I
I. SUMMARY OF
FLORIDA'S ARGUMENT
Richard Florida
ambitiously claims to have defined a new social class
in America and around the world. The old Marxist
economic indicators of class gave us the bourgeoisie
and the proletariat. Florida scraps those signifiers
of the faded industrial age. Because of the high
value now placed on the creativity of workers in
postmodern capitalism, Florida identifies a
"Creative Class" and two new classes that
absorb and supersede the old industrial
proletariat--the "Working Class" and the
"Service Class."
His creative
class has two major sub-components: (a) a
super-creative core and (b) creative professionals.
In the core are people in computer and mathematical
occupations; architecture and engineering; life,
physical, and social science; education, training,
and library; arts, design, entertainment, sports, and
media. The larger creative class also includes
creative professionals in the following occupations:
management; business and financial operations; legal
work; healthcare and technical workers; high-end
sales and sales management. (328)
SIGNIFICANCE
OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
The significance
of Florida's findings does not lie in this grouping,
which looks a lot like the familiar bourgeoisie of
the industrial age. It lies for him in the remarkable
growth of the grouping relative
to the other classes, in the radically
new value placed on the
creativity of workers in the new economic
circumstances, and in the power of the class to set
cultural trends that define the
mainstream lifestyle of contemporary society.
Florida believes
that the creative class is leading the way to "a
new society and a new culture--indeed a whole new way
of life." For some years he has been studying
the "key factors" that have generated the
"changing attitudes and desires" of the new
class and the other classes. (12) The
Rise of the Creative Class is
his summing up of findings.
His exuberant
report at times blurs its own research boundaries.
Florida himself is a proud, self-declared member of
his newly discovered class. And he issues a call to
his fellow creative workers around the world to take
on a new class consciousness. They hold the destiny
of the emerging world in their hands, he says. Now
that they are dominant, it is time for them to
"grow up" and acknowledge their
responsibility. (315-326) They must join forces to
build "creative communities" where their
values will be free to play out in a vital new
setting beneficial not only to them but also to
members of the other classes. (283-314)
TRANSFORMATION
OF EVERYDAY LIFE
Florida maintains
that members of the creative class have transformed
everyday life so that it no longer resembles what it
was in the industrial age. (12) He points to four
basic categories of contemporary life to support this
observation.
First, style and
attitude for the creative class are critically
important. They thrive in a "no-collar
workplace" and feel productive when they manage
themselves and work independently. They would abhor
the stiff white collar world of the industrial age.
They would rebel at a traditional 9-5 work schedule.
They would shun the hierarchical structures of the
old industrial organization. (12-13) Yet, they are
willing to work 24-7 when they feel motivated to do
so.
Second, members
of the creative class no longer identify themselves
by their economic or social functions but by their
"experiential lifestyle." (13) They are
what their individual creative experiences make them.
The opposition between organizational conformists and
individualistic nonconformists no longer is an issue,
Florida says.(14) The old avant-garde at the edge of
mainstream bourgeois life folded its motley tent and
blended into the mainstream. Mainstream life has
become something wholly new; it is not merely a
modification of the old middle class. (13)
Third, Florida
emphasizes that the conception of time entertained by
members of the creative class differs radically from
the old notions. The blurring of conventional
schedules arises from the new priority that they give
to individual creativity. Moreover, career patterns
as a whole have changed. They tend to be
"front-loaded," Florida says. They no
longer involve creative people in a slow climb up the
corporate ladder toward the top. (14)
Fourth, creative
class members increasingly seek "creative
communities" that enable them to "reflect
and reinforce our identities as creative
people." These communities are stimulating,
diverse, and rich in experiences. Florida defines
creative communities "by the impermanent
relationships and loose ties that let us live the
quasi-anonymous lives we want rather than those that
are imposed on us." (15)
Florida says that
today's society differs markedly from what we knew in
earlier decades because of the remarkable
growth of the creative class
over the twentieth century. According to his
methodology, it more than doubled since 1980 and now
numbers some 38 million Americans, 30 percent of all
those employed. (8-9) The working class declined from
its 40 percent peak in 1950 to about 25 percent
today. The service class increased from 30 percent in
1950 to about 45 percent.
