Three Pathways of the Creative Process: How Cognition, Interaction, and Relationships Facilitate Culture Creation in Songwriting Teams
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing on over three years of ethnographic data from the everyday activities of Toronto-based songwriters, I advance three sociological contributions to scholarship on creativity and cultural production. First, I develop a microsociological framework to explain how social interactions enhance cognitive processes that drive the creative process forward. Second, I conceptualize the social skills that enhance songwriters’ capacity to generate cultural objects in social occasions. And third, I specify future coordination as an important dimension of creative work and theorize how the projected futures of social relationships influence whether songwriters disseminate their creative works to mass audiences or not.Seriously considering mundane dimensions of creativity demystifies it as a topic of sociological analysis and helps social scientists understand creativity more fully. My data from songwriting sessions enables me to identify routine, mundane, but significant social processes that are essential to culture-in-the-making in the abstract. By taking up the microsociological approach to data collection, analysis, and theorizing, this dissertation demonstrates that social encounters and social relationships are not simple contextualizing factors for creativity and creative action. Instead, some creative actions can only be accomplished through sustained group focus, a social encounter, and relationship management. By exploring how groups of creators outside of formal organizations of cultural production do creative action and culture creation, this dissertation contributes to better understanding the social dimensions of creativity. Taken together, the arguments advanced throughout the dissertation suggest that the mainstream sociological definition of creative action should be expanded to accommodate for varying degrees of intentionality and happenstance resulting from social interaction, social occasions, and social relationships.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".