Theorising context in psychology: The case of creativity

Context: A definitional problem

Problems around theorising context are primarily of two kinds: conceptual and methodological (Anderman & Anderman, 2000). The first relate to building a theory of context within psychology, the second concern the measurement and analysis of contextual factors. Indeed, these two issues are interconnected and they both stem from a more basic, definitional difficulty. Despite current enthusiasm for the study of context, this difficulty is so great that scholars like Goodwin and Duranti (1992) stated in Rethinking Context that “it does not seem possible at the present time to give a single, precise, technical definition of context, and eventually we might have to accept that such a definition may not be possible” (p. 2). This is not necessarily a fatalistic approach but reflects the authors’ belief that the lack of a unifying formal definition can actually foster productive efforts to unpack the ways in which contexts “work” in practice.

A further complication arises from the proliferation of notions that partially overlap in meaning, such as context, environment, situation, activity, practice, etc. (see also Cole, 1995). Clitheroe et al. (1998) tried to differentiate in their article the terms context, environment, behaviour setting, and situation, despite acknowledging some conceptual overlaps. In their view, environments denote the relatively stable qualities of the physical and social surroundings of individuals or groups. Behaviour setting and situation, on the other hand, refer to more dynamic relationships between individuals and their setting, more (for the former) or less structured (for the latter) person–environment interactions. Context is different from the above in that it reflects “a particular kind of interdependence that exists between selected aspects of a given environment, setting, or situation” (p. 105). In other words, unlike the “non-specificity” of an environment, a context is defined as the particular set of personal, physical, and social aspects that come into play in the form of contextual factors and have an impact on focal variables (those immediately shaping behaviour). This approach restricts contexts to a system of “external” variables and, from this perspective, is opposed to the meaning I am proposing below.

To understand context, I argue here, one needs to consider the simultaneous temporal and spatial dynamics of psychological phenomena. The context of psychological functions and action in the world is fundamentally structured by the spatiotemporal continuum in ways that make space and time co-constitutive of psychological phenomena and not “outside” elements added to our psychology. From this perspective, therefore, context is an integral part of the types of phenomena we are preoccupied with in psychology and makes them at once possible and intelligible. Conversely, acontextual understandings of psychological life consider it independent of time and space, existing “within” the presumably atemporal and aspatial universe of the psychic or the mind. The choice of defining contexts in terms of time and space dimensions is not unique. Bamberger (2008), analysing existing definitions of context, considered “how particular environmental factors may serve as temporal and/or spatial boundary conditions governing observed phenomena” (p. 840). Clitheroe et al. (1998, p. 105) mention the socio-physical-temporal settings in which interactions and behaviours occur, while Adams and Marshall (1996, p. 437) focus the developmental contextualist perspective on identity on processes taking place within social, physical, and economic contexts.

But what exactly is context as time and space? Temporally one can distinguish between different perspectives, from microgenetic and ontogenetic to sociogenetic and phylogenetic. Spatially, we can imagine the “extent” of our activities engaging first our bodies, then objects in the outside world, the network of social relations, and the institutional and cultural arrangements that saturate everyday interactions for individuals, groups, and entire communities. Two key arguments are developed here in relation to these contextual “dimensions.” First, all people, at all times, function within contexts that are simultaneously defined by their temporality and spatiality. Second, any distinctions operated within the temporal or spatial element (such as those between micro-, onto-, and sociogenetic time scales or between physical and social spaces) are only made for analytical purposes. In essence, these analytically constructed “forms” of temporality and spatiality exist all at once for any individual or psychological phenomenon. Contexts are, therefore, extended in both time and space infinitely, which doesn’t mean, of course, that we are equally impacted by or should always investigate all their elements or “levels.” Indeed, it is often more practical for researchers to look at situations which, in contrast, appear as patterned aspects of a given context. For instance, one’s situation differs when being at home compared to being at work, in each case the context changing its immediate characteristics and presenting, both in terms of time and space, a certain regularity specific for a given environment.

