Abstract
In this chapter we reflect on a particular way of studying immensely high complexity, such as creativity, by investigating extraordinary achievers. The basis of our reflections are two empirical studies, one conducted in the area of haute cuisine, through interviewing top chefs, and the second conducted in the area of science, thorough interviewing Nobel Laureates. We explore why we feel that studying such extraordinary individuals can be more fruitful for better understanding creativity than trying to achieve an artificially manufactured sample that provides insights about the creative potential of the average individual. We outline the problems we see with the notion of representative samples from both conceptual as well as feasibility perspectives and offer an argument for studying the extraordinary instead.
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Notes
- 1.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: We have presented various aspects of our thinking about this topic as a series of developmental papers (Dörfler & Stierand, 2009; Stierand & Dörfler, 2011, 2012a, 2013) in the Research Methodology Special Interest Group (RM SIG) of the British Academy of Management (BAM) conference. We would like to thank members of the RM SIG as over the years they helped us clarify our thinking with their constructive criticism, comments and most of all questions for which we did not have satisfactory answers.
- 2.
An additional difficulty here is that the Nobel Prize nominations are confidential for 50 years following the nominations. Furthermore, we can see that both in the case of Michelin stars as well as in the case of the Nobel Prize, the award will usually have significant delay compared to achieving the extraordinary level, so it could be expected that often there would be no recognisable difference between the comparison groups.
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Dörfler, V., Stierand, M. (2019). Extraordinary: Reflections on Sample Representativeness. In: Lebuda, I., Glăveanu, V.P. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Social Creativity Research. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95498-1_36
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