John-Steiner, Vera. (2000). Creative Collaboration. Reviewed by Elizabeth Creamer, Virginia Tech

John-Steiner, Vera. (2000). Creative Collaboration. New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. 259 + xii $29.95         ISBN 0-19-506794-0 Reviewed by Elizabeth Creamer, Virginia Tech May 14, 2001 Following her award winning first book, Notebooks of the Mind: Explorations of Thinking, first published in 1985, Vera John-Steiner's 2000 book, Creative Collaboration deals with the topic and creativity and innovation among artists and scientists working both within and outside of an academic setting. Both books take a developmental view of creativity, looking at the evolution of an idea over time. Creative Collaboration picks up on the role of collaboration in innovation, a sub-theme in the first book. Collaborations that results in innovation are those "that lead to change in their domain's dominant paradigms" (2000, p. 196). They involve intense dialogue over a prolonged period of time, are motivated by a desire to transform knowledge, and integrate knowledge from multiple disciplines. John-Steiner grounds her approach in the theoretical work of L. S. Vygotsky, illustrating how creative thought and collaboration occurs within a social-historical context. This social-historical view interprets creative activities as social and the construction of knowledge as "embedded in the cultural and historical milieu in which it arises" (2000, p. 5). Challenging the view of cognition as in individualized process, she characterizes thinking and creativity as a social process that can involve intense and prolonged engagement and interaction. Rather than derailing collaboration, John-Steiner suggests that the willingness to tackle differences in viewpoint is a characteristic of long-term collaborations that lead to innovation. She observes: "Collaboration thrives on diversity of perspectives and constructive dialogue between individuals negotiating their differences while creating their shared voices and visions" (John-Steiner, 2000, p. 6). A second key element about how collaboration is associated with innovation is through what John-Steiner labels as mutual appropriation. This is when collaborators develop a deep familiarity with each other's ideas and a shared knowledge base that is only possible through prolonged engagement and intense interaction about ideas. A third element of when collaboration is associated with innovation is when there is both trust and shared risk taking. Risk taking, John-Steiner argues, is especially characteristic in paradigm shifting work. "Creative work requires a trust in oneself that is virtually impossible to sustain alone," she observes (2000, p. 8). John-Steiner's life-span perspective is also reflected in her view of identity and how it is evolves within collaboration. She sees identity as fluid and changing over time. She casts identity development as relational or occurring in relation to significant others. Individual identity, she argues, is a synthesis of the qualities of multiple role models and influences. Collaboration contributes to vitality by supporting the on-going development of a "changing self. " Her views contrasts that of many developmental theorists who cast identity development, even among adults, as occurring along a continuum that has a clear endpoint "akin to a physical peak capacity which is then followed by decline" (2000, p. 188). Her view is consistent with the depiction of faculty careers as fluid and developmental (Weiland, 1995). John-Steiner's methodology is an intriguing marinade of methods. A Presidential Professor of Linguistics and Education at the University of New Mexico, her sources of data include personal interviews, autobiographical materials, narrative accounts, and a method called a "Collaboration Q-sort." In this she asked individual collaborators to rank the relevance a series of statements that might characterize the collaborative relationship and process. She then brought the two collaborators together and asked them to discuss differences in their perceptions. The book is liberally sprinkled with examples of "experienced thinkers" from the physical sciences, math, philosophy, social sciences, and the visual and creative arts. Some of the most vivid accounts, such as the collaboration between Picasso and Braque that led to the development of Cubism as an art form, are based on a careful reading of historical documents. Having recently completed a book on collaboration among dual-career faculty couples (Creamer, 2001), one of the most exciting things for me about reading this book, was to open to the first chapter to find that it deals with the work accomplished by intimate partners. In this, John-Steiner revisits some historical figures, such as Marie and Pierre Curie whose working relationship has been documented elsewhere (Pycior, 1987), but also presents some more contemporary examples, such as the writers Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris. She provides an engrossing description, for example, of the evolution of the working arrangement between Will and Ariel Durant, detailing how over time Will and Ariel became a co-equal in the roles they played in producing a multi-volume work on