Introduction

“Creativity at work ” signifies a complex and contested site of research. On the one hand, it is where we might locate the extraordinary capacity of human beings to create objects, events, and experiences that afford entertainment, delight, pleasure, insight, meaning, and solace. On the other hand, as many contributors to this Handbook remind us, it is where we witness the capitalist mode of production and the broader ideology of neoliberalism perpetuating inequalities, precariousness, bias, and forms of “un-freedom” that constrain rather than enable our creativity. Creativity at work, it would seem, is as much a locus of dispute, disagreement, rivalry, and entrenched opposition, as it is the wellspring of human happiness and well-being. So, how then are we to understand the ethical nature of creativity at work? How are we to account for this complex and sometimes fraught context of transformative human activity from an ethical standpoint? These questions motivate this final chapter.

In their collection of chapters under the umbrella title Creativity, Wisdom, and Trusteeship (2007), Anna Craft, Howard Gardner, and Guy Claxton present a collective case for “wise creativity”; they point to the prevailing “value-neutrality” of human creativity, suggesting that the “ends to which creativity is put are not seen as significant” (Craft et al., 2008, p. 3). They open the door to thinking about creativity explicitly in terms of “human virtues”. More recently, in The Ethics of Creativity (2014), Seana Moran, David Cropley, and James C. Kaufman refer to the “crossroads” between creativity and ethics. For these authors, “Blending creativity with its consequences makes the generation of novel and effective solutions more than merely a question of what we could do, and turns it as much into an issue of what we should do” (Cropley, Kaufman, Murphy, & Moran, 2014, p. 299). Clearly, there remains much to be understood about this deep and foundational relationship.

Human beings face momentous challenges, not least in respect of climate change and global warming, and how we—as a species endowed with both the freedom and the responsibility to “manage” the earth’s ecology—should actually go about doing this. Though still at a much slower pace than many would like, “sustainability” is moving from being (at best) a fringe activity, to the issue of our century; more and more people are realizing that sustainable creativity is an imperative not just a “nice to have”. In this context, progressing our understanding of the ethics of creativity appears absolutely vital, but how might this be achieved through an exploration of creativity at work? In this final capstone chapter, I take up the opportunity to propose a new and distinctive theory, which has important implications for understanding both how creativity is “put to work” now and how it should be in the future. This theory is predicated on the human capacity and need for care and caring, which I argue is absolutely central to creativity, as it is to “being human”. In what follows, I introduce a novel theory of human creativity and by extension a new ethics of creativity as a form of care.

The chapter is divided into three parts—theory, evidence, and discussion. In Part I, I put forward the theoretical case for understanding human creativity in relational terms and as a structured practice of care. This theory seeks both to help us better understand extant cases of “actually existing” creativity, as well as point in new directions, for where creativity (at work) might go. The conceptual link between care and creativity is not of itself entirely new; however, the explanation of the extent of this relation and how it is structured is. Human creativity—as a structured practice of care—is profoundly relational and dialectical. It involves the absenting of the absence of living differently, in order to live as well as possible. Two issues are immediately worth highlighting about this formulation. First, it embraces the status quo—creativity’s “other”. This is significant because in fact we only ever recognize creativity in respect of its particular context (how else would we understand or experience “difference”?). Second, attention is drawn to the latter part of my definition, wherein the telos of “living as well as possible” is introduced. Naturally, this raises further questions about just what “living well” might mean precisely (e.g. there is a vast literature on themes relating to “authenticity”); the key point to emphasize at this stage is that according to this redefinition of human creativity, it is—just like “care”—always relational and ethically framed; ethical considerations are necessarily present, whether in fact they are our focus or not. In short, human creativity is an inherently ethical, relational, and dialectical structured practice of care.

To the extent that we want to know more about what such structured practices of care entail in the actually existing context of human creativity “at work”, the chapter introduces us to four ethical phases (after Tronto, 2013), which help to situate and explicate the case being proposed. These phases of care—which, in effect, define what is necessary across all cases of creativity at work—require the moral qualities of “attentiveness”, “responsibility”, “competence”, and “responsiveness”. Having introduced the theory, Part II draws on the “evidence” presented from the preceding 29 chapters in order to assess whether this theorization of human creativity at work is credible when held up against a broad range of contexts and perspectives. Examples of what I take to be “creativity as care” are introduced, prior to each structured stage of creativity at work being considered in more detail. The third and final part of the chapter offers a forward-looking discussion and two overarching recommendations.

Part I: The Theory

Creativity, Creative Living, and Care

As has been reported throughout this book, creativity is widely taken to denote novelty and value (see Chap. 23 for a discussion of these two components and their relation by Chris Bilton). Robert Sternberg and Todd Lubart, for example, define creativity as “the ability to produce work that is both novel (i.e., original, unexpected) and appropriate (i.e., useful, adaptive concerning task constraints)” (Sternberg & Lubart, 2007, p. 3; see also Kaufman & Baer, 2012; Runco & Jaeger, 2012). Such a definition was originally proposed as a conceptual stopgap (Stein, 1974; see Martin & Wilson, 2017), and despite significant attention during seven decades of research on creativity, fundamental issues concerning the nature of novelty, the role of effectiveness, whether recognition is necessary to the existence of creativity, and the nature of the value created remain largely unresolved (Adarves-Yorno, Haslam, & Postmes, 2008; Boden, 2004; Kasof, 1995; Kaufman & Baer, 2012; Martin & Wilson, 2017; Runco & Jaeger, 2012).

Reflecting further on the nature of the value generated through creativity, it might be suggested that this depends upon both the specific context involved and our perspective on what we take creativity to be. In 1961, Mel Rhodes pointed out that we can (and do) look at creativity from a variety of distinctively different perspectives. His “4Ps” of creativity (based on a review of research on creativity at the time) is taught widely today:

  • Person—research focused on the traits that characterize creative persons

  • Process —exploring some kind of journey or process

  • Product—the outcome of the creative process

  • Press—the context in which creativity takes place

Whilst all four perspectives are important, it is the Person and Product that are most obviously visible in the workplace. This is reflected back to us in popular culture portrayals of creatives and creative industries: consider Don Draper, the fictional creative director in the television series Mad Men, for example, whose talent for understanding the desires of others, and then successfully pitching and selling ideas, is the reason why his colleagues put up with his otherwise highly erratic and alcohol-fuelled behaviour in the workplace. Such stories of “creativity at work” reinforce a particular and prevailing connotation of value, where ultimately “the market decides”. They also demonstrate the enduring lure of the “heroic” model of managing creativity (Bilton, 2006), where a “laissez-faire” approach—keeping out of the way and letting the creative do what they do best—is considered the best (or perhaps, only) way to proceed.

