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SOR0010.1177/0038026120918991The Sociological ReviewGarrett

Article
The Sociological Review

Getting ‘creative’ under

2021, Vol. 69(1) 21­–36
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0038026120918991
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creativity as a dominant journals.sagepub.com/home/sor

keyword

Paul Michael Garrett

NUI Galway, Republic of Ireland

Abstract
This article proposes a sociologically informed analysis of ‘creativity talk’ using an approach
based on Raymond Williams’ ‘keywords’. Arguing that Williams’ perspective provides a helpful
conceptual foundation, the discussion argues that the emergence of contemporary ideas
circulating around creativity are rooted in material changes taking place within capitalism, the rise
of humanistic psychology and the notion of the ‘creative city’/‘creative class’. Four discourses are
proposed as potentially significant: austere creativity; liberatory creativity; analgesic creativity;
and dissenting creativity.

Keywords
capitalism, creative, creativity, keywords, Raymond Williams

Introduction
What I will refer to as ‘creativity talk’ is now ubiquitous within a range of ‘fields’
(Bourdieu, 2003). Google’s ngram database of printed books reveals a steep incline in
the use of the word since the 1920s, with a notably marked increase in usage since the
1960s. However, Reckwitz (2017, p. 2) argues that from a ‘sociological viewpoint, crea-
tivity is not simply a semantic phenomenon’, but ‘rather, a crucial organizing principle
of Western societies over the last thirty years or so’. Since the 1970s, a ‘two-pronged
advance of the creative urge and the creative imperative has been overstepping the con-
fines of career, work and organization to seep deeper and deeper into the cultural logic’
of our times (Reckwitz, 2017, p. 3). Paradoxically, it is avowed by critics of this develop-
ment, that ‘everyday life’ is so ‘saturated by a creativity rhetoric’ that it now actually
discourages us from working ‘creatively’ (Mould, 2018, p. 15). Nevertheless, despite

Corresponding author:
Paul Michael Garrett, School of Political Science and Sociology, NUI Galway, Galway, H91 TK33, Republic
of Ireland.
Email: PM.Garrett@nuigalway.ie
22 The Sociological Review 69(1)

Mould’s provocatively titled Against Creativity, it is difficult – and rather pointless – to

criticise or oppose ‘creativity’. This article will not stridently confront and debunk.
Rather, the more modest intention is to sociologically explore the word.
First, I provide a brief theoretical foundation for the ensuing discussion by furnishing
a truncated account of the work of Raymond Williams on keywords. The second section
examines how contemporary ‘creativity talk’ may have emerged: what were, and remain,
its main constituting components? To try and answer such questions there is a need to
historically chart and situate the emergence and hyper-valorisation of creativity. Here, at
least three elements are significant: material changes taking place within capitalism; the
rise of humanistic psychology; and discourses dwelling on the ‘creative city’ and the
‘creative class’. The third part of the article suggests that a quartet of identifiable compo-
nent discourses are important: creativity as a form of austere practice; creativity as lib-
eration from a purportedly sterile public sector; creativity as a form of analgesic for jaded
neoliberal subjects; and dissenting creativity that tries to locate ‘lines of flight’ beyond
the imperatives of neoliberal capitalism (Virno, 1996; see also Garrett, 2019).

Creativity as a keyword
An interest in keywords was apparent even in the late nineteenth century, but Williams
(1983) is the leading contemporary theorist associated with this form of scholarly analysis
(Garrett, 2018). First published in 1976, his Keywords included 110 short essays on the
words he regarded as important in social, cultural and political life in the mid-1970s. In
1983, the revised edition of the book incorporated an additional 21 words. More recently,
a revival of interest in keyword theorisation has occurred (see, for example, Bennett et al.,
2005; Garrett, 2018; Leary, 2018; MacCabe and Yanacek, 2018; Parker, 2017).
One of Williams’ aspirations was to counteract the common tendency to take the words
we use for granted. For him, there were great social and political advantages accruing
from subjecting specific words to sociological and literary scrutiny in order to illuminate
how meanings, far from stabile, shift and change over time. A willingness to embark on
this type of examination was vital, for those seeking radical political change, because
there was a need to recognise how ‘keywords’ help to constitute, shape and bolster a par-
ticular view of the world. A heightened attention to such words, in the shifting contexts in
which they are deployed, could help punctuate the dominant narratives of social and eco-
nomic life ordinarily left unquestioned. In a more encompassing sense, Williams aspired
to engender critical reflection and counter hegemonic strategies antithetical to capitalism.
In short, keyword analysis was wedded to a wider intellectual and political project intent
on sustaining a ‘long revolution’ that might result in the gradual construction of demo-
cratic socialism (Williams, 1965). However, he recognised the limitations of merely
focusing on words. Such recognition was also echoed years later by Bourdieu (2000, p.2)
who caustically criticised many educators and activists for erroneously regarding the ‘cri-
tiques of texts as a feat of resistance’ and for foolishly implying that ‘revolutions in the
order of words’ amounted to ‘radical revolutions in the order of things’.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘creativity’ refers to the ‘faculty of being
creative’ or the ‘ability or power to create’. Williams (1983, p. 82) identified how the
word ‘create’ was formerly used in the context of the ‘original divine creation of the
world’ from nothing. Within the belief system, promulgated by figures such as Augustine
Garrett 23