Florida further
says that power in the old capitalist economy, which
was firmly in the hands of owners and management, has
shifted. Now, those who work creatively are the key
to our economy and society. (4) This confers on the
creative class a radically new
value in our society.
Corporations have had to adapt to the lifestyle of
creative workers, who are essential to their success.
Regions of the country seeking revitalization have
sought to create environments receptive to the
creative class--indeed, Florida's main consulting
business is to advise regions on just such
revitalization. Members of the creative class are so
important that they "control the means of
production" in a way that Marx did not foresee.
(37) Because their creativity fires corporate
progress, "they are
the means of production." (37) The
mass-production, or Fordist, organization of the
industrial age prized standardization. In the
postindustrial age, creativity is more valuable than
standardization. Florida describes at some length the
rise of "the creative ethos" that replaced
the mass-production ethos of Fordism. (21-43)
As the key to
economic vitality, members of the creative class,
according to Florida's studies, have the power to set
cultural trends that define
today's society. Above all, they determine "the
power of place." (215-234) Florida finds that
creative people gather in places that are
"diverse, tolerant and open to new ideas."
(223) Their decision to live in those places drives
their economic growth. Creative class people avoid
cities and regions that are unreceptive to their
values, with negative economic consequences for those
places. They go to places that offer a variety of
creative job opportunities. But they want those
places to have a culturally creative lifestyle and
social vitality. They migrate to places that are
tolerant of strangers and intolerant of mediocrity.
(227) They prefer "authentic" places that
resist generic chain stores and restaurants. They
want to be able to "identify" themselves by
referring to the place where they live and work.
Florida is a
professor of regional economic development at
Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. This makes
him primarily a student of "place." He has
led a wide-ranging empirical research project to draw
"the geography of creativity." Applying his
"creativity index" and other indices that
rank places on their high technology and on their
bohemian and gay and lesbian populations, Florida
draws a map of America that shows where the creative
class is leading economic development and where it is
not. (235-248, 249-266) He has created something of a
media buzz because of the high correlation he has
found between gay and lesbian counts and creative
economic vitality.
The values of the
creative class, in Florida's view, supersede both the
old Protestant work ethic and bohemian hedonism. A
"Big Morph" has resolved the
"centuries-old tension between the two value
systems." (192) In a chapter of that title, he
attempts to show how the tension eased under the
combined influence of two powerful drivers--(a) the
social changes of the late 1960s and (b) the
computer-driven economic changes that took off in
Silicon Valley in the 1970s. (190-211)
THE
UNMET OBLIGATIONS OF CLASS LEADERSHIP
But Florida
worries in the end about the hedonism in the
genealogy of the creative class. "What kind of
life--and what kind of society--do we want to
bequeath to coming generations?" (325) Urging it
to "grow up," he believes that the creative
class must now assume "the obligations of
leadership that come with our position as the
norm-setting class." (317) Members of the
creative class should pull together so that the
benefits of the "Creative Age" reach
everyone. (318)
Their class
unity, he thinks, will not come from collectivization
as in the industrial labor unions of old; nor will it
take the form of political action through a
traditional party. (317) Florida instead thinks that
the unity of class activism will best revolve around
a "shared vision" of creativity as
"the fundamental source of economic growth"
and as "an essential part of everyone's
humanity." (317)
He proposes a
three-pronged action agenda to realize this vision.
The creative class should be "investing in
creativity to ensure long-run economic growth."
It should work to overcome "the class divides
that weaken our social fabric and threaten economic
well-being." And it should build "new forms
of social cohesion in a world defined by increasing
diversity and beset by growing fragmentation.' (318)
Florida would not
have been far amiss if he had closed his text by
paraphrasing the Communist Manifesto of the
proletarian class a century and a half before: "Creative
workers of the world, unite!"
