Creativity and cultural production: an interdisciplinary approach to understanding creativity through an ethnographic study of songwriting

Psychology, sociology, poststructuralist literary theory and the study of communication and media have all offered insights into creativity and cultural production. In doing so they have hinted at and, at times, explicitly engaged in an exploration and critique of one of the central problems in social theory; the relationship between agency and structure. By presenting the results of a ten year long ethnographic study of contemporary western popular music songwriting, and calling on these disciplinary areas in that process, this paper will attempt to shed some light on the agency/structure question. In doing so, it will present evidence to support the idea that creativity is less the province of singular and extraordinary individuals working beyond structural constraints but is, instead, the emergent property of a complex system at work.