of Hippo (354–430 ce), creatures (human beings) lacked the power to ‘bring into being
something new’ and to render the ‘absent present’ (Bröckling, 2006,
pp. 513–514). As the biblical book of Ecclesiastes declared: ‘There is nothing new under
the sun’. This perspective appears to have been the dominant understanding until the
sixteenth century when ‘as part of the major transformation of thought’, occurring in the
European Renaissance, the word began to encompass the possibility of humans’ creating.
Williams (1983, p. 82) referred, for example, to the poet Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86)
who perceived God as ‘having made Nature but having also made man in his own like-
ness, giving him the capacity “with the force of a divine breath” to imagine and make
things beyond Nature’. However, wariness and ambiguity continued to be hinder the
notion of human ‘creation’. The cleric and poet John Donne (1572–1631) perceived
‘poetry as a “counterfeit Creation”, where counterfeit does not have to be taken in its
strongest sense of false but where the old sense of art as imitation is certainly present’
(Williams, 1983, p. 82, original emphases). Amongst Elizabethan writers, such as
William Shakespeare (1554–1616), pejorative uses were still, argued Williams, very
much to the fore. Even today, phrases such as ‘creative accounting’ hint at fake and dis-
reputable practices.
Soon, however, ‘create’ and ‘creation’ were to take on the meanings we would come
to share. During the eighteenth century both words acquired a ‘conscious association’
with art and were suggestive of ‘original and innovating’ endeavours. This development
can be connected to the coining of the word ‘creative’. ‘Creativity’, first deployed in
1875 in an essay on the brilliance of Shakespeare, began to be used more frequently in
the twentieth century and it usually referred to activity in art and thought (Hartley et al.,
2013). Williams (1983, p. 83) noted the ‘difficulty’ which arose when words, such as
these, ‘once intended, and often still intended, to embody a high and serious claim,
[become] so conventional. . . . Thus any imitative or stereotyped literary work can be
called, by convention, creative writing, and advertising copywriters officially describe
themselves as creative.’ Such critical remarks take on greater resonance, with the banal-
ising, hollowing out and impoverishment of such words in the twenty-first century. One
of the problems today is the ‘credibility of creativity’ insofar as the ‘adjective form “cre-
ative” is liberally applied to products or works that involve negligible amounts of nov-
elty’ (Hartley et al., 2013, p. 67). For example, despite commodities being ‘routine,
frequently standardised and generally derivative’, corporate advertisements frequently
allude to the producers and purchasers of commodities being marinated in ‘creativity’
(Hartley et al., 2013, p. 68).
Williams (1983, p. 84) concluded his exploration by remarking on the ‘magnitude and
complexity of the interpretation of human activity which creative . . . embodies’.
Because creativity is hard to define, metaphors have an illuminating function. Bröckling
(2006) maintains that these metaphors can be situated within six different registers. First,
creativity is associated with the artistic action and flair. Second, it is conceived in relation
to production and here the activity of the ‘craftsman’ is the paradigmatic figure (see also
Arendt, 1958/1998; Sennett, 1998). Third, creativity is perceived as ‘problem solving
action’ with an emphasis on inventiveness and innovation (Bröckling, 2006, p. 516). The
fourth ‘metaphoric field’ is one of revolution and here the stress is on liberation and the
inauguration of a new political realm. The fifth evocation of creativity dwells on ‘life
24 The Sociological Review 69(1)

connected associations’ with the metaphors of birth and biological evolution to the fore
(Bröckling, 2006, p. 516). Finally, the sixth creativity metaphor is that of play. Here the
embodiment of the metaphor is the child. However, in recent times, it is possible to iden-
tify how creative ‘play’ and ‘fun’ are valorised within some workplaces (Fleming, 2005);
a development that might partly be interpreted as infantilising adult workers.
Bröckling (2006, p. 516) states that contemporary appeals to creativity come in vari-
ous forms implying: an ‘anthropological capacity’ (creativity is something everyone
has); a ‘binding norm’ (creativity is something everyone ought to possess); a ‘telos with-
out closure’ (creativity is something we can never have enough of); and a ‘learnable
competence’ (creativity is something that can become achievable by recourse to instruc-
tion). Despite this delineation, there are rarely sociological explorations as to what con-
stitutes creativity within mainstream and popular depictions. Rather, it is taken as ‘given’
and there is no attentiveness to social ambiguities and philosophical abstractions attached
to the concept. Nevertheless, what ‘constitutes creativity has not been determined once
and for all, but rather emerges from the various ways it has been attributed, evoked, and
catalysed throughout history’ (Bröckling, 2006, p. 514). Martin (2009) and Hartley et al.
(2013) highlight that the meaning of creativity is bound up with a number of complex
philosophical considerations: does ‘creativity’ have to generate a tangible outcome
observable and validated by another party or parties for it to be recognised as such? If
recognised, does the recognition have to be instantaneous? (Clearly, this would hardly
seem to be the case given that the work of authors such as Kafka were not lauded as
magnificent works of ‘creativity’ until after their death.) Do most understandings of crea-
tivity – still rooted in residual, older notions preoccupied with the artistic, even the soli-
tary artistic male ‘genius’ usually located in the Global North (Glăveanu & Sierra, 2015)
– assume a certain specialness, despite quotidian and mundane actions invariably con-
taining new, novel yet barely recognised ingredients or elements? Despite the fact that
creativity privileges the new over the old, divergence over the standard, otherness over
sameness (Reckwitz, 2017, p. 2), the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ dichotomy can be interpreted as
somewhat misleading. This is because the former ‘lurks within everything new; the new
builds on the old, modifies it, distances itself from it. The closer one looks, the more
familiarly it stares back. Inversely, a moment of creative variation lurks within every
repetition’ (Bröckling, 2006, p. 524).
Indeed, this perception shares an affinity with Williams’ nuanced perspective on
social change and on how potent, if obscured, residues from the past impact on and
shape the contemporary world – foreclosing some possibilities, but also opening up
opportunities.

