Missing links: What is missing from definitions of creativity?

Abstract

Creativity sometimes has been viewed as fixed or absolutist over time and space and other times has been viewed as flexible or relativistic over time and space. The psychometric view has tended toward the absolutist model, the sociocultural view toward the relativistic model. It is proposed that these two views roughly represent a thesis and an antithesis, and that a synthesis with both absolutist and relativistic elements may best capture the nature of creative enterprise. Four models of the composition of creativity and its manifestations are proposed that vary what is fixed and what is variable across time and space.