In my view, this perspective sells creativity short, on at least two counts: first, in terms of its overlooking the significance of creativity for all persons (not just those deemed to be “creative” in certain contexts); and second, for its emphasizing creativity as an individualistic phenomenon rather than acknowledging the relational and social nature of the creative process, which is highly contingent on the Press of the context involved (see Wilson, 2010 on “social creativity”). One of the things I’m arguing for in this chapter is a call to engage more holistically with all four of these perspectives—all 4 Ps.

A key difficulty, however, is that we often don’t actually get to see the relational or processual nature of creativity. It remains invisible. But in keeping with Anna Craft’s “possibility thinking” (Chappell, Cremin, & Jeffrey, 2015, p. xviii) “what if” rather than forming explanations of creativity in terms of the novelty and value of its outcomes, that is, that which is evident and actually apparent to us through empirical observation, we first considered what must have been necessary in order for the creativity to exist? Pursuing this ontological line of questioning leads to a rather different conception of human creativity—one that is not so much about “the successful or acclaimed creation” but “a colouring of the whole attitude [we hold as human beings] to external reality” (Winnicott, 2005, p. 87). In four Ps’ terms, the focus of attention shifts from the Product, to also take account of the Process encountered by the Person, given the particular Press of the environment in which they are acting. Crucially, this conception challenges the value-neutrality of creativity, whereby we currently attribute either a positive or negative reading on the basis of some ill-defined post hoc ethical scale. As we’ll see, the position I’m proposing here argues that at an ontological level, creativity is always an ethically directed practice. This brings us to “creative living”, and so to “care”.

A key theorist of “creative living” is the psychoanalyst and paediatrician Donald Winnicott whose theories of holding, play, and reality have been particularly influential, though thus far remaining relatively marginal in the area of creativity studies. Crucially, Winnicott contrasts “creative apperception”, which he suggests “makes the individual feel that life is worth living” with “a relationship to external reality which is one of compliance, the world and its details being recognized but only as something to be fitted in with or demanding adaptation” (Winnicott, 2005, p. 87). According to Winnicott’s perspective, creativity is best understood in contrast to its dialectical “other”—compliance. Indeed, when we talk of creativity, we are often concerned with a situation of non-compliance—the act of breaking the rules, not conforming, not doing something expected, not doing the traditional or normal.Footnote 1 In practice, we are happy to sanction such creative behaviour and practice “when it works” … that is, when the practices involved actually result, paradoxically—not in what was expected or anticipated or planned (or even hoped for)—since these cannot be known ex ante—but in respect of living differently, living better, or living well. This, then, is where the value-positive nature of creativity enters: we are much less happy when it “doesn’t work”—this is taken simply as breaking the rules, being deviant, a troublemaker, a trickster, or loser. What this points to is the importance of both understanding and acknowledging what we mean by “when it works” … and how this in fact indicates the necessary presence of an ethically loaded teleological end that is desired. Such an “end” is manifest in all sorts of ways, and includes what we do, make, think, express, and experience.

It follows from what I have said so far that human creativity involves the absenting of the absence of doing, making, thinking, expressing, and experiencing (i.e. living) “differently”, so that we can live in the world as well as possible. As Winnicott observes: “In a tantalizing way many individuals have experienced just enough of creative living to recognize that for most of their time they are living uncreatively , as if caught up in the creativity of someone else, or of a machine” (Winnicott, 2005, p. 87). He adds that “the creative impulse” is a “thing in itself” and is not restricted to say an artist producing a work of art “but also as something that is present when anyone … looks in a healthy way at anything or does anything deliberately” (Winnicott, 2005, p. 92).

These perspectives on creative living are implicitly (and in some cases explicitly) concerned with “living as well as possible”. This is my cue for turning to the foundational link between creativity and “care”. I am not the first to recognize this link. Ann Game and Andrew Metcalfe, for example, note in their 2001 article on “Care and creativity” that:

Caring, indeed, is the source of creativity, vitality, and belonging. Creative experiences of newness and aliveness—those moments when we say we are really experiencing love, tenderness, an idea, a sunset, a piece of music, a poetic image—involve a state of holding. We need to feel held, or cared for, in order to open ourselves to the world, to live our relations with the world. (Game & Metcalfe, 2001, p. 70)

Care is complex, and “characterized by diversity and ‘multiple discourses’ of caregiving (Gubrium, 1995) shaped [amongst other things] by feminism, the disability movement, social policy analysts, legislators and carers’ organizations” (Phillips, 2007, p. 3). Care is not simply about a “soft” or “loving” human disposition (see Fromm, 1995); indeed, it often carries with it ambiguity, and notions of conflict and stress, that is, when people talk of the “burden of care” (this betrays the early Anglo-Saxon meaning of the word in terms of sorrow, anxiety, or concern). For the purposes of my enquiry, it is particularly instructive to follow Joan Tronto’s (1993) view of care as implying “a reaching out to something other than self”, as well as emphasizing that “care implicitly suggests that it will lead to some type of action” (p. 102). Both of these characteristics fit with human creativity. More broadly, Tronto has defined caring in the following way:

On the most general level … caring can be viewed as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our “world” so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web. (Fisher & Tronto, 1990, p. 40)

Given the connections already made between creativity, creative living, and this definition of caring, it should be apparent why I am proposing that human creativity is just such “an activity that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible”. Whilst it is perhaps more immediately obvious to see how creativity “continues” or “repairs” (these being transformational in nature), it also “maintains” in the sense of our creative responses being required to hold many pressures at work at bay. That creativity is about “living as well as possible” might be disputed by some; but, I think this confuses disagreement concerning what “living well” actually involves in practice, individuals’ beliefs about this, and the natural necessity of creativity always being comprised at an ontological level of such a telos. The definition being proposed is grounded in a structured practice of care, but this does not deny the fact that what counts as “living as well as possible” remains a practical and moral challenge all of us face, every day. “Living well” is, in part at least, a matter of social construction that is constantly negotiated and renegotiated over time, and which changes within and across individual cultures. This is important, of course, in accounting for why one generation or civilization deems something to be a shining example of creativity, when another might overlook it completely.