Making ‘creativity talk’

Changes within capitalism
A number of writers maintain that the contemporary fixation with creativity is connected
to material changes occurring in how capitalism operates. Important here is the shift
from a Fordist to a post-Fordist regime of capital accumulation. With its emphasis on
‘regularity and standardization’, the former regime was dominant in much of North
Garrett 25

America and Northern Europe from the end of the Second World War until the mid-
1970s (Reckwitz, 2017, p. 85). Throughout its ‘boom’ period, capitalism was perceived
within the dominant imaginary as a ‘hyper regulated rational machine’ with an emphasis
being placed on the standardisation of ‘elements (people, things, rules and habits of con-
duct)’ (Reckwitz, 2017, pp. 85–86). Moreover, the iconic figure associated with orches-
trating the smooth running of workplaces was the ‘administrator and technician’, and the
‘accompanying personality type’ it both required and helped to constitute was the ‘disci-
plined, expert, unemotional professional’ (Reckwitz, 2017, p. 85). This form of economy
and the cultural conformist imperatives it lauded were criticised by Frankfurt School
theorists, such as Horkheimer and Adorno (1947/2002) and even some political philoso-
phers, largely supportive of capitalism, such as Hannah Arendt (1958/1998).
In contrast, the current regime of capital accumulation, it has been argued, is one of
post-Fordism and ‘disorganised capitalism’ (Lash & Urry, 1987). Here factory produc-
tion is less significant and working lives become more ‘flexible’, dispersed and precari-
ous. The economy has become one of ‘aesthetic capitalism’ laying more emphasis on
creative novelty (Reckwitz, 2017, p. 2). Relatedly, employers ‘want more from employ-
ees than was typically demanded in factories of the industrial era’ and attempt to enlist
workers’ ‘creativity and their relational and affective capacities. . . . Whereas Fordism
demanded from its core workers a lifetime of compliance with work discipline, post-
Fordism also demands of many of its workers flexibility, adaptability, and continual
reinvention’ (Weeks, 2011, p. 70).
Prior to exploring this line of argument in a little more detail, a few clarifying
remarks are important. First, this dichotomy between ‘Fordist’ and ‘post-Fordist’
regimes of capital accumulation can be too schematically defined: factory labour still
exists, of course, and workers (in factories and offices) continue to be subjected to
surveillance and performance monitoring which, albeit increasingly electronically
mediated, characterised the assembly lines of Henry Ford. Moreover, the argument
that a clean break has occurred separating the two modes of capital accumulation
tends – even if it contains a measure of descriptive accuracy – to have greater explan-
atory purchase in North America and Northern Europe than it does elsewhere across
the globe. Additionally, there is a need to be careful not to imply that before the mid-
1970s, capitalism was – culturally – a wholly stultifying form of social and economic
organisation intent on eradicating creativity. As Marx noted, capitalism has always
been, even if destructively so, a creative project. For example, in a competitive mar-
ket society, new commodities constantly have to be created to attract consumers. If
consumption rates drastically fall, so does the rate of profit, and a systemic crisis is
generated. As well as coming up with new products, and ‘improving’ existing ones,
new ways to creatively lure ‘customers’ must be devised. This entails a stress on nov-
elty, ‘fantasy worlds’ and the relentless marketing of commodities and services within
affective registers offering the promise of better, more emotionally fulfilled, vital and
joyful lives (Mouffe, 2013, p. 90).
The economic and social transformations occurring since the 1970s are clearly
bound up with notions connected to creativity. Conceding the ‘idea of creativity’ was
certainly not invented during this period, Reckwitz (2017, p. 4) asserts that, until then,
it was still limited to particular ‘cultural and social niches’. However, he identifies
26 The Sociological Review 69(1)

domains in which creativity – or its purported absence – was a concern even during
the period of Fordism and, preceding that, during time when industrial capitalism was
beginning to achieve dominance. First, he refers to those, at the turn of the nineteenth
century and into the early years of the twentieth century, who bemoaned the annihila-
tion of the skills and crafts from earlier eras of slower, individualised and more crea-
tive production. In England, this strand of critique included figures such as John
Ruskin and William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. In the US, into the late
1950s, the writings of Hannah Arendt (1958/1998) similarly expressed contempt for
the labour practices characterising what she termed the ‘mass society’. Within her
conceptual paradigm, ‘work’ (not ‘labour’) was a much meaningful endeavour.
Second, Reckwitz argues that US management in the 1950s also became interested in
ideas circulating around creativity because the embedding of ‘creative practices’ was
a strategy to counteract lack of ‘motivation’ within corporate workplaces. The crea-
tive economies (fashion, advertising, design) were a third arena producing critiques
of industrial capitalism’s lack of a creative aesthetic. Fourth, was the psychological
turn to creativity in the 1950s.

