Creativity

Leaders as Gatekeepers To Creativity

According to the “system model,” the term creative may be used to describe a new idea, process, or product that is socially valued and pursued to completion. For creativity to occur, three elements must be present. The first is a cultural domain—that is, a set of procedures for thinking and acting. Domains are likely to consist of a symbolic system with its own notation and codified rules. Music, mathematics, religion, and engineering are a few of the many thousands of domains that make up a culture.

The second element necessary for creativity is a person who, after learning the rules of a particular domain—for example, religion—decides to introduce some novelty into it. Most persons are content to reproduce the information they learn from a domain without changing it. But there are always a few individuals who feel that the domain needs improvement, and who are willing to put out the effort necessary to implement the desired change. For instance, Martin Luther, who was ordained as a Catholic monk, was unable to accept the religious rules laid down by Rome and after many struggles developed his own version of Christianity.

The third element is a social field. Fields are made up by the gatekeepers of specific domains. The function of a field is to evaluate the novelties proposed for introduction into a domain, to reject those that it believes are not an improvement on what already exists, and to select for inclusion into the domain those changes that are better than what existed before. In the case of Martin Luther, the field that evaluated his ideas was the Papal curia and its various offices, including the Inquisition. Rejected by them, Luther was forced to recruit a new set of gatekeepers from dissatisfied clergymen and nobility who were seeking autonomy from Rome. This resulted in the Protestant church, which soon developed into a domain and a field with its own dogmatic and procedural rules. The system model thus implies that creativity cannot occur even in very creative people unless their ideas are accepted and implemented by the relevant gatekeepers.

As this example shows, the choices a field has to make in deciding whether a new idea is heretical or creative often reflect political, ideological, and financial conflicts. This is true even in domains that are more abstract than religion. In mathematics or physics, for example, it may take a few years to ascertain whether a scientist's claim is fraudulent, mistaken, or truly new and valid and thus worthy of recognition. Only then will it be included in the [Page 287]domain—the journals, the textbooks, and the growing knowledge base that future mathematicians or physicists will learn.

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