Creative Class

Description

"Market value in the knowledge economy is driven by creative energy in the workforce. In his groundbreaking 2002 bestseller The Rise of the Creative Class, prize-winning economist Dr. Richard Florida profiled the characteristics of creative knowledge workers, and introduced strategies for attracting and leading them successfully. With The Flight of the Creative Class, Florida addresses global competition and what countries and corporations must do to thrive in the knowledge economy." (http://www.landed.fm/shows/richard-florida.html)

Discussion

Christophe Aguiton and Dominique Cardon:

“the notion of "creative class" could be extremely confusing. Firstly, it brings together social groups with very different lifestyles and socio-economic conditions. To describe a young person painting tags on the wall of her city and living on the minimum income and Bill Gates or a CEO of a successful software company as member of the same "Super Creative Core" does not make much sense. Secondly, the notion of "Creative class" tends to gloss over the hierarchies and inequalities inherent to this era of globalised capitalism. Saskia SASSEN, in her book (2001), described in the same way as Florida the related growth in the dominant cities, such as New York, London or Tokyo, of the well paid workers of the financial economy and the poor, precarious and generally immigrant workers in services such as restaurants, security and the maintenance of those cities. However, instead of describing the growth of a Creative Class in several cities only according to their level of tolerance and the quality of their educational systems, Sassen draws the picture of hierarchical archipelagos where one two or three cities are at the centre of the worldwide flow of financial capital, giving them a dominant place in the world economy. We could hypothesize that the growth of digital cooperative uses associated with new Web 2.0 services could create the same kind of inequalities, on the basis that a network structure always creates some new form of exclusion (BOLTANSKI & CHIAPELLO, 1999).”

Source: The strength of Weak Cooperation. Christophe Aguiton and Dominique Cardon. Communication & Strategies, No. 65, 1st Quarter 2007.

More Information

Listen or watch: Richard Florida on the Creative Class