‘Humanistic’ psychology
Scientific and popular psychology, psychotherapy, applied psychology, psychiatry and
psychological tests exerted a profound influence in amplifying the social and cultural
centrality of creativity. Significant here was the evolution within psychology of a ten-
dency, spilling over into other spheres of social life, to comprehend and articulate the
modern self as creative subject (Reckwitz, 2017). More generally, since the 1960s,
psychology and kindred fields of theory and practice contributed to ‘popular notions of
what it means to be a well-balanced person and lead a satisfying life’ and within this
mix of ideas creativity was increasing understood as ‘both a human default setting and
an ideal’ (Reckwitz, 2017, p 130). No longer characterising the lives of merely the
creative genius, the urge to become creative was universal and existed, albeit latently,
in everyday lives. This reasoning was very much at odds with the psychiatry that
emerged in the mid-nineteenth century that was more fixated with ‘abnormal’ forms of
‘deviant’ behaviour (Foucault, 2016). The task of the newer ‘psy professions’ was to
aid individuals to pilot their lives, albeit within the fabric of capitalism, in such a way
as to tap into potentially unlimited capacities for individual enhancement and fulfil-
ment (Rose, 1998, 1999). Intensely ideological and entirely in tune with the ambiance
of the Fordist ‘boom’, this orientation presupposed an innate ability to shape the self
and the surrounding world.
Historically, Douglas McGregor (1960) was one of the ‘earliest “architects” of the
“human resources”, “empowerment” approach’ which tried to direct individual desires
toward ‘organizational objectives’ and reconcile disgruntled employees to the unpleasant
realities of work (McRobbie, 2006, p. 106). This can also be related to the fact that one
of the major obstacles in nurturing a compliant workforce is employers’ ‘limited access
to the deepest human needs and motivations’ (Brouillette, 2013). Hence, particularly
since the period between the two World Wars, there has been a constant ‘complicated and
shifting interplay between adaptation to workers’ demands and efforts to construct and
Garrett 27

shape their needs and motivations so that they will be maximally amenable to manage-
ment’ (Brouillette, 2013). So-called ‘postmodern’ management theory, in the 1980s and
1990s, was to grapple with this quandary by stressing that creativity was an essential
element in an individual’s personal ‘brand’ (Peters, 1997).
Important, in this context, was the emergence of the psychology of ‘self-realisation’
and nostrums pivoting on ‘self-growth’. Not unreasonably, Reckwitz (2017, p. 138)
argues that the ‘significance of self-growth psychology for the transformation of the
popular vocabulary since the 1950s can hardly be overestimated’. At first a US-based
movement, ‘operating also under the names of humanistic psychology, positive psychol-
ogy and human potential movement, self-growth psychology developed the influential
model of human psyche that wants, can and should attain self-realisation, chiefly by
means of individual advice and therapy but also through education and business consul-
tation’ (Reckwitz, 2017, p. 139). Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers were key figures
(and skilful, popularising entrepreneurs) continuing to influence mainstream theory and
practice. Particularly in the 1950s, within the US, these and other writers and practition-
ers intent on promoting self-growth psychology were successfully able to occupy a niche
between ‘academic psychology, with the latter’s predominantly behaviourist bent, and
therapy-orientated psychoanalysis’ (Reckwitz, 2017, p. 139). By the early 1960s, the
movement had established its own professional association and academic journal. Later
in the decade, the fixation with ‘self-actualisation’ and ‘self-growth’ also had certain
affinities with an evolving ‘counter-culture’ because there was a shared valorisation of
volition and personal choice and a united antipathy for social conformism and social
adaptation. This further contributed to a deepening and embedding of these discourses
(Marcuse, 1999). Despite largely losing its ‘counter-cultural status’ in subsequent years,
they were to become the ‘spearhead of a new, dominant therapy practice catering broadly
to the psychologically sensitized and educated middle classes’ (Reckwitz, 2017, p. 139;
see also Furedi, 2004; Grogan, 2013; Nolan, 1998). By the mid-1970s, such ideas on the
nature of human subjectivity had achieved ‘hegemony that has continued’ into the pre-
sent day (Reckwitz, 2017, p. 139).
For Maslow (1968), for example, the ‘creative moment’ constituted one of a number
of potential ‘peak experiences’. Similarly, for the psychologist John Curtis Gowan
(1912–86), ‘failure to become creative’ was to ‘fall short of full development’ (in
Reckwitz, 2017, p. 101). Intriguingly, many within the field of humanistic psychology
were also keen to stress how the, seemingly, inherent US orientation toward creativity
could be deployed to provide a competitive edge during the Cold War. Rogers avowed
that, unlike the allegedly dreary USSR with its herds of conformists, the US required
‘freely creative original thinkers’ (in Hartley et al., 2013, p. 55). What is more, ‘interna-
tional annihilation’ would be the ‘price’ the US would ‘pay for a lack of creativity’
(Rogers, 1961, p. 349). Maslow (1965, p. 263) shared the perception that creativity was
a weapon which could be discharged against the Soviet enemy. The view of the esteemed
US psychologist was that the outcome of the Cold War would ‘tip one way or the other’
in line with the ‘human products turned out by the Russian society and the American
society’. Corporate management styles had the aim to produce a more rounded and ‘bet-
ter type of human being’. This would be good PR and might, in turn, make Americans
‘more loved, more respected, more trusted’ around the world (Maslow, 1965, p. 262).
28 The Sociological Review 69(1)

