The Social Foundations of Creative Influence
Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and the School of Information
Creativity is central to cultural production and scholars have spent decades identifying the conditions that affect individual creativity. Innovation scholars have long emphasized that creativity arises from the process of recombining existing inputs into novel outputs. By contrast, social psychologists focus on the motivational, affective, and normative environment (stimulation) surrounding individuals as drivers of creativity.
We develop a conceptual framework that integrates these traditions and distinguishes between two spheres through which they operate: a social sphere of direct interpersonal connections, and a cultural sphere that influences through categories and genres affiliation. These distinctions between two varieties of creativity and two spheres of influence allow us to highlight four mechanisms of creative influence — social recombination, social stimulation, cultural recombination, and cultural stimulation — and to examine how they shape creative output both independently and in combination.
Using data on over 25,000 musicians and 600,000 songs released between 1955 and 2000, we examine how these different sources of influence shape the novelty of musical output. The results reveal sharp asymmetries and distinctive interaction effects: while some mechanisms reinforce one another, others act as substitutes, producing ceiling effects or even suppressing novelty. These findings suggest that creativity emerges not from the accumulation of influences, but from the particular configuration of social and cultural mechanisms to which artists are exposed.
Speaker
Noah Askin
Noah Askin is a computational social scientist and sociologist by training and an associate professor of organization and management at the Paul Merage School of Business, UC Irvine. Askin conducts research on social and cultural networks, the causes and consequences of creativity (particularly in the music industry), the production and consumption of culture, and the dynamics of organizational and individual status. He is particularly interested in the creative process, its outcomes, and the forces that influence it.
His work, which has garnered him recognition on the Thinkers 50 Radar list, has appeared in Administrative Science Quarterly and the American Sociological Review, as well as computational social science publications. He has been an interview guest on the BBC (radio and television) and Salon.com, and his research has been covered in The Economist, Rolling Stone, Forbes, Business Insider, Quartz.com, The Times of London, and music industry blogs. He has done a TEDx talk on what makes popular songs popular.
Noah has directed and taught multiple executive education programs in addition to teaching organizational design and leadership to MBA students. His teaching focuses primarily on firms’ organizational-strategic alignment, leading and experiencing organizational change, managing corporate culture, fostering creativity in organizations, and understanding & utilizing social networks.
Before becoming a business school academic, Noah had a number of roles in the business and not-for-profit sectors. He was a management consultant for the Monitor Group, working in its strategy practice and its executive development group. This was followed by several years as an early member of a start-up in the educational services space. He maintains ties to business practitioners by continuing to advise organizations and coach executives.
Contact
If you have questions about this event, please contact Lilli Wessling Hart at lilli@berkeley.edu.
Accessibility
If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting, CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about mobility access in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Lilli Wessling Hart at lilli@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7–10 days in advance of the event.