerge from individuals in intera…
Creative Engagement for Well‐Being
Creativity is increasingly recognized not only as a cognitive asset but also as a contributor to emotional and psychological well‐being. This paper explores the relationship between creativity and well‐being across everyday, artistic, and educational contexts, highlighting how creative engagement supports resilience, stress reduction, and personal fulfillment. Drawing from research in psychology, neuroscience, and education, we examine mechanisms…
Teaching creative thinking
This paper reports on a study of professor talk in design studio classrooms. In design education, creative thinking is an important learning outcome, as demonstrated in previous observational studies of studio classrooms and interviews with design professors. I found that professors explicitly describe their concurrent and spontaneous thinking while they are analyzing student work and that this talk represents the features of creative thinking id…
Dialogic Status in Design Education
In this article, I study role enactment and status relationships in university design studio classrooms. I analyze conversations that take place during discussions of student creative work, and I interpret them in the context of previous studies of learning, classroom discourse, and creativity. I found that professors and students jointly establish and maintain a complex and hybrid participation structure in which they enact dialogic status: they…
Opinions
Several months ago, when Jakob, Timothy and I were planning this spring's issue of the JBA, we realised that we would probably have two articles ready for publication on professional people-architects and fashion designers-regarded as "creative."So, in an attempt to overcome the randomness of journal submissions and to create a thematic flow for our readers, we decided to seek opinions on creativity and innovation from people in the business worl…
Analytical Sociology and Social Mechanisms
Mechanisms are very much a part of social life. For example, we can see that inequality has tended to increase over time, and that cities can become segregated. But how do such mechanisms work? Analytical sociology is an influential approach to sociology which holds that explanations of social phenomena should focus on the social mechanisms that bring them about. This book evaluates the major features of this approach, focusing on the significanc…
The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity
The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity is a comprehensive scholarly handbook on creativity from the most respected psychologists, researchers and educators. This handbook serves both as a thorough introduction to the field of creativity and as an invaluable reference and current source of important information. It covers such diverse topics as the brain, education, business, and world cultures. The first section, 'Basic Concepts', is designed to in…
Distributed creativity
Creativity is often considered to be a mental process that occurs within a person's head. In this article, we analyze a group creative process: One that generates a creative product, but one in which no single participant's contribution determines the result. We analyze a series of 5 theater performances that were improvisationally developed in rehearsal by a theater group; over the course of these 5 performances, a collaborative creation emerged…
Simulating Complexity
Language and creativity
Ronald Carter , Language and creativity: The art of common talk . London: Routledge, 2004. Pp. xiii, 255. Hb $99.95, Pb $29.95. The central idea of Carter's wonderful new book is that “Creativity is a pervasive feature of spoken language ... a key component in interpersonal communication, and ... is a property actively possessed by all speakers and listeners” (p. 6). Carter is a scholar with a long history of solid work, both as one of the leader…
Complexity and Emergence
Complex phenomena reside between simplicity and randomness. When the laws governing a system are relatively simple, the system's behavior is easy to understand, explain, and predict. At the other extreme, some systems seem to behave randomly. There may be laws governing their behavior, but the system is highly non‐linear, such that small variations in the state of the system at one time could result in very large changes to later states of the sy…
Explaining Creativity
Explaining Creativity is an accessible introduction to the latest scientific research on creativity. In the last 50 years, psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists have increasingly studied creativity, and we now know more about creativity than at any point in history. Explaining Creativity considers not only arts like painting and writing, but also science, stage performance, and business innovation. Until about a decade ago, creativity …
Group creativity
In this article, I focus on three defining characteristics of group creativity: improvisation, collaboration and emergence. To demonstrate these three characteristics, I present several examples of group creativity in both music and theater. Then I explore how structure and improvisation are always both present in group creativity. Improvisations contain elements of structure and structured performances contain improvisational elements. I conclud…
Social Emergence
Can we understand important social issues by studying individual personalities and decisions? Or are societies somehow more than the people in them? Sociologists have long believed that psychology can't explain what happens when people work together in complex modern societies. In contrast, most psychologists and economists believe that if we have an accurate theory of how individuals make choices and act on them, we can explain pretty much every…
Creative Teaching
Teaching has often been thought of as a creative performance. Although comparisons with performance were originally intended to emphasize teacher creativity, they have become associated instead with contemporary reform efforts toward scripted instruction that deny the creativity of teachers. Scripted instruction is opposed to constructivist, inquiry-based, and dialogic teaching methods that emphasize classroom collaboration. To provide insight in…