The ‘creative city’ and the ‘creative class’

Another very significant development contributing to the contemporary centrality of ‘crea-
tivity talk’ has been the evolution of urban policy and the omnipresent idea that, for cities
to succeed, they must become ‘creative cities’ committed to attracting and retaining a ‘cre-
ative class’. Such notions are largely associated with Richard Florida (2002), who, for
almost two decades, has been the primary definer and ‘cheerleader for the creative econ-
omy, advocating a business-school model comprising league tables and easily remembered
catch-phrases’ (McRobbie, 2016, p. 45). The essence of Florida’s ‘message’, now largely
hegemonic within urban planning, is that cities have to be more than merely functional, but
must vaunt a cultural vibrancy, excitement, edginess, gritty glamour and unrelenting nov-
elty. Across the western world and beyond, this has resulted in urban policies sharing the
same vision laying an emphasis on acting as magnets for a mobile ‘creative class’. This has
produced a competitive desire, amongst individual cities, to develop diverse entertain-
ments, festivals and other ‘cool’ events throughout the annual calendar to attract visitors
and to boost the cultural consumption of middle-class residents able to afford to purchase
the multifarious urban distractions (McGuigan, 2009). Despite some of the most prominent
‘creative cities’ also being some of the ‘most racially segregated’ (Leslie & Catungal, 2012,
p. 116), this heightened attention to ‘marketing’ the city can be connected to a rhetorical
inclusivity, feigned cosmopolitanism and valorisation of ‘diversity’ (McLean, 2017). Cities
‘without gays and rock bands’, opined Florida (2002, p. 15), were ‘losing the economic
development race’. Relatedly, he stressed the importance of nurturing ‘creative clusters’ of
‘start-ups’ oozing youthful, flexible and driven entrepreneurial talent, with Silicon Valley
the dominant imaginary as the ‘creative cluster par excellence’ (Mould, 2018, p. 120).
Two core criticisms can be directed at Florida. First, despite the hype which envelopes
his ideas, the lucrative fixation is not as new as his acolytes may believe. Some of his
notions are redolent of the rhetoric helping to secure the governorship of California for
Ronald Reagan in the mid-1960s. The future president of the US launched his campaign
to become state governor, in 1966, with the proposal to create a ‘Creative Society to
discover, enlist and mobilize the incredibly rich human resources of California [through]
innumerable people of creative talent’ (in Miller, 2013, p. 81). Similar comments were
made in his inaugural address as governor the following year (Reagan, 1967). Later
Reagan asserted that the ‘Creative Society’ could extinguish – what was to become a
familiar neoliberal bugbear – ‘welfare dependency’ (Reagan, 1968).
The second criticism pivots on the charge that Florida’s work is merely furnishing
neoliberal orientated ‘solutions’ to perceived urban ‘problems which actually serve to
make life worse for many people. Contributions from the US and elsewhere have illumi-
nated how policies influenced by Florida have resulted in gentrification and the de facto
expulsion of many low-income residents from inner cities and their replacements have
tended to be the dismal figure of the ‘hipster’ (McRobbie, 2016, pp. 50–51; see also
Denmead, 2019; Tissot, 2015). Processes in many cities also recall bell hooks’ (2000, p.
137) characterisation of urban renewal as a form of ‘state-orchestrated racialized class
warfare’. Furthermore, Florida has a palpable lack of interest in the inclusion/exclusion
binary within the city. Instead, he merely concentrates on how urban spaces can be
‘cleaned up’ and repopulated by ‘healthy, youthful-looking and self-reliant citizens’
Garrett 29