There will be those who feel my explicit linking of creativity with care is in danger of stripping out the contentious, the uncomfortable, or the critical—aspects of creativity, for example, which are seen as absolutely central to art. Again, my response here would be to make the important distinction between what I am asserting as the unifying underlying telos of “living as well as possible” and the actual practice(s) involved, which, inevitably, will be understood and appreciated differently, dependent upon individuals’ backgrounds, beliefs, life experiences, and emotional states. For example, artists critique, outrage, offend, and disrupt, I suggest, not simply to be bloody-minded (though I don’t exclude this in some cases), but because they care about our “world” (N.B. as paradoxical as it sounds, the conscious act of “not caring”, which no doubt some artists would claim as their guiding light, is arguably also one such approach to living as well as possible). Of course, this leaves the question of whether an artist’s chosen approach is, in practice, any more (or less) ethical than any other—to be clear, I am not suggesting some kind of blanket ethical approval of artists’ work per se; but the implicit aim of “living as well as possible” is the underlying driving force for human creativity—as, indeed, it is for our being human. It is also the reason we are committed to understanding it better.

An Ethics of Creativity as a Structured Practice of Care

Having presented the outline case for creativity as a practice of care, I want now to draw particular attention to two further features. First, this perspective is at its heart a relational one—care, after all, is always both given and received. Understanding care, and I suggest creativity, from this relational perspective is critical—particularly when thinking about creativity at work. As Milton Mayeroff eloquently puts it, we can “speak of caring for the other, but in any actual instance of caring it is always someone or something specific that is cared for: the writer cares for this idea, the parent cares for this child, the citizen cares for this community” (Mayeroff, 1971, p. 12). Human creativity, similarly, shares this relational focus. We cannot understand creativity at work without addressing the particular context in which that work is taking place. Second, central to what is being discussed here is how creativity, as a specific form of “practice” (i.e. an activity that can be distinguished from other activities by its distinctive aims, virtues, and sentiments (Ruddick, 1989, pp. 13–14)) is “structured”. This is of potential significance with respect not just to understanding creativity but to help us be creative, at work, at play, and across our lives in general.

In thinking through what such a structured practice relating to creativity at work might entail, I turn once again to the work of Joan Tronto, who introduces four phases of care, each aligned with what she describes as a “moral quality” (Tronto, 2013, pp. 34–35):

  1. 1.

    Caring about— attentiveness . At this first phase of care, the would-be carer notices unmet caring needs. Here, the moral quality of attentiveness, of a suspension of one’s self-interest, and a capacity genuinely to look from the perspective of the one in need, is paramount. It is fascinating to reflect on how this attentiveness plays out in the context of creativity at work. Being attentive to the “one in need” (on whatever level this is construed), for example, requires being “open to experience”, which is widely cited as a key requisite for creativity (see McClure, Chap. 28 for further discussion).

  2. 2.

    Caring for— responsibility . Once needs are identified, the would-be carer has to take on the burden of meeting those needs. This is a responsibility and represents the key moral quality of this second phase. Here, it is interesting to reflect on how this phase might relate to existing (and well-known) stage models of creativity. Typically comprising three or four stages themselves, these follow a sequence through preparation-incubation-illumination-verification (see Wallas, 1926). A focus on responsibility adds something quite distinctive in this respect. In particular, it challenges an individualistic take on creativity and calls into question how individuals, groups, organizations, industries, and societies as a whole might collectively take responsibility for acting in ways that maintain, continue, or repair our “world”, in order to live as well as possible.

  3. 3.

    Care-giving— competence . Taking responsibility may well merge into the actual work of care; this work represents the third phase of caring and requires the moral quality of competence. This is both a technical and a moral issue. Given what I have argued earlier in terms of living as well as possible, it might be suggested that there is a particular moral dimension here to the question of what counts as living well, and therefore what we undertake as creative. In the professionalized context of caring in the health and social care sector, we find frequent reference to “care frameworks”; these are important for framing narratives concerning exactly what skills, behaviours, and practices are needed to best meet the needs of those involved. By extension, we might question whether there exists a similar shared discursive space in the context of creativity at work—and if not, how would we go about developing such a care framework here?

  4. 4.

    Care-receiving— responsiveness . Once care work is underway or completed, there will be a response from the person, group, animal, plant, environment, or thing that has been cared for. Observing that response, and making judgements about it (e.g. whether the care given was sufficient, successful, or complete?), requires the moral quality of responsiveness. Straightaway we can link this to the stage of “verification” outlined earlier, but we might also understand this phase as being of a more iterative kind. Indeed, one hopes that this responsive mode of behaviour is present at the start of any creative process too, that is, having an eye for the potential impact on any one or thing—including those involved is again both a technical and moral concern.

These steps in the process of care offer a structure which has crucial relevance for understanding what creativity at work is or could be and how we go about doing it. Having introduced the theory, the next section draws on the many insights offered across this volume to assess the evidence for how well this theory might hold up when considered across a wide variety of disciplinary and professional contexts.

Part II: The Evidence

There is a well-known saying which warns that “when you’re holding a hammer, everything is a nail”. So, it could be that in my enthusiasm to secure supportive evidence for this theory of creativity as a structured practice of care, I see “nails” where none exist. However, reading the chapters submitted to this volume, I have been struck repeatedly by the palpable feeling that I’m on to something important. Notwithstanding the need to scrutinize the evidence objectively, this feeling is something that should not be ignored. Indeed, I would venture that whilst it is an aspect of doing research rarely commented on in methods textbooks, the way we feel about our work (embracing our subjective, conative, emotional, and embodied responses to data we review) always need to be acknowledged for the central role it plays in directing out enquiry. Support for this view comes from Terri Goslin-Jones and Ruth Richard’s (Chap. 4) discussion of “intimation”, the often-overlooked stage in the creative life cycle that heralds a creative breakthrough, and which, as the authors note, can “feel good”.

Creativity as Care

What, then, is the “evidence” for creativity as a structured practice of care? Implicitly at least, this is a perspective that finds broad support from my fellow contributors. There is widespread agreement that creativity is closely linked with human flourishing and what might be termed “good work”. Whilst drawing attention to the constraints that frequently impede this practice, many authors nonetheless agree that creative labour is typically oriented towards the production of things that are “aimed at pleasing, informing and enlightening audiences, and in some cases to the goals of social justice and equity” (Banks and Hesmondhalgh, 2009, p. 419; see also Oakley and Ward, 2018). Going further, as Toby Bennett (Chap. 21) explores in his chapter on “passion for music”, a vocabulary of love is repeatedly evinced, and research in this area “speaks of deep attachment, affective bindings, and to the idea of self-expression and self-actualization through work” (Gill & Pratt, 2008, p. 15). It is by no means a big conceptual leap to rephrase such perspectives in terms of practices of care.