Coherence in Discourse
Nonreductive Individualism Part II—Social Causation
In Part I, the author argued for nonreductive individualism (NRI), an account of the individual-collective relation that is ontologically individualist yet rejects methodological individualism. However, because NRI is ontologically individualist, social entities and properties would seem to be only analytic constructs, and if so, they would seem to be epiphenomenal, since only real things can have causal power. In general, a nonreductionist accou…
Artificial Societies
This article introduces a general sociological readership to multiagent systems (MAS), a new computer simulation technology that has increasingly been used to describe and explain sociological phenomena. The author uses the term artificial societies to refer to social simulations using MAS and he describes MAS technology and contrasts it with other social simulation technologies. The author argues that MAS have attained a level of maturity where …
Emergence in Psychology
Theories of emergence have had a longstanding influence on psychological thought. Emergentism rejects both reductionism and holism; emergentists are scientific materialists, and yet argue that reductionist explanation may not always be scientifically feasible. I begin by summarizing the history of emergence in psychology and sociology, from the mid-19th century through the mid-20th century. I then demonstrate several parallels between this histor…
Nonreductive Individualism
The author draws on arguments from contemporary philosophy of mind to provide an argument for sociological collectivism. This argument for nonreductive individualism accepts that only individuals exist but rejects methodological individualism. In Part I, the author presents the argument for nonreductive individualism by working through the implications of supervenience, multiple realizability, and wild disjunction in some detail. In Part II, he e…
The New Anthropology of Children, Play, and Games
(2002). The New Anthropology of Children, Play, and Games. Reviews in Anthropology: Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 147-164
Unresolved Tensions in Sociocultural Theory
Socioculturalists are divided on two of the foundational theoretical claims of the paradigm: a process ontologyof the social world; and the inseparabilityof the individual and the group. A process ontology holds that only processes are real; entities, structures or patterns are ephemeral and do not really exist. Inseparability is the claim that the individual and the social cannot be methodologically or ontologically distinguished. To clarify the…
Durkheim's Dilemma
The concept of emergence is a central thread uniting Durkheim's theoretical and empirical work, yet this aspect of Durkheim's work has been neglected. I reinterpret Durkheim in light of theories of emergence developed by contemporary philosophers of mind, and I show that Durkheim's writings prefigure many elements of these contemporary theories. Reading Durkheim as an emergentist helps to clarify several difficult and confusing aspects of his wor…
Introduction
How Creative Contributions Emerge Over the Lifespan
The Nature of Creative Development is about the lifespan developmental processes that result in an individual's creative contributions. The central theme is that the development of a creative contr
Nonreductive Individualism
The author draws on arguments from contemporary philosophy of mind to provide an argument for sociological collectivism. This argument for nonreductive individualism accepts that only individuals exist but rejects methodological individualism. In Part I, the author presents the argument for nonreductive individualism by working through the implications of supervenience, multiple realizability, and wild disjunction in some detail. In Part II, he e…
Emergence in Sociology
Many accounts of the micro‐macro link use the philosophical notion of emergence to argue that collective phenomena are collaboratively created by individuals yet are not reducible to explanation in terms of individuals. However, emergence has also been invoked by methodological individualists; they accept the existence of emergent social properties yet claim that such properties can be reduced to explanations in terms of individuals and their rel…
Creative Teaching
Teaching has often been thought of as a creative performance. Although comparisons with performance were originally intended to emphasize teacher creativity, they have become associated instead with contemporary reform efforts toward scripted instruction that deny the creativity of teachers. Scripted instruction is opposed to constructivist, inquiry-based, and dialogic teaching methods that emphasize classroom collaboration. To provide insight in…
Distributed creativity
Creativity is often considered to be a mental process that occurs within a person's head. In this article, we analyze a group creative process: One that generates a creative product, but one in which no single participant's contribution determines the result. We analyze a series of 5 theater performances that were improvisationally developed in rehearsal by a theater group; over the course of these 5 performances, a collaborative creation emerged…
Unresolved Tensions in Sociocultural Theory
Socioculturalists are divided on two of the foundational theoretical claims of the paradigm: a process ontologyof the social world; and the inseparabilityof the individual and the group. A process ontology holds that only processes are real; entities, structures or patterns are ephemeral and do not really exist. Inseparability is the claim that the individual and the social cannot be methodologically or ontologically distinguished. To clarify the…
Durkheim's Dilemma
The concept of emergence is a central thread uniting Durkheim's theoretical and empirical work, yet this aspect of Durkheim's work has been neglected. I reinterpret Durkheim in light of theories of emergence developed by contemporary philosophers of mind, and I show that Durkheim's writings prefigure many elements of these contemporary theories. Reading Durkheim as an emergentist helps to clarify several difficult and confusing aspects of his wor…
Nonreductive Individualism Part II—Social Causation