the history of civilization. Supporting an argument I presented in Working Equal: Academic Couples as Collaborators (Creamer, 2001), she points to examples of egalitarianism among intimate heterosexual partners. These are couples who successfully combine both personal and personal lives and who are committed to equality and overcoming stereotypical gender roles in the division of labor both in work and in the household. Her work adds to the literature that provides a counterpoint to earlier feminist portraits of such relationship as inevitably asymmetrical. It challenges scholars of the family in both in sociology and family studies to consider the division of labor in jointly accomplished professional work as an index of egalitarianism, rather than to focus exclusively on division of labor in private matters of the household. Recognition of the potential for egalitarianism among cross-sex collaborators with an intimate partner is only one of several positions taken by John-Steiner that reflect what could be characterized as that of a third-wave feminist. She devotes a chapter to collaboration and women and provides a good mix of examples of collaborators that include women. Within the first six pages of the book, she recognizes that her work is grounded in what she identifies as the feminist concepts of relational dynamics and feminist ways of knowing. Relational dynamics refers to the idea that individual identity or a sense of self develops in the context of important relationships. Feminist perspectives on ways of knowing, John-Steiner asserts, challenge the idea of individuation and autonomy and emphasize mutuality and interdependence instead. She extends the earlier work she credits, however, by illustrating that these concepts apply equally to relationships among men as well as among men and women as they do do to relationships among women. This is an important contribution of the book. The book will be of interest to scholars in a number of areas including interdisciplinary scholars and those in a number of areas in education. These include those who study creativity, as well as those in higher education who study faculty lives and cultures. Although the tie is not one that is discussed, the book has clear connections to the literature that examines processes that foster the co- construction of knowledge, such as those that look at learning communities and communal forms of knowing. A sub- text rather than a main theme, John-Steiner's exploration of identity will be of interest to those who work on the topic of adult identity development. The Q-sort method described in an appendix, which she describes as a method often used in personality research, could readily be adapted to other topics as well, including to test some existing models of feminist and racial identity. Another way that John-Steiner's book contributes to the literature is in the refreshing view of mentoring relationships that she offers. Rather than freeze-framing mentoring relationships as forever asymmetrical, John- Steiner's developmental perspective recasts mentoring as a relationship that under the best of circumstances can evolve over time to become a symmetrical relationship among co- equals. Although the literature about mentoring is extensive, it is not generally from a life-span perspective. Of most relevance to the topic of the collaboration that is central to the book, John-Steiner presents some original views about long-term collaboration. Consistent with her social-cultural perspective, in the last chapter she moves from an exclusively dyadic focus on collaboration to one that sets it within what she labels as thought communities. Thought communities are defined as "groups of experienced thinkers who engage in intense interaction with each other while promoting a perspective shift in their discipline" (2000, p. 6). "The sustainability of collaboration depends on the supporting structures in which it is embedded" (2000, p. 202), John-Steiner maintains. That means that while a pair of collaborators may make the most direct contribution to an innovation, that they are likely to be simultaneously engaged with a community of like-minded colleagues who make less visible contributions but are vital to stimulating and sustaining the effort. Thought communities are distinguished from cooperative teams by mutuality and trust that, according to John-Steiner, is vital for the risk taking necessary for genuine innovation. They often develop their own distinct culture. Casting long- term collaborative dyads within a larger community of colleagues and the culture they create is an important contribution of this book. In the last chapter, John-Steiner extends the discussion among those researching the process of collaboration by sketching a model that distinguishes four different patterns of collaboration. She identifies these as (a) distributed collaboration, (b) complementary collaboration, (c) family collaboration, and (d) integrative collaboration. Because the chapter is about thought communities, I am unclear as to whether the model applies to dyads, which is the subject of most of the examples she uses as illustrations, or to a the larger thought community in which they are likely to be engaged. The four