End of I. Go
to II.
I. SUMMARY OF FLORIDA'S
ARGUMENT II. CRITICAL
ANALYSIS OF FLORIDA'S ARGUMENT III.
PROFESSOR FLORIDA'S CREATIVE PRESENCE
II
II. CRITICAL
ANALYSIS OF FLORIDA'S ARGUMENT
Like a good
intellectual entrepreneur, Richard Florida would like
us to believe that he has discovered a wholly new
social class. Although he nods at Marxist precursors,
he nevertheless confers on his creative class a
uniqueness that categorically separates it from
capitalist antecedents.
In doing so, he
gives his argument dramatic effect. He creates an
intellectual commodity that apparently is selling
well. But, at the same time, he misleads us. He
shifts attention away from the well-established
dependence of class culture on the conditions of
capital accumulation. The class structure of
capitalism has not fundamentally changed. What have
changed are the conditions of capitalism from a
modern to a postmodern mode. The bourgeoisie, the
middle class, has not disappeared. It has adapted its
style to meet the needs newly created by a
transformed capitalism.
STILL
CONTROLLING THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION
Perhaps the most
telling trait of Florida's creative class members is
their unbroken grip on the means of production. In
his view, production in postmodern conditions is
overwhelmingly dependent on creativity. As noted
above, this leads Florida to declare that creative
class members now therefore ARE the means of
production. (37) He apparently means this as a clever
turn on the old Marxist phrase; but it has the effect
of affirming the continuity of bourgeois class
dominance.
Florida has found
the same old bourgeois class, still cheerily in
control, with new values and ways of behaving that
sustain it in the ever-expanding embrace of a
heated-up capitalism. He has given us a description
of the life and times of what he more accurately
might have labeled the "neo-bourgeoisie."
Despite the
blurred focus of his class analysis, Florida's
extensive fieldwork on the prevailing values and
lifestyle of the neo-bourgeoisie yields a ripe
harvest of insights into life in the West in the
beginning of the 21st
century. His emphasis on the desire for open and
diverse social settings, where "weak ties"
can quickly come into play and just as quickly
disappear, rings true to our observations of
contemporary urban life. So too does his report on
changed attitudes toward time, politics, and social
correctness. I have little doubt that his mapping of
social types gives regional planners—who must
make up his primary professional audience--a viable
tool when they seek to revitalize their client
cities.
On the other
hand, Florida fails to discern the deeper connection
between (a) the new cultural forms that he finds in
his creative class and (b) new capitalist modes of
accumulation and production. This failure becomes
evident when we place the findings of his empirical
research over against the critical analysis of the
turn to postmodern capitalist culture by such
scholars as Fredric
Jameson, Perry Anderson, or David Harvey.
INTERRELATIONSHIP
OF CAPITALIST & CULTURAL CHANGES
Harvey in The Condition of
Postmodernity (Blackwell, 1990)
particularly invites comparison with Florida because
he focuses directly on the interrelationship of
capitalist and cultural changes in the postmodern
turn—an interrelationship that Florida fails to
explain clearly.
We begin to see
the values of Florida's creative class (let me
henceforth call it the neo-bourgeoisie) in a clearer
light when David Harvey informs us about the
"sea-change" that has occurred in cultural
and in political-economic practices since about 1972.
(vii) We also begin to understand from Harvey that
however dramatic this "sea-change" may
seem, it has not altered "the basic rules of
capitalistic accumulation." (vii)
If Richard
Florida had referred to David Harvey's book (I see no
evidence in the notes that he did), it would have
gratified him to find Harvey supporting one of his
key insights. Harvey believes that a main driver of
the turn from modernist to postmodernist life has
been the compression of time (and space) in the new
conditions of work.