(McRobbie, 2016 p. 50; see also Denmead, 2019). However, this is a very partial evoca-
tion of the neoliberal urban environment ignoring coercive ‘tough on crime’ and ‘zero
tolerance’ policies targeted at marginalised groups (Wacquant, 2009). One illustration of
this dynamic was provided during the summer of 2019 when Cardiff – self-proclaimed
‘creative city’ and host of the ‘Creative Cities’ 2019 convention – set about the forced
‘removal’ of camps set up by the homeless (Marsh & Greenfield, 2019).
A coruscating critique of Florida’s oeuvre has been furnished by Peck (2005, p. 740),
who lambasts this ‘new credo of creativity’. Whilst acknowledging the impact of
Florida’s work, it is maintained that the ‘irreverent, informal, sometimes preachy, but
business-friendly style is in many ways a familiar one, echoing as it does the lifestyle
guides, entrepreneurial manuals, and pop sociologies’ of the neoliberal period (Peck,
2005, p. 741). Unsurprisingly, therefore, Florida largely neglects issues rooted in struc-
tural inequality and prefers to advocate for a form of ‘creative trickle-down, with the
lumpen classes of noncreatives eventually learning what the overclass has already fig-
ured out, that “there is no corporation or other large institution that will take care of us
– that we are truly on our own”’ (Peck, 2005, p. 759).
Leslie and Catungal (2012, p. 115) dwell critically on the neoliberal assumption
underpinning the whole ‘creative class’ literature, implying an ‘unparalleled mobility
amongst workers’. Such reasoning is deeply flawed because – particularly given the
contemporary and racialised emphasis placed on immigration and border policing –
‘uneven geographies of mobility’ are still materially significant (Leslie & Catungal,
2012, p. 115). They conclude that assuming ‘otherwise suggests a problematic post-
racial and post-national construction of the mobile creative free agent. It still matters
where engineers, architects and other creative workers come from, since their mobility is
tempered by increased controls over national borders’ (Leslie & Catungal, 2012, p. 115).
Issues pertaining to mobility are also, of course, gendered in that women tend, more than
men, to be tethered to a particular place because of the dynamics of social reproduction
and associated responsibilities related to caring for others (McLean, 2014).
Despite such criticisms, this constellation of factors, related to changing patterns of
capitalist accumulation, humanistic psychology and the ‘creative city’/‘creative class’,
helped to shape new hegemonic and ‘common sense’ understandings (Crehan, 2016). It
will be suggested, in what follows, that there may be four, even more specific, types of
‘creativity talk’ currently constituting engagement with the theme.

Creativity and contemporary ‘common sense’

Austere creativity
A survey of over 1000 social workers by the UK trade union UNISON (2019) high-
lighted the fact that many are no longer able to do their jobs effectively because the years
of cuts have produced a deep crisis in the sector. The survey found that an overwhelming
proportion (95%) felt they could not adequately perform their jobs due to the combined
effects of reduced services and the social conditions created by ‘austerity’. More than
nine in ten (92%) stated that budget cuts had resulted in plummeting staff morale.
However, at the core of austere creativity is the assertion that social services, charities
30 The Sociological Review 69(1)

and other third sector institutions are failing not because their funding has been drasti-
cally cut, but because they are insufficiently creative (Mould, 2018).
Shifting attention away from the deleterious impact of budget cuts on these organisa-
tions, the cynically instrumental emphasis is on the shortcomings and lack of imaginative
and innovatory activity amongst staff. In this sense, creativity is the necessary response to
dealing with shortages and the enforced rationing of resources. Implicitly, this discourse
functions as an interpellation aiming to summon forth a worker endowed with particular
attributes: one who is an ‘innovative’ fixer of problems, ‘flexible’, willing to uncritically
embrace ‘change’, personally resourceful and creatively committed to plugging ‘gaps’ in
welfare state provision. The ‘trick’ of austere creativity is to ‘convince us that you can
only be creative by looking to your own agency. . . . Any semblance of the social has col-
lapsed into and onto the individual’ (Mould, 2018, p. 61). On account of this framing,
creativity is ‘stripped of any oppositional or transgressive aspects’ (Forkett, 2016, p. 11).
Since the 2007/8 ‘crash’ there are countless instances of this form of ‘creativity talk’
being put to work. For example, in the UK, food bank use is up almost ‘four-fold since
2012, and there are now about 2,000 . . . up from just 29 at the height of the financial
crisis’ (Alston, 2018, p. 17). Food hunger now stalks the streets of ‘first world’ countries.
In the US, in 2016, 15.6 million households (12.3% of households) were food insecure
(United States Department of Agriculture [USDA], 2016). However, why this situation
has arisen is discursively and ideologically marginalised when food banks are encour-
aged to simply ‘Get Creative’ in order to respond to this politically and economically
generated human catastrophe (Move for Hunger, 2016).
Another example relating to the deployment of this variant of ‘creativity talk’ con-
cerns public libraries, which were formerly accessible and not subject to charging poli-
cies. They also furnished congenial social locations enabling users to read books they
could not afford to purchase and gain access to the Internet. However, given the embed-
dedness of neoliberal reasoning, public libraries have been subjected to severe financial
retrenchment. In the UK, between ‘2010 and 2016 more than 340 libraries closed and
8,000 library jobs were lost’ (Alston, 2008, p. 13). This is the material context in which,
moreover, austere creativity discourse proposes that public libraries should be run as
enterprises by creative and enthusiastic volunteers (Forkett, 2016).

Liberatory creativity
This strand of ‘creativity talk’ orbits the central idea that the public sector is irredeema-
bly blighted by stultifying work and fails to satisfy human beings’ desire for fulfilment
and self-actualisation. Only one way exists for this to be achieved and it entails leaving
‘rigid’, ‘inflexible’ public sector ‘bureaucracies’ to finding employment in the private
and quasi-private sectors: the bird must flee the rusty ‘iron cage’ and, in this sense, this
particular variant of creativity discourse can be interpreted as a neoliberal fable. It can
also be perceived as an ideology only serving to promote an ‘unworkable fantasy’ and
can be viewed as a facet of what Berlant (2007, p. 300) refers to as ‘cruel optimism’,
because this creative freedom is largely unachievable, for most of us. In a US context,
Denmead (2019, p. 2), for example, has illuminated the duplicity lying at the core of
urban discourses that narrate the ease of the transition from ‘troubled youth’ to ‘creative
Garrett 31