Intriguingly, perhaps the closest affinity for my theory of creativity as a structured practice of care comes from furthest away in geographic terms: several of the contributors to this volume work at The Learning Connexion in Wellington, New Zealand, which as its founder Jonathan Milne (Chap. 7) observes, abbreviates to TLC—Tender Loving Care. As Alice Wilson Milne (Chap. 9) notes, TLC makes care explicit in their Class Agreement: Take care of yourself, take care of others, and take care of the furniture (or look after the environment). Whilst this doesn’t go as far as stating creativity is care, I think it far more than just coincidental that this connection comes through so strongly in an educational institution dedicated to supporting and growing the creativity of all who study there. It also clearly links with Jonathan Gross’ (Chap. 24) discussion of creative activities acting as processes of “self-recognition”, “techniques of coping”, and providing opportunities to believe in the possibility of change.

As we have seen, caring is defined in terms of activities that maintain, continue, and/or repair our “world” in order to live as well as possible. Goslin-Jones and Richards (Chap. 4) quote Carl Rogers’ (1961) advice that creativity is crucial if we are to adapt and thrive with the many changes that occur in our personal lives (including in our workplaces). We also see this sense of “repair” in Simon Poole’s (Chap. 3) appeal to the metaphor of the ship (after Neurath, 1959) forever sailing and continually being repaired and rebuilt at sea by the crew; and elsewhere, Goworek et al.’s (Chap. 27) discussion of “clothing longevity”, in what amounts to an argument about how creative clothing design might “care” for the world.

Understanding just what living as well as possible actually means, for whom, under what circumstances, in any given context, is central to unpacking creativity as a structured practice of care, and thus moving beyond the restricted conventional wisdom of creativity as novelty and value. Chris Bilton (Chap. 23) presents a powerful argument for avoiding Western and uncaring approaches to novelty without value, cautioning us against the pursuit of difference and disruption as ends in themselves. In what amounts to a call to better care for the world, Bilton appeals to a variety of dialectical design principles (“jugaad” in India (see also Weston and Imas, Chap. 14), “agile” and “lean” business processes and “design thinking”) which resist change for change’s sake and remind us of the importance of “uncreativity” or “the personal and organizational ballast which questions the value and necessity of new ideas”. Doing something “new” is not always the best way of providing care.

This link between creative living, living as well as possible, and everyday creativity comes through strongly in several chapters. Goslin-Jones and Richards, for example, suggest that “we are ‘everyday creating’ every single day of our lives … when we reorganize the office, resolve conflicts with staff, drive a new way home, fix a gourmet meal, plant a garden, or tell our child a bedtime story”. Brigid McClure agrees with Ruth Richards that “Far from being a minor or specialized part of our lives, our everyday creativity—our originality of everyday life—is, first of all, a survival capability” (Richards, 2007, p. 3). The design principle of jugaad , introduced by Chris Bilton, builds on “the everyday, adaptive ingenuity of ordinary users and consumers, working from the bottom of the pyramid by using local people and resources, rather than starting with the special insight of an inventor or creator directed from above or outside the localised context”. A yet more extreme context for this kind of approach is discussed by Alia Weston and Miguel Imas, who use field research in Zimbabwe to explore how creativity transforms adversity. Weston and Imas argue that creativity is “the ability of marginalized people to continually engage in tactics of survival by using adversity as a form of capital”. Here, above all else, we are reminded that creativity “as care” is for many experienced as a daily burden. Just as is the case for individuals undertaking “care work” in their private lives for partners, family, and friends, so this kind of “creativity work” is largely overlooked by society and can be anything but glamorous.

I have been keen to highlight the relational nature of this theory of creativity as a structured practice of care. Care is always both given and received. Mary Kay Culpepper’s chapter (Chap. 5) on affordances, understood as relations with the world, discusses the limits and allowances people confront “on the way to building a creative identity”. Affordances are understood as relational possibilities rather than operating according to some hydraulic shoving system, and this emphasizes the need always to contextualize creativity at work, taking as much account of the Press (giving/receiving) of the environment as the Person and their creative identity. Brigid McClure’s chapter on salsa dance highlights a wider shift “away from individualist conceptions and toward collaborative, sociocultural conceptions of creativity” (see Sawyer, 2012, p. 429). Intriguingly, she advocates “compassionate disruption” as a way to engage with and make a difference to established patterns of behaviour or interaction, arguing after Holman (2010, p. 163) that “compassionate disruption opens the way to creativity”.

It would be ludicrous, of course, to suggest that human creativity is dependent upon the explicit goal of living as well as possible. As Kerrie Unsworth (Chap. 2) reminds us, the workplace is characterized by multiple goals, and oftentimes, we are simply muddling through. Nevertheless, the argument being presented here does point towards specific practices associated with creativity being structured in such a way as to deliver a form of care. It is to these structured practices that I turn to in the next section. Before doing so, however, it is salutary to reflect further on Deema Sonbol’s chapter on women entrepreneurs in Saudi Arabia (Chap. 17), where the barriers they face in undertaking entrepreneurship stem, in part, from “natural … ubiquitous essentialist discourses” that, from childhood, reinforce a lived-out understanding of their position in society as “caregivers”. Two things are very clearly identified here. First, the deeply entrenched nature of societal values, including those relating to “motherhood”, which can curtail the ability of women to pursue entrepreneurial projects (and, as Sonbol argues, requires women to develop “creative strategies” to overcome). Second, the sense in which creativity—as a structured practice of care—must always be understood within a broader societal context where competing demands for care are being made of us (some more than others) at any given time.

Creativity at Work as a Structured Practice of Care

The idea of a structured practice of care enables us to explore in more detail what kinds of necessary practices and dispositions are actually involved in creativity at work. Each of the four phases of care (attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness) are discussed in turn. It should be stressed, this is an analytically helpful ordering rather than an ontological account of what necessarily happens in practice; in reality, the phases overlap and merge together.

Attentiveness

The first stage of creativity as a structured practice of care involves caring about something. This raises questions over who is involved, what are they paying attention to, how are they “better” at others in paying attention (if indeed this is the case), as well as what kinds of structures and conditions motivate and enable (rather than constrain and exploit) their attentiveness. In the context of creativity, it is easy to see how society’s enduring fascination with individual creative geniuses (popularized in media and through celebrity culture) reinforces a sense of the “creative” or “artist” being, quite simply, different to everyone else: they notice things that others don’t. Some support for this view is perhaps inevitable when focusing in on the cultural labour market. Brook and Comunian (Chap. 6) consider the sense in which “being a creative involves a calling that may well transcend any immediate application in the labour market”, for example. This view is also closely allied to the belief that products within an artistic context have more about them to notice than other types of work.