collaborative patterns identified by John-Steiner are distinguished by the roles assumed by collaborators, the extent that values are shared, and working methods which may or may not be discipline-based. The patterns utilized by collaborators evolve over time. Collaborators may initially organize their work following one pattern, but then mutate to another pattern. While the pattern she identifies as complementary collaboration, with its clear division of labor and discipline-based working methods, is the one that is most commonly utilized, it is not the one she associates with innovation. Instead, she argues that an integrative pattern of collaboration, with interchangeable roles in the division of labor and integration of knowledge across disciplines, is most likely to produce innovation. In this analysis, John-Steiner links dynamics of the collaborative process to innovation. She confirms the importance of interdisciplinary scholarship by associating the integration of knowledge across disciplines as a hallmark of innovation. The model she offers of different collaborative patterns offers a promising premise for future research. John-Steiner's completely engrossing and elegantly written first book is a hard act to follow. It won the 1990 William James Book Award from the American Psychological Association and has gone through multiple printings. The critiques I might offer of her 2000 book are minor. A number of propositions she characterizes in the text as significant, such as about identity as relational, are only briefly sketched. In what I imagine was an oversight, I was surprised to find, for example, that the word, identity, is not listed in the index. At times the descriptions of the collaborations are so expansive as to outweigh the analytic point she is making. In what may be an inevitable by-product of methods that combine traditional social science methods with historical research, the combination of historical and contemporary figures is sometime disconcerting. Within the first ten pages, John-Steiner offers a surprising caveat to the book, given its stated grounding in a social- cultural theoretical perspective. John-Steiner notes: "In this book, historical, cultural, and institutional conditions, which shape the nature and meaning of collaboration, are not treated in depth" (2000, p. 9). While this well could be an overstatement on John-Steiner's part, it does underscore that her focus is on the relational aspects of collaborations that have resulted in significant innovations. She had not the space to develop the full historical context of some of the famous alliances she describes, such as the one between Charles Darwin and his mentor, Charles Lyell. Influential institutional and environmental factors that support collaboration are indeed absent, as they are in the accounts of collaborators presented in my book. This may be because collaborators often fail to identify them. A reader cannot fail but to be impressed by the scope of John-Steiner's literary palette in that she describes with alacrity famous collaborators in fields as diverse as science, music, and art. She seems as comfortable describing the development of innovation in art, dance, and music as she with those associated with scientific inventions. The breadth of her knowledge and reading is clearly evident in the inspiring array of literature cited in her reference list and endnotes which in itself provides a strong endorsement for an interdisciplinary perspective. They range from fictional works, poetry, to intellectual biography and well-known works in the history and the social sciences. Above all, John-Steiner is certainly successful in offering vivid alternative narratives that respond to her criticism that most of the literature on collaboration focuses on cognition while overlooking the power of relational dynamics. References Creamer, E. G., & Associates (2001). Working equal: Academic couples as collaborators. New York, NY: Routledge-Falmer Press. John-Steiner, V. (1997). Notebooks of the mind: Explorations of thinking. New York: New York. Oxford University Press. (Revised edition) Pycior, H. M. (1987). Marie Curie's anti-natural path. In P. G. Abir-Am and D. Outram (Eds.), Uneasy careers and intimate lives: Women in science, 1789-1979. New Brunswick: NJ: Rutgers University Press. Weiland, S. (1995). "Belonging to romanticism": Discipline, specialty, and academic identity. Review of Higher Education, 18(3), 265-292. About the Reviewer Dr. Elizabeth G. Creamer is an Associate Professor at Virginia Tech. She teaches courses in Women's Studies, Interdisciplinary Studies, and in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies. While her faculty appointment is in the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences at Virginia Tech, her training is in the field of higher education. Her research interests focus on faculty work and cultures. Most of her work explores the nature of the personal and working lives of faculty who have strong or extraordinary publication records. Her interest in collaboration, including among academic couples, grew out of a long-term research project that involves interviewing prolific faculty members about the factors they associate with their productivity.