One of the main claims put forward in this article is the fact that contexts, defined in spatiotemporal terms, are constitutive of any psychological or behaviour expression. As such, context is not on the outside of the kind of functions and activities studied by psychologists, existing as a set of external variables that have the power to shape their manifestation, but is integral to these phenomena. Focusing one’s attention, in research or in everyday life situations, on one particular aspect of this totality and making it our focal point—thus placing elements that appear “external” in the background—should not blind us to the fact that there is no sharp boundary in the relation between self and world, between psychological function and environment, between what we consider to be a phenomenon and its context. This is why definitions of contexts conceiving them as “surroundings associated with phenomena which help to illuminate that phenomena” (Cappelli & Sherer, 1991, p. 56) can be misleading. Context does not only illuminate, it participates in psychological phenomena for the simple reason that the latter exist and “expand” in both time (by being dynamic and developmental) and space (by materialising, relating to a multitude of actors, objects, and institutional forms). Context is also more than simply “situational opportunities and constraints that affect the occurrence and meaning of … behaviour as well as functional relationships between variables” (Johns, 2006, p. 386). While some aspects of particular situations can indeed be more or less conducive for a certain course of action, the context of action is part of action itself. In the words of Bateson (1972), “action [is] part of the ecological subsystem called context and not … the product or effect of what remains of the context after the piece which we want to explain has been cut out from it” (p. 338).

Michael Cole (1995, 1996) clearly captured this difference between context being “outside” or “inside” (or, better said, simultaneously “inside” and “outside” since this dichotomy doesn’t hold in the relational account proposed here) when he referred to “context as that which surrounds” versus “context as that which weaves things together.” In the first case, context tends to be depicted in terms of a set of concentric circles revealing multiple, nested levels. As Cole acknowledges, this type of thinking is specific for a top-down approach that tells us little about dynamic relationships and continuities, and considers context as influence, a stimulus or cause. In contrast, if context weaves things together (an understanding stemming from the Latin origin of the term), a more intimate connection is established between context and psychological events. Some interesting theoretical perspectives have emerged that try to incorporate these two ways of conceptualising context. For instance, Wapner (2000; also Saari, 1992) discusses at length the person-in-environment framework. According to this holistic conception, development is not restricted to ontogenesis, but encompasses phylo-, micro-, patho-, and ethnogenesis. Also, as a system-centred view, the person-in-environment model focuses on different aspects of the person (physical, intraspsychological, and sociocultural) as well as the environment (physical, interpersonal, and sociocultural) and aims to establish links between the two. While sensitive to relations between “components,” the mere fact of breaking down both person and environment into smaller units has the potential to reinforce separation into distinct levels of analysis rather than reconstructing the continuity between these levels.

A final aspect to consider regarding the depiction of context in psychological theory concerns its “objective” versus “subjective” status. For example, when discussing linguistics, van Dijk (1999) stated that, “strictly speaking, contexts do not directly influence discourse or language use at all. Rather, it is the subjective interpretation of the context by discourse participants that constrains discourse production, structuration, and understanding” (p. 124). If we take this argument to the extreme, context can be reduced to perception and has no ontological reality outside of the perceiving mind of the subject. From this standpoint, people construct mental models of different contexts based on subjective interpretations and store them in episodic memory. Needless to say, this claim is not supported by my understanding of what context is. The concurrent temporality and spatiality of psychological phenomena and human action are not artefacts of perception or of cognitive models; they are fundamentally involved in the construction of any form of psychological expression, including the perception of and cognitive reflection on one’s environment. In summary, context is not a subjective entity, nor is it something material and objective outside the person. As any psychological function is necessarily distributed in both time and space, and not “trapped” inside the “mind,” context transcends traditional internal–external, subjective–objective divisions and emerges as the main focus of psychological research. How this is actually achieved and what are the difficulties of adopting this whole as an analytical unit is explained with the help of a case study.

From “flat” to “3-D”: Theorising in creativity research

What I tried to establish above is the fact that psychological phenomena and their spatiotemporal context constitute a totality and distinguishing a focal point or list of constituents within it is an analytical step to be done only with reference to the bigger whole. As this whole extends in both space and time it is indeed difficult to perceive its multitude of facets and relations but this should not stop scholars from theorising phenomena in a contextual manner, that is, making reference to all three interdependent dimensions of the psychological, the temporal, and the spatial. This type of “3-D” theorising is yet to be accomplished, especially in the field of creativity studies, where “flat”/one-dimensional theoretical models (purely intra-psychological) and “2-D” depictions (engaging only with the spatial or the temporal dimension) are still exceedingly common. Why should we be preoccupied with creativity in particular? First of all because this is an excellent example of a psychological phenomenon that has, for a long time, been associated with “internal” elements (genes, intellectual eminence, unique personality, special types of pathology, etc.) and, mainly since the 1980s, started to engage more seriously with the “outside” (with environmental influences, social interaction, relation to the material support, etc.; Amabile, 1996; Hennessey, 2003). Even in these cases, the conceptualisation of context is primarily the one illustrated before: a set of external variables that occasionally come into play and shape intra-psychological creative processes and their outcome. Second, using creativity research as an illustration we can unpack, at a practical level, the phenomenon-context unit proposed here and, towards the end, consider both the challenges and the opportunities for a truly contextual theory of creativity in psychology.