One of the many problems with the enduring genius myth is that it places undue emphasis on the skills, behaviours, and personality traits of the individual, leaving any more structured understanding of the Press of creativity unexplored. For example, Tanya Aplin’s exploration of what constitutes “originality” under different intellectual property jurisdictions (Chap. 19) reveals structural differences in what one might then choose to consider valuable and worth pursuing (“The work must originate from the author and, as well, show the ‘author’s own intellectual creation’ in the European Union; ‘labour, skill and judgment’ in the United Kingdom; ‘skill and judgment’ in Canada, a ‘minimal level of creativity’ in the United States; the ‘imprint of the author’s personality’ in France; or ‘personal intellectual creation’ in Germany”).

The capacity to notice what others don’t is often discussed in terms of being open to experience. Speers and Wilson (Chap. 25) draw particular attention to the need to keep an open mind and to hold a creative play-space “open”. Intriguingly, they introduce “the paradox of intentionality”, whereby the space for creativity to emerge must be held open without this becoming part of an extrinsic instrumental goal-driven purpose or intention. On the face of it, this appears to be at odds with the notion of creativity as a structured practice of care; how can you care about someone or something without first settling on who that someone or what that something is? Something rather similar to this paradox is played out in a powerful way in David Wright’s discussion of “hopeful work” and the creative economy (Chap. 15). Wright draws out the tensions that exist between hopeful work, premised on “the possibility of self-fulfilment or the pursuit of enthusiasms and the expression of passions”, on the one hand, and what he refers to as “hope labour” (after Kuehn and Corrigan, 2013), where workers work in hope —more often than not because they are working for free. It would be foolish to downplay the very real constraints that Wright and other critical commentators bring our attention to here. However, equally we need to acknowledge that hope is more than a survival strategy. Hope itself, it might be argued, is a structured practice of care. We hope, in this sense, precisely in order to maintain, continue, and/or repair our world so that we can live as well as possible. A key attraction of creative work for the still enthusiastic army of young people attracted to pursue work in the arts, cultural industries, and associated fields is precisely that this work is not exclusively shaped by narrowly constrained neoliberal economic goals. Instead, such work remains associated with aesthetic forms of self-expression, with pleasure and passion.

Writing specifically about the production of visual art (Chap. 8), Peter Adsett and Mary Alice Lee quote the art historian T.J. Clark who extolled the rewards of sustained attention, reflecting on the pleasure and astonishment that works will offer “if you give them half the chance”. Interestingly, Adsett and Lee’s definition of creativity also hinges on the “special attention” that an artist pays to the materials and processes of a work in its formative stages; such attention, they aver, will also then be acknowledged by the viewer in reading the finished work. The authors describe the work, when it happens, as “operating”. This is a term I would like to extend beyond art works. For it alerts us to both the relational and the qualitative nature of our experience(s), more broadly. Being “open” is a necessary but not sufficient feature of this type of experience; there is also a qualitative depth to it; it matters. As such, we are compelled to take responsibility for it. This brings us to the second stage of creativity as a structured practice of care.

Responsibility

It is not enough to care about something ; the next step in realizing caring is to care for—somebody, something, an idea, or even, the world as a whole. This involves taking (or actively refraining from) action of some kind. A number of issues present themselves when thinking further about this aspect of creativity as a structured practice of care. Building on the ideas raised in this Handbook, I consider just three here.

Firstly, we are reminded that responsibility comes not just in the shape of taking action for others; it is also pivotal in our being able to receive care ourselves. We can see this in the context of TLC , where Wilson Milne (Chap. 9) notes “By accepting the Class Agreement we take responsibility for ourselves and our actions, and acknowledge that it is our responsibility to ask for help when we need it”. The link between care and creativity is enshrined in this ethos of learning and “supported autonomy” (see Wilson & Gross, 2017). It is important to highlight the responsibility for self (as care-receiver) that comes first. Speers and Wilson highlight the centrality of “giving and being given permission” to be creative, once again emphasizing a mix of agential and structural determining features.

In many ways, the notion of an individual taking responsibility is much easier to grasp than collective responsibility. For example, running through many of the chapters in this Handbook is the question of what government’s responsibility towards creativity (as a structured practice of care) ought to be? In the absence of really knowing what creativity is, let alone how much value to ascribe it, society readily replicates a “truth in practice” (the de facto value of creativity is determined by what we can measure) on the basis of a “falsity in theory” (what we can measure determines the value of creativity). Jonathan Vickery (Chap. 16) writing on the role of creativity in the context of international development highlights how this lack of clear causality between government funding and the apparent “dynamism” in the arts in the United Kingdom is “often used by Governments to escape their responsibilities”. What is exposed here, I suggest, is the fault line of applying a cost-benefit analysis to a process of caring. Penny Newell’s discussion of “impact”, that is, the “benefits [of research to] the economy, society, culture, policy, health, the environment and quality of life—both within the UK and overseas”, also brings this problem of measurement sharply into focus (Chap. 18). Perversely, a distorted kind of responsibility taking, premised on an asymmetrical contract, is replicated if we’re not careful: “we’ll care for you, but only if you guarantee that our time and effort will be rewarded with the knowledge that this will benefit you”. As Louis Hyde (2006) reminds us, creativity (like care) cannot be commodified without damaging the very thing being exchanged; in this sense, creativity (like care) is both “given” and “received”.

A central line of argument in this chapter is that human creativity extends well beyond problem-solving or introducing novel ideas; I highlight creative living as a mode of everyday practice which requires non-compliance. We normally don’t associate breaking the rules with taking responsibility; but, in fact, this is the fulcrum around which creativity at work happens (or not). We cannot absent the absence of living differently in order to live as well as possible without knowing when (as well as how) to act “differently”. This, in turn, requires taking responsibility to know the rules in the first place (see Margaret Boden (2004) on “conceptual constraints”), and then to follow or deviate from them. McClure (Chap. 28) observes, for example, that “the first mechanism of connection that dancers learn is a simple pattern of steps commonly known as ‘the basic step’ [the rules] which provides the foundation for virtually all movement throughout the dance, and enables dancers to coordinate their movements to the music and develop shared momentum”. Mary Kay Culpepper (Chap. 5) emphasizes the role of technical and material affordances in understanding the rules of any particular domain. Elsewhere, Adsett and Lee draw on Stanley Cavell’s idea of “automatism”, which refers to the rules by which the “practitioners of a given discipline gain the freedom to improvise”. On the face of it, the idea that there are rules by which one gains freedom to improvise, challenges Winnicott’s basic formulation of creative living (as non-compliance); but, seen dialectically, this idea places even more emphasis on this critical stage of taking responsibility.