In Part I, the author argued for nonreductive individualism (NRI), an account of the individual-collective relation that is ontologically individualist yet rejects methodological individualism. However, because NRI is ontologically individualist, social entities and properties would seem to be only analytic constructs, and if so, they would seem to be epiphenomenal, since only real things can have causal power. In general, a nonreductionist accou…
The semiotics of improvisation
L'A. propose un cadre base sur la theorie semiotique pour analyser la performance liee a l'improvisation verbale et musicale. Ce cadre localise la performance improvisee et ritualisee dans le meme domaine semiotique et permet de les comparer et de les mettre en contraste. Une telle analyse exige une semiotique fondamentalement interactionnelle qui souligne les proprietes indexicales de l'usage du signe, introduites par Pierce, plutot qu'une analy…
Artificial Societies
This article introduces a general sociological readership to multiagent systems (MAS), a new computer simulation technology that has increasingly been used to describe and explain sociological phenomena. The author uses the term artificial societies to refer to social simulations using MAS and he describes MAS technology and contrasts it with other social simulation technologies. The author argues that MAS have attained a level of maturity where …
Improvisation
A Discourse on Discourse
Over the last 30 years, the term discourse has spread throughout both the social sciences and the humanities. There is a widespread consensus that the current usage of the term ‘discourse’ originated with Foucault. This paper has three related goals: first, it demonstrates that the current usage of ‘discourse‘ did not originate with Foucault, and in some ways contradicts his own limited technical usage. Second, an intellectual history is presente…
The New Anthropology of Children, Play, and Games
(2002). The New Anthropology of Children, Play, and Games. Reviews in Anthropology: Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 147-164
Role voicing, gender, and age in preschool play discourse
This study analyzed play discourse participation frameworks in groups of different gender compositions and different age compositions, focusing on the different ways that children "voice" a pretend play role. A single, 24‐child preschool classroom containing 3‐, 4‐, and 5‐year‐olds was the object of an extended observational study; 29 hours of naturalistic discourse were transcribed, coded, and statistically analyzed. There were significant diffe…
Interaction and Grammar
Interaction and Grammar. Elinor Ochs, Emanuel A. Schegloff. and Sandra A. Thompson. eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966. 468 pp
Dialogic Status in Design Education
In this article, I study role enactment and status relationships in university design studio classrooms. I analyze conversations that take place during discussions of student creative work, and I interpret them in the context of previous studies of learning, classroom discourse, and creativity. I found that professors and students jointly establish and maintain a complex and hybrid participation structure in which they enact dialogic status: they…
Creativity as mediated action
This paper elaborates the notion of mediated action through a comparison of group improvisational performance and the product‐oriented creative domains studied by psychology. Semiotically mediated interaction is central to both forms of creativity: in group improvisation, the interaction is parallel and simultaneous, communication between performers is mediated by musical or verbal symbolic structures, and is thus synchronies in product‐oriented …
Role voicing, gender, and age in preschool play discourse
This study analyzed play discourse participation frameworks in groups of different gender compositions and different age compositions, focusing on the different ways that children "voice" a pretend play role. A single, 24‐child preschool classroom containing 3‐, 4‐, and 5‐year‐olds was the object of an extended observational study; 29 hours of naturalistic discourse were transcribed, coded, and statistically analyzed. There were significant diffe…
The semiotics of improvisation
L'A. propose un cadre base sur la theorie semiotique pour analyser la performance liee a l'improvisation verbale et musicale. Ce cadre localise la performance improvisee et ritualisee dans le meme domaine semiotique et permet de les comparer et de les mettre en contraste. Une telle analyse exige une semiotique fondamentalement interactionnelle qui souligne les proprietes indexicales de l'usage du signe, introduites par Pierce, plutot qu'une analy…
Multiple Creativities
Interaction and Grammar
Interaction and Grammar. Elinor Ochs, Emanuel A. Schegloff. and Sandra A. Thompson. eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966. 468 pp
Improvisation
Connecting Culture, Psychology and Biology
Improvisational Cultures
I was delighted to read Becker’s (this issue) insightful and broad-ranging comments, especially since they touch on parallels that I’ve been exploring in my own work—between jazz, improvisational theater, and everyday social life. Becker identifies several fruitful areas for future research, and my comments will focus on these areas and how they connect with my own recent research. I focus on two key themes of Becker’s article. First, Becker’s ti…
Emergence in Sociology
Many accounts of the micro‐macro link use the philosophical notion of emergence to argue that collective phenomena are collaboratively created by individuals yet are not reducible to explanation in terms of individuals. However, emergence has also been invoked by methodological individualists; they accept the existence of emergent social properties yet claim that such properties can be reduced to explanations in terms of individuals and their rel…
Emergence in Psychology
Theories of emergence have had a longstanding influence on psychological thought. Emergentism rejects both reductionism and holism; emergentists are scientific materialists, and yet argue that reductionist explanation may not always be scientifically feasible. I begin by summarizing the history of emergence in psychology and sociology, from the mid-19th century through the mid-20th century. I then demonstrate several parallels between this histor…