One of the best examples of what I call here “flat” or acontextual theorising relates to the classic definition of creativity in terms of purely cognitive processes such as divergent thinking. While it is clearly acknowledged that divergent thinking is not synonymous with the whole of creativity (Runco, 2012), this basic understanding has been most fertile for creativity researchers who, in the decades following 1950 (when Guilford urged psychologists to consider creativity and the possibility of educating it; see Guilford, 1950), used this primary definition to construct psychometric tools that are widely employed to this day (e.g., The Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking). To appreciate what qualifies this theoretical perspective as a largely decontextualised view of creativity we need to raise the question of which temporal and spatial dimensions of the phenomenon are under investigation. More specifically, how does divergent thinking or ideation take into account the expression of creativity over time and its relation to socio-material-aspects? Although admittedly divergent thinking tests have been used to investigate creative expression at different ages and in different professional domains and cultures (e.g., James & Asmus, 2000; Milgram & Milgram, 1978; Plucker, 1999), the very association between creativity and a (almost singular) cognitive mechanism is questionable. To consider divergent thinking or other similar processes as part of a creativity-relevant set of skills (Amabile, 1996), aiding creative production independent of domain, contributes to eliminating contextual elements from the equation of creativity. Simply put, divergent thinking supports creativity in interaction with other intra-psychological processes and largely independent of time, place, and other individual characteristics (e.g., age, education, culture, profession, etc.). This conception and its associated psychometric devices require testing large samples of people (usually students), but shows little concern for who the participants are and what contextual elements differentiate between them; it simply assumes the universality of the process and its relation to actual creative work.

Other more elaborate cognitive models tend to include similar descriptions. For instance the Geneplore model (Ward, Smith, & Finke, 1999) asserts that creativity involves the interplay between generative and exploratory processes. The initial, generative part, produces candidate ideas, meaning ideas that have the potential to turn into creative outcomes, while the subsequent, exploratory part, “tests” the validity and usefulness of these preinventive structures. While the interchange between these two phases does include a minimal temporal element, at least at a microgenetic level, there is almost no “spatiality” in the Geneplore model, nothing to take the creative process “outside” the mind of the individual creator. This is because preinventive structures consist of symbolic visual patterns and diagrams, mental blends of basic concepts, exemplars of novel categories, mental models, verbal combinations, etc., while remaining silent about the materiality of creative outcomes and the fact that both idea generation and exploration require, most of the time, physical engagement with different kinds of artefacts.

A similar “flatness” in theorising is also found in attempts to associate creativity not with cognitive processes but with certain personality traits. The basic assumption is similar: if an individual possesses the “right” type of personality structure (established through research conducted on both regular and highly creative people), then he or she is potentially expected to perform creatively outside of the testing situation. There is little concern for the ontogenetic development of such traits (as testing is usually done with adults) or the sociogenetic context of a personality profile (for instance, a trait like openness to experience might be encouraged in many societies today but this does not apply to all historical times and geocultural locations). Once more, the spatiotemporality of creativity is restricted. For Feist (2012), the functional model of the creative personality starts from genetic factors and brain characteristics which impact, in turn, cognitive, social, motivational-affective, and clinical traits favourable for creative thought or behaviour. While there is a reference here to the social world, the focus remains on individual psychological characteristics. Indeed, authors like Feist (1998) were concerned with the difference in personality profiles between artists and scientists and this reveals an effort to contextualise the personality approach but, overall, both (strictly) cognitive and personality accounts of creativity remain theoretically “flat” through their focus on the psychological cut off from the spatiotemporal.