Competence

The third phase of a structured practice of care concerns our competence (or not) to actually deliver—care-giving. The metaphor I like to use to explain this moral quality of competence is the very simple example of a care-giver bringing a cup of tea to someone they are caring for. They care about the care-receiver and are attentive to their needs; moreover, they care for the care-receiver by, in this case, going into the kitchen to put the kettle on and making the tea, that is, turning a disposition for care into practice. However, care-giving requires that care is delivered, and delivered well. Should, for the purposes of this example, our in-competent care-giver accidentally spill scalding tea all over the care-receiver, they would have not succeeded in caring at all.

The question arises, what are the competences required to deliver creativity (as a structured practice of care)? Furthermore, we might ask what does “incompetence” entail in this context of creativity at work? These might seem like academic questions, but as Caroff et al. (Chap. 1) remind us in their chapter looking at assessment of creative potential, creativity is a major issue for companies; there is enormous interest in establishing approaches and methods that can detect the creative potential of people. The concerns and issues raised here have very real and pragmatic significance in terms of investment, resource allocation, organization, strategic management, and so on.

The market for self-help books on creativity is extensive; with them come many lists and typologies of skills, attributes, and competencies associated with “being creative”. There is no one master list, but being open to experience, risk-taking, autonomous , outward looking, adaptive, with an internal locus of control and high level of self-efficacy are some of the commonly cited criteria (see Michael Mustafa and Hazel Melanie Ramos’ discussion of “personal resources” in Chap. 13). Straightaway, we can see how such criteria link to what I have discussed earlier in the chapter under the label of creative living. The normative challenge for anyone or any organization seeking to develop these in a proactive fashion, either for themselves or for their employees, is to determine whether such criteria are causes or symptoms; this chicken and egg problem similarly bedevils approaches that seek to explain creativity on the basis of successful role models—do they explain what contributed to their success, or merely indicate what that success looks like, once achieved?

Several chapters discuss optimizing conditions for creativity at work and highlight specific spatial requirements (Suckley and Nicholson’s Chap. 12 on workspace design; Weiyi Wu’s discussion in Chap. 11 of co-working spaces in Shanghai), or the particular qualities of “studios” (see Gross, Chap. 24, and Wildt, Chap. 29). Penny Newell bemoans the “deflation of creative imaginative spaces” within a university context, and Brigid McClure stresses the importance of “providing time and space to allow students to take the lead in a playful exploration of options”. Others focus on the digital space, which has been widely discussed as having a democratizing influence on creativity at work (see Gauntlett, 2018). An overriding viewpoint expressed in this Handbook, however, is not to overlook the broader context in one’s enthusiasm for the digital. Jonathan Milne calls for a better balance between digital and “doing”, suggesting that experiential learning brings us face to face with puzzles that are beyond digital reach. Meanwhile, Simon Poole argues that by connecting with or knowing the past and our cultural traditions, we can engage in a more personally and socially meaningful creative practice in the digital world (see Chris James Carter’s Chap. 26 for further discussion of social media and the future of creativity at work).

A central point of tension in relation to this care-giving phase of creativity concerns the view, on the one hand, that creativity demands specialist knowledge, skills, and talent, which only some possess versus the “everyday creativity” perspective, on the other, which draws attention to the capacity (at least) of individuals to develop such competencies, given the right conditions. Unfortunately, particularly within a cultural policy context of austerity, this tension is all-too-frequently polarized into a zero-sum game that pitches “proper” artists on the one side, against the untrained majority, on the other. Jonathan Gross’s chapter makes a particular call to think differently about the way creativity is embraced in people’s lives. He cites “the need to expand the application of the idea of a ‘creative career’ beyond remunerated activity”, drawing attention to how “recognizing and supporting creative careers off the clock has the potential to open new possibilities for expanding the cultural agency of individuals and groups, across the life-course”. There is a conceptual link here to Chris Bilton’s discussion of “hacking”, “crafting creativity”, “working with your hands”, “fixing things” as opposed to more high-profile cases of creativity at work (in turn, echoing Larry Shiner’s (2001) discussion of the “great divide” between artisans and fine artists).

It is 20 years since the UK government published its definition of the creative industries: “those industries which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property” (DCMS, 1998). One feature of the relational ethics of creativity being introduced here is to challenge this individualistic and instrumental reading of creativity that has come to dominate so much policy thinking and practice. Reflecting on students coming together to meet with others in acts of “shared creativity”, Alice Wilson Milne highlights high levels of empathy, stamina, dedication, tolerance, and a commitment to personal values. Such qualities map closely on to Ruth Richards’ discussion of five relational qualities—engagement, authenticity, empathy, mutuality, and empowerment (2007, 2014), and Wilson’s (2010) five steps towards social creativity—enabling interdisciplinarity; supporting collective critical reflection; facilitating engagement; developing communicative tolerance; and applying alternative methods. These are competences that all too easily get overlooked in the rush to be creative. As one of my master’s students rather wonderfully said to me on being asked “what is creativity?”—“well, it is living more slowly, isn’t it!” Creativity takes time. Like care, it’s not always something you can hurry.

Responsiveness

The final phase of caring highlights care-receiving. Here, the primary (though not exclusive) emphasis turns back on those receiving the care: is it what they need or want? How might it be improved? What, if any, are the opportunity costs of the caring approach actually being delivered? But also, what is the impact of the caring on the carers themselves? In the context of creativity at work, such questions intersect with a raft of recent research projects exploring aspects of “cultural value” (Crossick & Kaszynska, 2016) and the much-discussed tension between intrinsic and instrumental value creation in creative organizations (Hewison & Holden, 2011). This is a vast area which demands careful contextualization; indeed, one of the major challenges facing those studying creative and cultural labour is determining just who should be included (see Toby Bennett’s chapter for further discussion). I return to the big question of what kind of value is created in the workplace in the final part of this chapter; for now, however, I want to take the opportunity to look further at some implications of “responsiveness” for the Process of creativity. Being open to living differently, and being responsive represent two sides of the same coin. As various contributors highlight, the potentially emancipatory nature of creativity at work can place a heavy burden on those involved.