youth’. More generally, despite the relentlessly upbeat vibe of ‘creativity talk’, the pre-
vailing institutionalised social order remains one which has a ‘systematic tendency to
create unsatisfying work’ (Bellamy Foster, 1998, p. ix).
The intensely ideological assertion that the private sector, never presented as one of
precarious working and insecure employment, can provide an escape route into more
creative practice does not tend to be embellished with compelling supportive evidence.
What is more, liberatory creativity is a component nested within a narrative crudely
seeking to siphon off and deflect leftist and libertarian oppositional critiques of the wel-
fare state and public sector arising from the late 1960s and into the 1970s (Forkett, 2016).
One of the more sustained theoretical explorations of this dynamic in recent years is that
of Boltanski and Chiapello (2005), who highlighted how capital continually attempts to
appropriate creativity and vibrant lifeworld elements it lacks in order to try and bolster
and legitimise its own dominance. It also needs, as Fleming (2009, p. 5) observes, to nul-
lify any potentially ‘dangerous counter-logic to its own axiomatic principles’. Boltanski
and Chiapello (2005) revealed that contemporary private sector management literature
– often rooted in a lexicon including words such as autonomy, spontaneity, excitement,
openness, novelty and, of course, creativity – seeks to conjure a ‘new spirit’ ‘taken
directly from the repertoire of May 1968’. In this context, job security – associated with
status, hierarchy, bureaucracy – is denounced not only as an obstacle to capital accumu-
lation; it also functions as a barrier stopping workers from transforming themselves into
truly human and self-actualised. Only within the private and quasi-private sectors, do
workers have the opportunity of becoming members of the ‘creative class’.
The emphasis on public sector social work, for example, as a potentially creative pro-
fession needing to free itself from the dead hand of state ‘bureaucracy’ is apparent in a
number of quarters even if this message is not always explicitly conveyed. Creativity –
along with its collocates such as ‘empowerment’ and ‘liberation’ – tap into the profes-
sion’s root values in order to try and shape new subjectivities (International Federation of
Social Workers [IFSW], 2014). This discourse also feeds on the ambiance of the ‘libera-
tion management’ of the early 1990s which flirted with a ‘peculiar kind of anti-authoritar-
ianism’ (Fleming, 2009, p. 3). An example of how liberatory creativity functions is the
literature on social work practices (SWPs). Crafted to replace public provision for ‘looked
after’ children, these private and quasi-private structures were presented as an unequivo-
cally better alternative. Thus, keywords constituting part of the legitimating apparatus for
SWPs (included in, for example, Le Grand [2007] and other parts of the promotional lit-
erature) featured reference to the opportunities provided for practitioners to have ‘auton-
omy’, to be a ‘champion’, ‘committed’, ‘creative’, ‘entrepreneurial’, ‘free’, ‘independence’,
etc. In contrast, working alongside children and families in the public sector was por-
trayed by a dismal cluster of keywords such as ‘bureaucracy’ and ‘bureaucratic control’,
‘burn-out’, ‘crisis situations’, ‘depersonalisation’, ‘deprofessionalisation’, ‘high case-
loads’, ‘job dissatisfaction’, ‘managerial control’, ‘paperwork’ and ‘stress’.

Analgesic creativity
Emerging in recent years, what I am terming analgesic creativity posits the idea that crea-
tivity and creative endeavours – perhaps like voguish ‘mindfulness’ training in Kinman
32 The Sociological Review 69(1)

et al. (2019) – might function as a painkiller or even form of preventive health care for
jaded neoliberal subjects. Although rather vague in respect of the precise dosage needing
to be calibrated, the BBC (2019) reported that even ‘a small amount of creativity can
help’ all of us cope with what is ambiguously referred to as ‘modern life’. Hence, the
onus was on individuals to ‘Get Creative’. The same report stated that, in May 2019, a
study of almost 50,000 people undertaken in partnership with the prestigious University
College London was to begin to find out how ‘creative activities can help us manage our
mood and boost wellbeing’. The ‘Great British Creativity Test’ emphatically revealed
that there were three main ways we can ‘use creativity as coping mechanisms to control
our emotions’; namely as: a distraction tool (using creativity to avoid stress); a contem-
plation tool (using creativity to give us the mind space to reassess problems in our lives
and make plans); and a means of self-development to face challenges by building up
self-esteem and confidence (BBC, 2019). More generally, when ‘we’re facing hardships
in our lives, creative activities are particularly beneficial for our emotions’ (BBC, 2019).
Despite recourse to creative practice having some utility for particular individuals, it is
unlikely to substantially counter the plethora of anxieties engendered by the institutional
order nurtured by neoliberal capitalism (Taylor, 2014). For example, transformations
impacting on the world of work have resulted in an array of interrelated – and avoidable
– ailments including ‘exhaustion, burn-out, alcohol and drug-related problems, premature
heart attacks and strokes, and a whole host of mental and emotional problems related to
anxiety and depression’ (Gill & Pratt, 2008, p. 18). Not infrequently, mental health prob-
lems are also gendered, with one report on the impact of ‘austerity’ by the Liverpool
Mental Health Consortium (2014, p. 27) highlighting that its women respondents were
having to deal with ‘sleeplessness, stress, anxiety, worry, depression, and feeling over-
whelmed, isolated and suicidal’. It is difficult to comprehend, therefore, how merely ‘get-
ting creative’ can adequately address the mass psycho-pathologies rooted in toxic forms
of contemporary neoliberal subjectivity (BBC, 2013; Birardi, 2009).