These approaches have come under severe criticism in the psychology of creativity especially from scholars concerned with the social, educational, and organisational aspects of this phenomenon. Among them, the effort to “socialise” creativity has been championed by Teresa Amabile (1996) who initiated, together with her collaborators, an ample programme of research to establish the social psychology of creativity. Her focus on the effect of social factors (such as rewards, evaluation, etc.) on task motivation and, in particular, her conclusion that the social environment can impact creative production by influencing intrinsic motivation, have contributed to broadening the inside-the-mind picture of creativity referred to above. However, in terms of the contextual dimensions I am concerned with here, this theory offers a “2-D” depiction of the phenomenon, “extending” it from individual to the level of social interaction but not engaging significantly with the time dimension or even with social aspects beyond the restricted universe of interpersonal relations (or, in other work, of relations at the workplace; Amabile, 1993). On the whole, the “macro” societal and historical aspects of creativity are more frequently present in the work of Keith Dean Simonton, another pioneer of the social approach to creative work. Simonton has published extensively in the past decades on the contextual factors that favour the emergence of creative geniuses, with a particular focus on social and political variables (e.g., Simonton, 1975, 1976). His historiometric method involves selecting well-known creators by following different indices of social recognition and relating their emergence and performance with societal events, thus capturing the elements of the Zeitgeist that mark creative expression in particular periods and geographical locations. Despite its clear interest in context, this approach fails to be fully contextual by not being able to account for the more “immediate” or mundane spatiotemporal aspects of creation, including the creator’s own experience of his or her environment.

If both Amabile and Simonton’s studies reveal important aspects concerning the social dynamic of creativity and therefore its spatial “extension” into the area of interpersonal and societal relations, the temporal aspect, particularly at an ontogenetic level, is better captured by developmental research. In fact, a clear interest in children and particularly what happens to children’s creativity and how it can be encouraged from an early age, has been a central preoccupation for psychologists, including Guilford (1950). A consistent body of research has been dedicated since then to understanding the trajectory of creative expression in childhood—again assessed mainly by using divergent thinking tasks—and it produced one of the best known findings in the creativity literature, evidence for the “fourth grade slump.” Documented extensively by Torrance and evaluated by subsequent generations of researchers (Plucker, 1999; Torrance, 1965), this slump in creative expression during the fourth grade is mainly explained in cognitive and social terms (from changes in cognition to new types of social relations). Seemingly connecting temporal (age and stage of sociocognitive development) and spatial elements (the school environment and its characteristics), this type of research doesn’t achieve a full contextualisation of the phenomenon because it largely ignores temporal scales other than the ontogenetic one (e.g., the microgenetic or moment-to-moment expression of creativity), and fails to see the continuities between school and other environments children traverse in their daily life.

While critiquing several important strands in the existing literature on creativity for not having developed a more comprehensive, “3-D” vision of the creative process, there are some theories within the psychology of creativity that are close to achieving this aim. They are largely considered “systemic models” and start from the premise that it is not an individual alone doing the creating, but an individual in interaction with the social field and cultural domain of the creation. Csikszentmihalyi (1988) championed this direction of research by proposing the basic triad of individual-field-domain and therefore challenging purely individualistic and psychological accounts of creativity. The systemic view emphasises “spatiality” by stressing the role of acquiring knowledge within a domain of culture and interacting with gatekeepers of this domain in order to promote one’s creative product. At the same time, other systemic thinkers like Gruber developed this model by emphasising its temporality. In his evolving systems approach, Gruber (2005) highlights the fact that creators, their productions, and the social systems they are part of, are all dynamic realities and that an adequate understanding of creative work can only be achieved by taking temporal and spatial elements into account in the study of how people create. Both Csikszentmihalyi and Gruber develop therefore more inclusive frameworks for understanding creativity but even these theoretical models have their own limitations. For instance, it is the case that a systemic perspective is typically used to unpack high-level or historical creativity and has not been applied to more mundane forms of creation (since everyday life creativity misses the kind of social recognition and contribution to established domains implied by these models).

Drawing inspiration from the “three-dimensionality” of system theories, as well as sociocultural scholarship, a new perspective on creativity in psychology defined as the cultural approach (Glăveanu, 2010; Sawyer, 1995) strives to fundamentally contextualise creative expression by pointing to its simultaneous psychological, social, and material nature and considering it in its temporal evolution. A novel framework within this orientation will be discussed as follows in order to show: (a) how context can be effectively incorporated into creativity theory and (b) what are the kinds of questions and directions of research that lead us to a further contextualisation.