Alice Wilson Milne observes that “The process of feedback is at the heart of creativity. You take something, do something to it, and then respond to the result… It’s how we learn, how we grow and how things evolve” (see also Milne, 2008). The capacity to reflect on failure unifies both the student of entrepreneurship (Huang and Arndt, Chap. 20) and the student of art and design (see Wildt’s discussion of the “balancing act between the learning journey and the crit” (Chap. 29); also Young’s discussion (Chap. 10) of the pivotal role of “reflection” in developing creative methodologies in the humanities). However, Wilson (Chap. 22) puts forward the view that, in some respects at least, entrepreneurship education has been rather better than the arts, humanities, and social sciences, in encouraging a reflexive and responsive approach to learning. Tori Huang and Felix Arndt outline how their entrepreneurship students are encouraged to expand their comfort zone, reflecting and sharing their successes as well as their failures. One wonders whether this is an approach that is so openly embraced in other disciplinary contexts?

In their chapter on creativity and employee well-being, Michael Mustafa and Hazel Melanie Ramos note that the overwhelming majority of research tends to view employees’ creativity as a win-win: “not only do organizations that promote individual creativity benefit in terms of effectiveness, but also the very employees report greater job satisfaction and psychological well-being”. However, Mustafa and Ramos caution us to also consider employee “unwell-being” at work, commenting on high levels of work-related stress and burnout. It is in this context that Penny Newell’s discussion of the need for creativity to be undertaken voluntarily and without coercion rings particularly true. She quotes Stefan Collini (2012), for whom “creativity is paradoxically nullified by the enforcement of imaginative free play”, and who decries any disciplinary regime that states: “be creative or I’ll beat the hell out of you”. This is rather like demanding “you will care”, and “you will be cared for”, both of which are guaranteed to fail.

Simply opting to “be creative” at work is equally not sufficient, however. Toby Bennett’s discussion on the role of passion in creative labour is especially enlightening in this respect. He notes that “To be passionate … involves conceiving of agency as an act of submission, or giving oneself over to an object or other”. What is so striking about this viewpoint is how it flies in the face of neoliberal thinking and “the enterprise of the self”,Footnote 2 which is all about being “in control”. As Bennett stresses, to be passionate is to submit oneself to one’s passion in ways that go beyond the boundaries of control and self-mastery. This is truly a domain of responsiveness, requiring courage, commitment, and listening to others at least as much as oneself.

Part III: Discussion and Recommendations

My overall aim in this chapter has been to introduce a new theoretical account of creativity premised on a relational ethics that casts creativity as a structured practice of care. Creativity, I have suggested, absents the absence of living differently in order to live as well as possible. I have then applied the insights from across this volume to lend support to this theoretical position. At a purely academic level, this conceptualization might be said to move us on past the conceptual “crossroads” that commentators have argued exists between creativity and ethics. More importantly, I think it provides a framework for both thinking and doing “differently” in the context of creativity at work.

In this last part of the chapter, I now put forward two recommendations based on what has been discussed. Both have to do with the words and stories we use to justify our dispositions and our actions when it comes to “creativity at work”; to be clear, however, my argument is not merely restricted to the presentational or discursive, but is profoundly ethical in nature. The first recommendation concerns our use of the term creativity, and its closely allied term innovation. Having made the case for creativity as a structured practice of care, we now need to operationalize a distinction that can herald a distinctively new way of thinking about—and crucially, practising—creativity at work. This brings me to the second recommendation, which is that we should actively reclaim “creativity at work” from the neoliberal ideology that threatens to either appropriate it for its purposes of accumulating capital or reduce it to a weasel phrase, devoid of any substantive significance. The agenda laid out here is an exciting new one for creativity at work, understood as a structured practice of care that is premised on maintaining, continuing, and/or repairing our “world” in order to live as well as possible.

First Recommendation: Distinguishing Creativity from Innovation

As many of the authors in this volume (and, indeed, elsewhere—see Banks, 2017; McRobbie, 2016) have attested, applied interest in creativity at work has all too often been driven by an underlying neoliberal agenda. However, there is a problem here in terms of the easy slippage between discussions of “creativity” and “innovation”. I would like to suggest that whilst both terms involve novelty and value of some kind, unlike creativity, innovation is not necessarily driven by living in the world as well as possible. Several authors discuss innovation in quite negative terms. David Wright’s context is the “creative economy”, which in his view stands for a “precarious and exclusionary labour market”; Chris Bilton observes that “the pressure to innovate results in a high pressure … environment where individuals are perpetually dissatisfied with their own work”. He argues that “excesses in the pursuit of novelty” can lead to neurotic behaviour and a failure to meet the criteria for creativity. Penny Newell’s discussion of innovation as an “operator” of creativity in a university context, also picks up on this critical theme.

Given this Handbook’s explicit focus on “work”, it is fascinating to reflect on the fact that the word “creativity” only first appeared in the nineteenth century, at the very time when free-market economics was being introduced, and when scientific and technological advances were beginning to make human independence possible. In his (2003) study of The value of creativity: The origins and emergence of a modern belief, John Hope Mason notes that “The fact that the word to ‘create’ involved some kind of innovation initially set it apart from to ‘invent’ (invenir; erfinden) and ‘to discover’ (découvrir; entdecken), for both of these verbs originally meant finding or uncovering something which already existed” (Mason, 2003, p. 8; see also Martin & Wilson, 2017 for a detailed review and critique of the relationship between creativity and discovery). Whilst some theorizations distinguish clearly between creativity and innovation (see, e.g. discussion in Mustafa and Ramos, Chap. 13, and Goworek et al., Chap. 27); in practice, creativity and innovation are now used interchangeably; to all extents and purposes, they have become synonyms for each other (e.g. see Keith Sawyer’s (2012) Explaining creativity: The science of human innovation). However, I want to argue that whilst creativity and innovation do indeed overlap in practice, they nonetheless refer to different things—they have different referents, if you like. Human creativity necessarily involves a structured practice of care, whereby there is an underlying telos of living in our world as well as possible. Such a telos is not always manifest as a conscious intention, nor is it a given that the practices actually carried out will be “caring” (as discussed in this chapter, there are many reasons, embracing issues of responsibility, competence, and responsiveness, as to why this might not be the case). “Innovation”, on the other hand, which according to mainstream definitions is also premised on the introduction of novelty and value, and the “successful exploitation of a new idea” (DTI, 2003) may or may not involve a structured practice of care—that is, crucially, this relationship is contingent not necessary. Any particular case of innovation may embrace an underlying telos for those involved of living in the world as well as possible. To be clear, I am not saying that all innovation is bad and creativity good. However, innovation is always driven by a different distinguishing underlying telos (albeit again, not usually held at a conscious level) of accumulating capital as a particular form of “value” creation. What is potentially very important about this distinction is the implications it has for thinking critically about the kind of attention we give to creativity, what we care about, and then how we go about delivering that care—for ourselves and for the world—in practice.

