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Robert J. Sternberg, James C. Kaufman, and Jean E. Pretz. The Creativity Conundrum: A Propulsion Model of Kinds of Creative Contributions. New York: Psychology Press, 2002, 141 pages, $44.95 hardcover.
Larry King, talk show host and erstwhile newspaper columnist, occasionally wrote pithy items like this for his column: "Look up the word _____ in the dictionary, and you'll find a picture of _____ (some famous individual)." In that vein, if you look up the word "prolific" in the dictionary, you might find a picture of Robert Sternberg. Individually and with others, Sternberg has written more and more often about intelligence and creativity than almost anyone.
The Creativity Conundrum, a volume in the Essays in Cognitive Psychology Series, is the latest addition to his lengthy vita. In this relatively short work (123 pages of text), Sternberg and his colleagues propose a model for distinguishing among various kinds of creative contributions. Underlying this work is the metaphor of "propulsion" as the way various fields of endeavor are moved by creative contributions. Conceiving of a domain of knowledge as existing in n-dimensional space, Sternberg et al. argue that it is possible to locate "the prototype for where a given paradigm, subfield, or field is at a given time. In other words, (a) centroid represents where a subfield, field, or paradigm is located for the contributors currently in the field." Movement of that prototypical point requires propulsive forces, the creative contributions in the book's title. The propulsion model provides a taxonomy for classifying such contributions as (a) accepting the current paradigms and attempting to extend them, (b) rejecting the current paradigms and attempting to replace them, or (c) synthesizing two or more paradigms.
The book comprises 11 chapters, with Chapter 1 presenting an overview of the approach to understanding creative contributions. Sternberg et al. provide brief descriptions of the types of creative contributions that one finds in each of the eight different taxonomic classifications.
Chapters 2 through 9...