The five As of creativity: Aiming for a bigger picture

Cultural psychology is a branch of psychology that concerns itself with theorising context, in particular, culture as the context for human development and action (Cole, 1996). Scholars working in this tradition are keen on emphasising the interdependence between person and environment, between self and other, action and its context (Shweder, 1990; Valsiner & Rosa, 2007). Consequently, the cultural psychology of creativity is defined by its vision of creative work as a relational process, taking place between creators and audiences, and engaging existing cultural artefacts in order to generate new artefacts. Cultural psychology proposes a “radical” contextualisation of creativity. Without denying the role of individuals and their set of traits (cognitive, motivational, personality, etc.) in creative production, it considers people in a broader (temporal and spatial) context. For example, mainstream creativity research typically uses as a conceptual organiser a typology proposed by Rhodes (1961) distinguishing between person, process, product, and press. These four Ps of creativity were recently reformulated from a sociocultural perspective into five As: actor, audience, action, affordances, and artefacts (Glăveanu, 2013b). This proposal goes beyond a simple rewriting of the language of creativity and achieves, on the one hand, to articulate a cohesive system of elements (unlike the rather disjointed four Ps description) and, on the other, to expand the equation of creativity in its psychological, temporal, and sociomaterial dimension. In order to understand how this becomes possible, let’s consider the five elements in turn.

The creative person in the five As cultural framework of creativity is not an isolated individual but takes the form of an “expanded” actor, a centre of creativity that is distributed both temporally and spatially (Glăveanu, 2014). Unlike the personality or cognition approaches that consider people in a static, adevelopmental manner, creators are here conceptualised as evolving agents who follow a certain life trajectory, experience change over time, and who function as part of extensive social networks. The spatiality of creation rarely enters considerations of the creative person, and yet, as actors, creative people exist fundamentally in a sociocultural universe and their work is, at all times, an achievement of some form of collaboration and division of labour (Barron, 1999; Becker, 2008). The multiplicity of creative actors is well documented in science where creativity is located at the level of teams more often than particular individuals (Schaffer, 1994). A similar case can be argued for other domains, including the arts and certainly the domain of everyday life creativity. The effort to “expand” actors and take creativity outside the exclusive realm of cognition, personality, or even psychopathology, requires us to acknowledge the fact that the person doing the creating is not only mind but also body. The material features of creativity have seldom been studied so far, particularly its embodiment. Moreover, what exactly are the boundaries of this body? As Bateson (1972) noticed, “there are lots of message pathways outside the skin, and these and the messages they carry must be included as a part of the mental system whenever they are relevant” (p. 459). His interesting example of the blind man using his stick as an actual continuation of his body raises the question of how creators use tools in creative work. What is the actual “limit” of the individual doing the creating? The brain, the body, the tools one uses, the books one reads, the group one is part of?

Similar questions arise when considering creative action, the “contextual” equivalent of the (usually intra-psychological) creative process. An action perspective on creativity has the quality of articulating psychological elements (like cognitions, motives, emotions, etc.) with their behavioural counterpart and situating creativity within physical and social environments (Glăveanu, 2013a). Unlike processes (for instance, divergent thinking), action/activity presupposes a type of externalisation, of engagement with others and with objects. Defining creativity as action achieves not only giving it a clear temporal dimension (just as is the case of process), but also a spatial extension into the sociomaterial aspects of one’s environment (Tanggaard, 2013). For cultural psychologists interested in the contextual aspects of creativity, action has the important property of revealing the continuity between person and world (Boesch, 2001). Most dichotomies within the psychology of creativity are born out of (artificially) segmenting creative action. For example, there has been a clear tendency among psychologists to detach idea generation from implementation and privilege the former over the latter. This is how we now have two extensive and yet largely separate literatures, one concerned with creativity and the other with what is called innovation (Clitheroe et al., 1998). While it is sometimes the case, in organisational settings, that idea generation is a task assigned to a certain group of people and turning creative ideas into practice falls on other groups, this doesn’t mean that, in the course of action, idea generation is not continuous with its testing or implementation (to different degrees). This is actually what the Geneplore model of creative cognition also points to: the cyclical nature of generative and exploratory processes within every creative act (Ward et al., 1999). This simple example illustrates how certain decisions about the temporal aspects of creativity can shape our whole view of the phenomenon, including directing our attention to, or distracting it from, social and material aspects. Answering the seemingly simple question “when does a creative act begin and when does it end?” can have enormous consequences for the way we describe creativity: as simply ideation and divergent thinking, as the interplay between ideation and exploration, between creating ideas and implementing them, etc. In the end, does creative action start with the work session in which a person comes up with an idea, does it include preparation for this session, or should we also take into account the years of training and education leading up to this particular moment in time?