Dissenting creativity
Marx (1857–8/1981, p. 611) avowed that individuals can find ‘self-realisation’ and ‘real
freedom’ in work. Here, the main obstacle is that, under capitalist conditions, work prac-
tices become alienating, cheapened, de-skilled and subject to intensified modes of sur-
veillance and ‘performance management’. As the ‘repulsiveness of the work increases,
the wage decreases’ or wages fail to keep up with the rise in prices for essential com-
modities such as food (Marx & Engels, 1848/2017, p. 18). More fundamentally, forced
to furnish labour power, the worker ‘surrenders . . . creative power . . . for a mess of
pottage’ (Marx, 1857–8/1981, p. 307). Under this system of exploitation, the worker
‘impoverishes’ her/his self because the ‘creative power’ of labour ‘establishes itself as
the power of capital, as an alien power’ (Marx, 1857–8/1981, p. 307).
This tendency is inherent to capitalism and its deleterious impact can be seen, beyond
traditional blue-collar labour, across a range of professions. Given this set of circum-
stances, are the possibilities for creativity entirely extinguished within the workplace?
Acknowledging the ‘constraints of a neoliberal market driven economy’, some human
services educators detect that practitioners and pedagogues are, nonetheless, ‘able to find
Garrett 33

places and spaces to exercise diverse ways to innovate and create’ (Maidment et al.,
2016, p. 1). Indeed, Bourdieu referred to a paradoxical situation in which the ‘rigidity’ of
neoliberal bureaucratic institutions is such that it can ‘only function . . . thanks to the
initiative, the inventiveness, if not the charisma of those functionaries who are the least
imprisoned in their function’ (Bourdieu in Bourdieu et al., 2002, p. 191).
Dissenting creativity can be theorised in a number of ways. For example, Jacques
Rancière (2012, p. 8) charted historical efforts by individual workers to find the time to
be creative and to ‘dream of another kind of work’. Within the Marxist tradition,
Autonomist Marxism placed emphasis not so much on the power of capital as on the
‘autonomy and creativity of labour, and labour’s power to bring about change’ (Gill &
Pratt, 2008, p. 5). In this sense, autonomy refers to the collective capacity of workers to
resist capital’s hierarchy of value rooted in the production of surplus value and to act
outside this stultifying imperative. Within this overarching conceptualisation, the stress
is on combating a system entirely constructed on the subordination of life to work and
the ‘alienation of creative capacities’ (Weeks, 2011, p. 97). In order to promote this type
of society, one tactic promoted is ‘engaged withdrawal’ (Virno, 1996, p. 196, original
emphasis). This involves dissidents embarking on generative ‘lines of flight’ so as to cre-
ate and nurture autonomous spaces in which people can arrive at a sense of worth and
self-valorisation as an alternative to capitalist valorisation (Virno, 1996, p. 203; see also
Turner, 2004). In more contemporary terms, this can occur when, for example, public
sector workers and students collectively organise carnivalistic demonstrations opposing
attempts to cut wages (Cuskelly et al., 2014; Trade Union TV, 2014).

Conclusion
Influenced by Williams, this article has suggested that the emergence of contemporary
ideas about creativity are inseparable from material shifts taking place with capitalism,
the ascendancy of humanistic psychology and, more recently, the popularity of the ‘crea-
tive city’/‘creative class’ discourses. Turning to ‘creativity talk’, it was suggested that
four strands are significant: austere creativity; liberatory creativity; analgesic creativity;
and dissenting creativity. The first three have a certain affinity in that each of them can
be interpreted as constituting part of a wider and politically distracting ‘screen discourse’
deflecting attention from issues related to capitalism, economic exploitation and a dif-
ferential distribution of power (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 2001, p. 4). Following Gramsci,
these three components of creativity rhetoric might also be viewed as ‘artillery’ being
used in a ‘war of position’ aiming to incrementally dismantle the social democratic state
and to extinguish movements aiming to defend it (Hoare & Nowell Smith, 2005). For
example, it has been posited that ‘creative education in social work’ can counter a, seem-
ingly, misguided commitment to ‘social justice and social action’ on many training
courses (Wise, 2018).
With dissenting creativity, however, it may be possible to identify the contours of
projects aspiring to genuinely break free from the logics, imperatives and governing
rationality of neoliberal capitalism (Mouffe, 2013, Ch. 5). This may be feasible because
creativity can be perceived, to ‘varying degrees’ as one of those keywords into which
‘different sets of actors can pour multifarious meanings, from the hegemonic to the
34 The Sociological Review 69(1)

counter-hegemonic’ (Eagleton-Pierce, 2016, p. 144). Indeed, the persistent call for all us
to become more creative might harbour a socially progressive dimension that might
prompt real transformations. Expressed slightly differently, ‘articulations of creativity’
can, perhaps, become ‘separable from capital’ (Brouillette, 2013). The key question
remains this: how can oppositional, dissenting and imaginative creative practices be
shaped and enacted to help challenge neoliberal capitalism?

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

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