Nonreductive Individualism
The author draws on arguments from contemporary philosophy of mind to provide an argument for sociological collectivism. This argument for nonreductive individualism accepts that only individuals exist but rejects methodological individualism. In Part I, the author presents the argument for nonreductive individualism by working through the implications of supervenience, multiple realizability, and wild disjunction in some detail. In Part II, he e…
The New Anthropology of Children, Play, and Games
(2002). The New Anthropology of Children, Play, and Games. Reviews in Anthropology: Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 147-164
Unresolved Tensions in Sociocultural Theory
Socioculturalists are divided on two of the foundational theoretical claims of the paradigm: a process ontologyof the social world; and the inseparabilityof the individual and the group. A process ontology holds that only processes are real; entities, structures or patterns are ephemeral and do not really exist. Inseparability is the claim that the individual and the social cannot be methodologically or ontologically distinguished. To clarify the…
Durkheim's Dilemma
The concept of emergence is a central thread uniting Durkheim's theoretical and empirical work, yet this aspect of Durkheim's work has been neglected. I reinterpret Durkheim in light of theories of emergence developed by contemporary philosophers of mind, and I show that Durkheim's writings prefigure many elements of these contemporary theories. Reading Durkheim as an emergentist helps to clarify several difficult and confusing aspects of his wor…
A Discourse on Discourse
Over the last 30 years, the term discourse has spread throughout both the social sciences and the humanities. There is a widespread consensus that the current usage of the term ‘discourse’ originated with Foucault. This paper has three related goals: first, it demonstrates that the current usage of ‘discourse‘ did not originate with Foucault, and in some ways contradicts his own limited technical usage. Second, an intellectual history is presente…
Coherence in Discourse
Nonreductive Individualism Part II—Social Causation
In Part I, the author argued for nonreductive individualism (NRI), an account of the individual-collective relation that is ontologically individualist yet rejects methodological individualism. However, because NRI is ontologically individualist, social entities and properties would seem to be only analytic constructs, and if so, they would seem to be epiphenomenal, since only real things can have causal power. In general, a nonreductionist accou…
Artificial Societies
This article introduces a general sociological readership to multiagent systems (MAS), a new computer simulation technology that has increasingly been used to describe and explain sociological phenomena. The author uses the term artificial societies to refer to social simulations using MAS and he describes MAS technology and contrasts it with other social simulation technologies. The author argues that MAS have attained a level of maturity where …
Creative Teaching
Teaching has often been thought of as a creative performance. Although comparisons with performance were originally intended to emphasize teacher creativity, they have become associated instead with contemporary reform efforts toward scripted instruction that deny the creativity of teachers. Scripted instruction is opposed to constructivist, inquiry-based, and dialogic teaching methods that emphasize classroom collaboration. To provide insight in…
Social Emergence
Can we understand important social issues by studying individual personalities and decisions? Or are societies somehow more than the people in them? Sociologists have long believed that psychology can't explain what happens when people work together in complex modern societies. In contrast, most psychologists and economists believe that if we have an accurate theory of how individuals make choices and act on them, we can explain pretty much every…
Explaining Creativity
Explaining Creativity is an accessible introduction to the latest scientific research on creativity. In the last 50 years, psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists have increasingly studied creativity, and we now know more about creativity than at any point in history. Explaining Creativity considers not only arts like painting and writing, but also science, stage performance, and business innovation. Until about a decade ago, creativity …
Group creativity
In this article, I focus on three defining characteristics of group creativity: improvisation, collaboration and emergence. To demonstrate these three characteristics, I present several examples of group creativity in both music and theater. Then I explore how structure and improvisation are always both present in group creativity. Improvisations contain elements of structure and structured performances contain improvisational elements. I conclud…
Simulating Complexity
Language and creativity
Ronald Carter , Language and creativity: The art of common talk . London: Routledge, 2004. Pp. xiii, 255. Hb $99.95, Pb $29.95. The central idea of Carter's wonderful new book is that “Creativity is a pervasive feature of spoken language ... a key component in interpersonal communication, and ... is a property actively possessed by all speakers and listeners” (p. 6). Carter is a scholar with a long history of solid work, both as one of the leader…
Complexity and Emergence
Complex phenomena reside between simplicity and randomness. When the laws governing a system are relatively simple, the system's behavior is easy to understand, explain, and predict. At the other extreme, some systems seem to behave randomly. There may be laws governing their behavior, but the system is highly non‐linear, such that small variations in the state of the system at one time could result in very large changes to later states of the sy…
Epistemology (19 obras) · Psychology (18 obras) · Sociology (17 obras) · Philosophy (13 obras) · Social Psychology (13 obras) · Creativity (11 obras) · Creativity in Education and Neuroscience (11 obras) · Computer Science (9 obras) · Art (8 obras) · Visual arts (8 obras)