Florida examines
"the time warp" from the angle of creative
workers who are putting in long hours, feeling
"the time famine," front-loading their
careers, "deferring" life, and
"deepening the moment" by speeding up and
multitasking. (144-162)
Harvey's analysis
of time (and space) compression, however, goes well
beyond Florida's anecdotal description of new class
behavior. He looks to the evolution of modes of
transportation to track the change in human
sensibility, that is, in the perception of spatial
and temporal reality:
1500-1840
("best average speed of horse drawn
coaches and sailing ships was 10
m.p.h.")
1850-1930
("steam locomotives averaged 65 m.p.h.
and steam ships averaged 36 m.p.h.")
1950s
("propeller aircraft 300-400
m.p.h.")
1960s
("jet passenger aircraft 500-700
m.p.h."). (241)
For Harvey, the
compression of space and time in human sensibility
accompanying these and other more recent
technological changes, especially in
telecommunications, is the most important
characteristic of postmodern capitalist accumulation.
Harvey argues that the change in the sense of space
and time came to operate in the financial arena no
less than in the cultural arena. With faster and
far-flung telecommunications, financial markets came
to encompass the entire globe in very short time
spans.
At the same time,
production of real commodities ceased to be essential
to the capitalist system. Through space-time
compression, the financial system became uncoupled
from the active production of real commodities. As
Harvey puts it, the instabilities in capitalist
production and a "radical shift in the manner in
which value gets represented as money" (296)
after 1973 furthered the change to a postmodern mode
of capitalism.
(In this new
mode, enthusiasm grew for the short-term market price
of stocks as opposed to the long-term productive
capacity of companies being traded. Money itself
became the favored commodity. The digital revolution
in communications made possible an international flow
of finance with almost instantaneous turnaround
time.)
"FLEXIBLE
ACCUMULATION" SPURS CREATIVITY
Harvey calls the
postmodern mode of capitalism "flexible
accumulation." He contrasts
this with the rigid form of modern capitalist
accumulation, which he calls "Fordism."
(147) Postmodern capitalism is flexible, he says,
"with respect to labour processes, labour
markets, products, and patterns of consumption."
(147) It has brought about "new sectors of
production, new ways of providing financial services,
new markets, and...greatly intensified rates of
commercial, technological, and organizational
innovation." (147) Flexible accumulation, he
says, has done away with the "relatively stable
aesthetic of Fordist modernism." (156) In place
of it, we now have "all the ferment,
instability, and fleeting qualities of a
postmodernist aesthetic that celebrates difference,
ephemerality, spectacle, fashion, and the
commodification of cultural forms." (156) He is
obviously describing the world of the neo-bourgeoisie
that Richard Florida has labeled the creative class.
Flexible
accumulation loosens the limits that Fordism
previously set on the production of commodities.
Entrepreneurs under postmodern conditions generate a
"vast range" of speculative and
unpredictable products and services. Often these are
only simulacra, uncoupled from an underlying reality.
Indeed, Harvey argues that flexible accumulation
accelerates the inherent tendency of capitalism to
expand from narrowly economic commodities into
broader and broader areas of society: "Precisely
because capitalism is expansionary and imperialistic,
cultural life in more and more areas gets brought
within the grasp of the cash nexus and the logic of
capital circulation." (344)
Harvey here shows
us why creativity has risen to such high value. In
the shift from rigid Fordist capitalism to the new
flexible capitalism, restraints on production fell
away. This opened the door to a vastly greater
entrepreneurial initiative, and this in turn called
for the greater use of creative talents. Richard
Florida, for all his faults of analysis, is
describing something real when he describes the
importance of creativity in the working life of the
neo-bourgeoisie.
As the flexible
capitalist process reached ever deeper into cultural
life, aspects of lifestyle could acquire the
characteristics of commodities. Members of the
neo-bourgeoisie itself, in short, could become, after
a fashion, the very products of the flexible
capitalist system that they energize and operate.
Florida says that
the creative people of his studies define themselves
by their "experiential lifestyle" not by
their occupations. From Harvey's analysis we can
infer that "lifestyle" has the attributes
of commodities that people can acquire and discard.