The third key element of the four Ps model is represented by the creative product. There has been extensive research on creative products especially in the psychometric tradition which typically asks people to complete a series of tasks and then considers the creativity of outcomes, inferring the type of psychological processes that led to them. Evaluations of these products are usually offered by expert judges and this constitutes the basis for the widely used consensual assessment advocated by Amabile (1996). This technique starts from the assumption that creative products, either produced in a testing situation or in more ecological settings, are “there” to be evaluated; although this would seem at first to extend creativity spatially through recognising the role of others for at least the recognition of what is creative, it actually manages to embed creativity in the product itself by assuming consensus between different judges (Glăveanu, 2012a). Moreover, it also starts from the implicit premise that creative products are complete by the time they are evaluated. If we consider the fragment above about creative action however, we might end up rightfully asking: when is a creative product actually finished? Is it when the creator decides to finish working on it, when it is presented to other people, when it stops generating social interaction and debate? From a cultural psychological perspective, creative outcomes are dynamic artefacts, they are permanently in the process of being constructed, never complete. This is not only because some creators actually return to previous work or other people continue their activity in similar or different directions, but for the basic reason that creativity “resides” at the interface between actors and audiences and perceiving a creative product is itself a generative act. An engaged viewer’s perception is a constructive process and, we are reminded by Dewey (1934), there is creativity in the production as well as the assimilation of new outcomes. Creative artefacts thus “move” in both time and space and some of these transits leave visible marks on their appearance and function. We can consider here Boesch’s (1997) inspirational discussion about the phylogenesis of the violin as a type of instrument and its ontogenesis in the case of each individual learner.

This account also raises the issues of the role of audiences in creative work. Within the four Ps framework, social factors were included as part of the “press” factor, the least developed element in this model. Acknowledging the value of other people in creativity is already a significant step forward towards contextualising this phenomenon. However, it is also important how this role is conceptualised. I have argued before that social psychological studies focused either on micro-aspects of the social environment (like offering rewards, evaluation, etc.) or, to the other “extreme,” on the historical context of creation (social, political, economic, etc.). This ends up making audiences completely impersonal as there is no clear understanding of who exactly interacts with the creator or how. The cultural psychology of creativity considers a wide (spatial) range of audiences relevant for creative expression, from close collaborators, family, and friends, to critics, members of one’s community, and the general public (Glăveanu, 2013a). At the same time, it describes them as evolving audiences in the sense that their composition and relation to the creator and his or her work changes over time and, with them, so does the perception of certain products or actions. Creativity is a relational quality, a “property” that is being attributed to persons, objects, or situations rather than intrinsically located “in” them. This is why focusing on the co-evolution of creative actors and their multiple audiences—something encountered also in Gruber’s (2005) approach—is central to understanding how and why certain people or creations are celebrated, others struggle for recognition, while others still “lose” creativity as a result of changes in mentality and representation.

Finally, the discussion of social relations and types of audiences achieves one kind of “spatial” contextualisation of creativity but it says little about its material support. The four Ps model is completely silent in this regard. In contrast, the five As framework considers the affordances of one’s environment to play a key role in creativity, facilitating creative action. In fact, creative action can be defined as a continuous and cumulative process of exploiting existing affordances and generating new ones through the creation of novel artefacts. Unlike some of Gibson’s (1986) claims about the direct perception of what an environment affords the animal, a sociocultural account emphasises the cultural nature of both perception and use of affordances. Both these processes take place over time and there is a constant microgenetic aspect to using affordances creatively which can result, at times, in sociogenetic changes of the environment. The essential aspect of creativity from this perspective is not divergence thinking but the existence of action potentials; affordances both constrain and reveal new possibilities for the individual and/or collective adaptation, use, and transformation of existing artefacts (Glăveanu, 2012b).

In summary, the cultural approach grounded in a five As framework strives to achieve a “radical” contextualisation of creativity. Unlike the restrictive, static, and disjointed nature of the four Ps, the account put forward here articulates all three “dimensions” of the psychological, the temporal, and the spatial. Expanded actors, continuous action, dynamic artefacts, evolving audiences, and cumulative affordances in their totality represent, at once, the phenomenon (creativity) and its context. It might be argued at this point that any single research on creativity can hardly cover all five aspects above and use a “3-D” perspective for each. Nonetheless, a concern for context can and should always be reflected in the theoretical models we construct and the research questions we ask. In the end, we might not be able to incorporate all contextual elements into one study but we can certainly relate our findings to the “bigger picture,” if only we develop the habit of noticing it.