The implications of this distinction are far reaching. One particular area where it would have very real significance is in entrepreneurial education. Entrepreneurship, after all, is widely seen as the process that leads to the production of innovation. Rather than dismissing entrepreneurship outright, as many left-leaning critics of capitalism are prone to do, I would wish to highlight the contingent nature of the relationship between entrepreneurship (as currently understood) and living as well as possible. My view (as also expressed in Chap. 22) is that entrepreneurship can, and should above all else, be seen as the process of realizing a creative project. This being the case, we have a choice to advocate and practice entrepreneurship that is motivated by living as well as possible rather than by the accumulation of capital.

Establishing which acts of creativity to support and invest in requires being able to assess, amongst other things, the extent to which they deliver on their promise to live in the world as well as possible. Currently, we tell ourselves that the market decides. But is this really the case? As Stephen Grosz puts it, “if we don’t tell out stories, our stories tell us” (Grosz, 2013 in Gross, Chap. 24). This is where perhaps we need to think harder about the kinds of overarching narratives and “care frameworks” we need to put in place to govern our approach and the types of creativity at work we really want. This is certainly no easy task—but again we can find some helpful pointers from Joan Tronto’s work on “caring democracy”. She introduces a fifth phase of care that advances a further set of critical moral qualities that make it “possible for people to take collective responsibility, to think of citizens as both receivers and givers of care, and to think seriously about the nature of caring needs in society” (Tronto, 2013, p. 35). This phase—caring with—as Tronto calls it, is defined in terms of plurality, communication, trust, and respect (themes, incidentally, which Speers and Wilson highlight in their study of everyday creativity in a university context). There are clearly no easy quick-fit solutions here, but it does seem that a productive first step might involve creativity and care theorists talking to each other. This could be an extremely productive dialogue for all concerned.

Of course, it might be claimed that what is being argued here is just some kind of semantic sleight of hand—whereby we “brush” the negative connotations of creativity at work under the innovation “rug”, exonerating creativity of any tint of compromise and in so doing raising creativity to an unimpeachable position on its pedestal of positivity. It is a fair question to ask what difference this conceptual distinction would actually make in practice—given that workplaces are not suddenly, or any time soon, going to stop looking to innovate (in the sense of accumulating capital) on the basis of this argument alone. My aim, at least in the first instance, however, is to open up a space under the label of “creativity at work”, which allows for genuine and shared reflection concerning what “living as well as possible” entails (as I have previously stressed, “actually existing creativity” is not uniformly positive). This takes me to my second recommendation.

Second Recommendation: Reclaiming “Creativity at Work”

It might be suggested that compiling a book devoted simply to “creativity” or even “creativity research” would have offered an easier overall framing than a Handbook of Creativity at Work. On the one hand, the “at work” tag might be seen to dilute the book’s focus on creativity; on the other hand, the focus on creativity might be held to belittle other forms of work that are, by implication, deemed not to be “creative” (a similar criticism is often aired of using labels like “creatives” or, indeed, the “creative industries”). However, through the writing and editing of this volume, I find myself more convinced than ever that this focus on “creativity at work” has not just been useful as a descriptive device—indicating where we should be putting our attention, but it opens up the possibility of thinking differently about creativity in a work context. My second recommendation, therefore, is that we should reclaim creativity at work as a force for positive change.

If we are to pursue this recommendation seriously, we need to be prepared to adopt an open mind, and indeed, think differently about our relationship to both creativity and work. Taking Peter Adsett and Mary Alice Lee’s chapter on creativity and the visual arts, for example, the authors intriguingly suggest that we might actually do well to avoid the use of the word “creativity” at all, advocating instead reference to words such as “work” or “process”, and adding that any “emphasis on the phrase ‘work of art’, must be on work…” Pursuing this line of thinking further, I want to use this opportunity of summing up this Handbook of Creativity at Work to call for a “hopeful” (see David Wright’s Chap. 15) “détournement”Footnote 3 (see Nick Wilson’s Chap. 22), in which we replace negative connotations with a positive message of care. In referring to “creativity at work”, therefore, we advocate a new position, a call to do things differently, such that, indeed, it is creativity (not innovation) which more often leads the way. Then we would indeed have reason to see the existence of “creatives” as “a harbinger for broader socio-cultural changes” (Brook and Comunian, Chap. 6).

Finally, recalling Goworek et al.’s (Chap. 27) focused discussion of how creativity at work can operate in practice (in their case the focus being on clothing design), it is exciting to reconfigure “creativity at work” as an aspirational term of reference for thinking differently about such practices. This Handbook offers more than just a collection of interesting perspectives on creativity in context, written by researchers who keep a safe “objective” distance from the objects of their study. Rather than merely seeing “creativity at work” as just one more manifestation of “third-wave” interest in creativity as a sociocultural phenomenon (see Sawyer, 2012), I suggest we should consider “creativity at work” as heralding a new wave of applied research. As such, what has been presented here collectively sends up a rallying cry to think and act differently (more creatively and caringly) about the much-needed role of creativity in society today.

It is with this rallying cry that I bring this chapter and the Handbook to a close, but it is not the end of the story. We clearly have much still to learn about creativity at work. This is not just because our grasp of the terrain is necessarily partial; it is also because the nature of creativity at work itself is, and will always be, changing. After all, it is in the very nature of creativity at work to be different tomorrow (I, for one, am optimistic about how the many creative technological revolutions that lie just around the corner can be harnessed in the service of human flourishing). Ansel Adams declared: “No personFootnote 4 has the right to dictate what other individuals should perceive, create, or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions, and their emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit” (n.d.). This seems a very apposite statement to end on. My hope is that this Handbook will build confidence in the reader to reveal more of themselves, to think, do, make, express, and experience “differently” about human creativity. If we achieve this even in some small measure, we will have begun to put creativity to work, and in so doing, taken another step towards living in the world as well as possible. That’s something we should all care about.