This deep immersion of the neo-bourgeoisie in the
processes of flexible capitalist accumulation helps
explain why Florida could seize on their
"creativity" as the fundamental value of
what he calls the Creative Age.
Harvey examines
the characteristics of producers and consumers of
cultural artifacts in the postmodern milieu. This
examination further explains the characteristics of
the neo-bourgeoisie with a sharpness missing in
Florida. Borrowing from Daniel Bell, Harvey uses the
term "cultural mass" to identify the
producers and consumers of works of art "in an
age of electronic reproduction and image banks."
(346) The cultural mass, he says, adds "yet
another layer to that amorphous formation known as
'the middle class.'" (347)
Harvey here is
attempting to explain a basic shift of taste in the
transition from modern to postmodern life. The newly
flexible power of money to control the production of
popular art forms pushes this shift. Consumers of
postmodern cultural production in the "cultural
mass" are unconnected to the deeper traditions
of the modern culture that has declined with economic
Fordism. This "frees" them to make up their
own social identity in the process of consuming the
overabundant cultural output of the image industry.
(348)
AFFIRMATION
OF THE POLITICAL RIGHT
The political
effect of this, Harvey finds, is to separate the
cultural mass from an older modernist acknowledgement
of working class objectives. Under the conditions of
flexible accumulation, which fuels cultural
production, the cultural mass is free to shape
"its own identity around its own concerns with
money power, individualism, entrepreneurialism."
(348)
Harvey thus joins
Fredric Jameson and others in showing the swing of
neo-bourgeois political values to the right as
capitalism morphed from Fordism to flexibility. The
rise of the neo-bourgeoisie coincided with the rise
to political dominance of the neoliberal (aka
"conservative") ideology of the free
market. Highlighting this political turn were the
election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the
discrediting of command economics with the end of the
USSR a decade later. Creative neo-bourgeois workers
swim in the sea of free market entrepreneurialism.
They appear to be unaware of their historical
origins. Nor do they seem to realize sufficiently
that they operate unreflectively in a politically
rightist environment that desensitizes them to the
needs of people outside their class.
But the political
swing of the neo-bourgeoisie as postmodernist life
developed did not take them back to a traditional
conservatism of the modernist period. They adopted a
new kind of politics in which esthetics triumphed
over ethics, to use Harvey's phrase. (329) The values
engendered by this swing allowed the neo-bourgeoisie
to abandon the old social conscience of political
realism. They accepted the new estheticized political
rhetoric that flowed from the Reagan revolution.
Political prophets like Reagan allowed the
neo-bourgeoisie to believe that the mythical power of
free market capital "justifies homelessness,
unemployment, increasing impoverishment,
disempowerment, and the like." (336) The reality
of the working class and the service class could be
"estheticized." They could be elements of
art but not objects of policy. Needs of the working
and service classes could be rendered moot as
political issues. Creative people could overlook
actual social suffering and feel few moral
compunctions as they played out their experiential
lifestyles in the compressed space and time of
emerging postmodernity.
In sum, Harvey's
explication of the historical condition of
postmodernity--merely highlighted here--shows us that
Richard Florida is onto something significant in his
studies. But it also suggests how superficially
Florida has accounted for the economic, social, and
political changes that implicate his creative people.
End
of II. Go to III.
I. SUMMARY OF FLORIDA'S
ARGUMENT II. CRITICAL
ANALYSIS OF FLORIDA'S ARGUMENT III.
PROFESSOR FLORIDA'S CREATIVE PRESENCE
III
III.
PROFESSOR FLORIDA'S CREATIVE PRESENCE
Throughout his
book Richard Florida identifies himself as a member
of the class he is studying. When he needs a concrete
example of the creative lifestyle, he often treats us
to a personal anecdote. We see Professor Florida
hanging out at a local bistro, multitasking in his
busy office, or getting rid of tension on a
challenging bike ride. He is apparently a being happy
in his skin, pleased with his membership in the era's
most important social class.