Context in psychology: Where to?

This article started by considering how we define context in psychology and how well we incorporate it into our research and our theories. To reflect on this, it used the case of creativity studies and presented “flat”/one-dimensional or acontextual frameworks as well as models that try to engage with context in a more or less comprehensive manner (referred to here as “2-D” and “3-D” theorising, respectively). It was argued that a cultural psychology approach to creativity achieves a radical form of contextualisation by integrating temporality and spatiality in its understanding of creative actors, actions, artefacts, audiences, and affordances. This framework is better equipped to unpack the multifaceted nature of this phenomenon than restrictive conceptions that either “locate” creativity in the mind or consider context simply as a set of “external” variables. Theorising context may be challenging but it is also extremely rewarding from a research perspective. It not only “makes our models more accurate and our interpretation of results more robust” (Rousseau & Fried, 2001, p. 2) and can help us “explain anomalous research findings” (Johns, 2006, p. 389) more effectively, but it also has some important practical implications. In the words of Clitheroe et al. (1998):

More fully contextual research will enable environmental designers and facility managers to make better use of research results; create and maintain healthier, more flexible, user-friendly, adaptable and adjustable environments; and design and maintain a wide array of environments that effectively support an increasingly complex range of human behaviours. (p. 111)

Admittedly, there are theoretical difficulties when it comes to integrating context into one’s research, starting from operationalising this construct and agreeing on what aspects of it can be studied at any one time. There is also the thorny issue of methodology since “contextual data are often difficult to code and quantify” (Bamberger, 2008, p. 840); moreover, we seem to be missing research instruments and methods that could facilitate a fully contextual approach (Clitheroe et al., 1998, p. 110). In creativity research several attempts have been made to respond to these challenges by using longitudinal designs using the diary method (Botella, Zenasni, & Lubart, 2011), contextual case-studies (Gruber & Wallace, 1999), historiometric analyses (Simonton, 1999), subjective cameras that capture action from the perspective of the actor (Glăveanu & Lahlou, 2012), etc. What is less common unfortunately is an authentic incorporation of context at the theoretical level beyond what Bamberger (2008) calls contextualisation. In his use of the term, this implies generating hypotheses about situational or temporal aspects but leaving the phenomenon itself theoretically disconnected from both. He urges the research community in his area to develop context theories which, for him, “require a researcher to build situational and/or temporal conditions directly into theory and, just as importantly, to explicate the mechanisms” (p. 841) that govern the totality of phenomenon and context. Such context theorising is needed and has been called for not only in creativity but many other areas of psychology, from self and identity (Adams & Marshall, 1996) to intelligence (Gardner, 1999) and stress (Magnusson, 1984).

Ultimately it is important to note that the exact ways in which context is brought back into theory and research denote a hermeneutical task. Each “interpretation” will depend to a great extent on the particular interest but also the position of the researcher within the field (as we should not forget that researchers themselves are an active presence within the “context” of a psychological study). For example, a creativity researcher trying to uncover cognitive, developmental, material, or historical aspects of creative expression and positioning him/herself as an observer, co-participant, or even subject of the investigation, will have a different perspective on what the (relevant) context is and highlight certain aspects of it while setting others aside. What is crucial though in these cases is to recognise the embeddedness of the chosen context within the larger spatiotemporal continuum of our human existence and invite further investigations of this greater totality instead of deciding to ignore or deny the relevance of other analytical interpretations.

The next steps for context theorists in psychology require coordinated efforts directed towards analysing past and present literature and understanding what aspects of the spatiotemporal continuum are usually privileged in research and how they can be “extended” to incorporate and articulate multiple levels of analysis. Second, conceptual tools need to be developed, perhaps new terminologies altogether, which are able to capture the presence of context within the phenomenon under study. We also need relational and creative thinking if we are to effectively challenge dichotomies deeply engrained in our discipline. Finally, we should consider innovative methodologies that can allow us to expand our unit of analysis from the psychological to the psychosocial, psychomaterial, and psychotemporal, without losing sight of the individual. Indeed, a “big picture” in psychology is not one that excludes the person and not even one constructed around the person, but one in which person and context both share the focal point of attention.