In his bumptious
enthusiasm for the new way of life, he reminds us of
Sinclair Lewis's George F. Babbitt, another social
class booster. Babbitt was from the era when modern
Fordist capitalism was just gaining hegemony in the
first decades of the twentieth century. The American
bourgeoisie was coming to feel its oats, and Lewis's
fictional hero was its outspoken advocate (before his
climactic disillusionment).
Professor Florida
resembles Babbitt not only in his optimistic
enthusiasm for his class but also in his sense of
social conscience. Babbitt believed in ideals of
service and was happy to think that he could serve
them through the great god profit itself.
INSUFFICIENT
CLASS SENSE OF EQUITY & JUSTICE
In the conditions
of postmodern flexible accumulation, the creative
people of the neo-bourgeoisie give small attention to
the problems of equity and justice beyond the circle
of their own important lives. (Their indifference to
political solutions shows, for example, in the
distressingly low voter turnouts of recent years.)
Florida to his credit acknowledges this shortcoming.
His creative class, the neo-bourgeoisie, lacks a
sufficient sense of obligation to other people, a
sense of "relational identity." (317) With
careful restraint, he admits that "many people
in the Creative Class, I fear, do not have an evolved
sense of this." (317)
From the
perspective of Harvey's studies, we know that their
lack of relational identity results from the
estheticization of social and political process in
the shift to postmodernism. It results from their
abandonment of an older modernist sense of the
reality of social need. This shift in sensibilities
emerged, as Harvey analyses it, from the impact of
flexible accumulation in a free market environment.
Florida insists
that his class must accept new social obligations of
leadership. (316-317) And Babbitt-like, he attempts
to define the agenda for meeting these obligations
within the framework of the only system he knows, the
flexible accumulation of postmodern capitalism. He is
so immersed in the postmodern system and in his class
that he cannot imagine alternative solutions that
would change the system itself or alter the basic
class structure. Professor Florida is an academic
entrepreneur whose consulting business would
doubtless be the envy of old Babbitt. His commitment
to his business perfectly exemplifies the class
vitality that he touts. We could not expect him to
establish a foothold outside the system from which to
seek solutions.
ANEMIC
PROPOSALS FOR SOCIAL IMPROVEMENT
When he looks
inside for solutions, he offers us his call for a
"shared vision" by the neo-bourgeoisie and
his suggested action agenda--investing in creativity
for all, overcoming the class divides, and building
new forms of social cohesion. (318) These suggestions
are mostly a sketch of good intentions unsupported by
any clear explanation of the systemic issues at
stake. As policy proposals, they are anemic.
First and last,
Florida sees the prevailing postmodern social order
as inevitable and unalterable. He has no choice but
to endorse it. With that endorsement given, he feels
free to offer his palliative solutions to obvious
social shortcomings but never at the expense of his
class. He would serve the "working class"
and "service class" by injecting more
neo-bourgeois creativity into them. He avoids any
genuine critical analysis of the effect of flexible
accumulation on justice and equity. Florida thus
suffers from his own problem of "relational
identity."
In the time that
has passed since 9-11, the narrowing of public
discourse on our societal needs is coming to disturb
a growing number of Americans. The paramount
importance given by the administration and the media
to military and security policies is making it
increasingly hard to act on domestic social
priorities. More than ever, America needs a
concerned, informed, and aroused citizenry to
challenge and test the truisms that political leaders
at present can lob at the nation without serious fear
of contradiction. Those truisms requiring critical
challenge include an unqualified endorsement of the
postmodern system of flexible capitalist
accumulation, clothed in neoliberal free market
ideology, the system in which the creative
neo-bourgeoisie flourishes so unreflectively.
It is indeed time
for the members of Richard Florida's creative class
to rise up in support of a better agenda for
postmodern social equity and justice. Florida is not
the one, however, who can show them the way.
End
of III and end of essay review.
I. SUMMARY OF FLORIDA'S
ARGUMENT II. CRITICAL
ANALYSIS OF FLORIDA'S ARGUMENT III.
PROFESSOR FLORIDA'S CREATIVE PRESENCE
