‘doing a florida thing

Fifth International Conference in Cultural Policy Research, Yeditepe University, Istanbul 20-24 August 2008

‘DOING A FLORIDA THING’ The Creative Class Thesis and Cultural Policy

Jim McGuigan,

Loughborough University, UK

Abstract The work of Richard Florida has proven extremely influential in cultural policy circles in recent years. His arguments concerning ‘the rise of the creative class’ and the concentration of ‘ technology, talent and tolerance’ in successful cities are grounded in certain theoretical assumptions and supported by specific kinds of evidence that should be submitted to critical interrogation in order to test their robustness. The paper addresses the following questions: What are the theoretical assumptions underpinning Florida’s arguments? Is the evidence upon which these arguments are substantiated sound? What are the implications of Florida’s thesis for cultural policy? The paper presents a critical reading of two of Florida’s key texts: The Rise of the Creative Class and Cities and the Creative Class. It also comments on the impact of Florida’s work around the world and focuses upon a particularly significant policy document in Britain, the Work Foundation’s Staying Ahead – The Economic Performance of the UK’s Creative Industries. It is necessary to trace the intellectual framework of ‘post-industrial’ thinking about contemporary capitalism, the incorporation of bohemianism into business and aspirations for urban regeneration and competitive advantage in a global economy with local and regional peculiarities in order to evaluate the ‘Florida thing’. These and other issues are treated extensively in my forthcoming book, Cool Capitalism. The paper reflects upon the synthesis of cultural policy with economic policy and considers whether or not this is the best way forward for the politics of art and culture in the twenty-first century. cool capitalism, creative class, creative economy, neoliberalism Introduction

Doing a Florida Thing

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A few years ago, on a lecture tour of Australia and New Zealand, whilst at Canberra, I received an e.mail from a colleague who was organising a couple of lectures for me in Wellington, New Zealand. He told me that the city of Wellington was ‘doing a Florida thing’. At first, I misunderstood his meaning. I thought by ‘Florida’ he was referring to a state in the South Eastern United States and, straight away, I wondered what Wellington might have in common with Miami and what exactly it was that the capital of New Zealand might be learning from the capital of Florida. Immediately it occurred to me that there was something distinctly Floridian lacking in Wellington, to whit, Hispanic gangsters. Perhaps they needed to bring in a few such folk in order to liven up the place and recruit some coppers from the Miami Vice department too. Of course, I was soon disabused of my error. Shortly afterwards, I spoke at a seminar in Wellington that was chaired by the mayor. Apparently, Richard Florida, the American management theorist, had been there some time earlier doing something similar to myself but, as it transpired, with greater impact than my miserable discourse. They were following his precepts for urban development. I realised that I needed to read Florida seriously in order to grasp the appeal of his magical advice, which was not about attracting Hispanic gangsters after all but, instead, about capitalising on ‘the rise of the creative class’. On reading his work, I realised that Richard Florida’s thesis was less impressive than it might appear at first sight to readers without an academic background in the social sciences. It was evident that Florida’s discourse is characterised by a typically managerialist rhetoric that over-simplifies and, to an extent, bowdlerises social-scientific reasoning and research. To demystify his work, it is necessary, then, to interrogate Florida’s pronouncements with regard to their theoretical assumptions, empirical evidence and implications for cultural policy. The Creative Class Florida’s (2003 [2002]) main thesis – stated in his book, The Rise of the Creative Class – is a familiar iteration of a longstanding tradition of ‘new class’ theorising, going back at least to Milovan Djilas (1966 [1957]) in the 1950s. Class formations are complex and they change over time, particularly due to shifting occupational structures and the habitus of different socio-economic groups. Florida discerns the emergence of a specifically middle-class formation, reminiscent of Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984 [1979]) ‘new petite bourgeoisie’. Bourdieu’s new petite bourgeoisie were famously characterised by him as consisting of ‘all the occupations involving presentation and representation’ (1984, p. 359) They include ‘the cultural intermediaries’ of advertising, journalism, marketing, public relations and the modern – or rather, postmodern - media and culture generally. Their numbers have increased dramatically since the Second World War and these people are, in Bourdieu’s terms, engaged in a struggle for distinction. Their strategy tends to blur the boundaries between and diminish the hierarchical structure of, on the one hand, the arts and high culture, and on the other hand, commerce and mass-popular culture. What we find, however, is that Florida’s ‘creative class’ is a much broader formation than Bourdieu’s new petite bourgeoise, making up an astonishingly high proportion of the population in the USA – for, after all, it is with the USA that he is principally concerned despite his influence on the rest of the world. Florida (2003, p. 74) makes the startling claim that the Creative Class constitutes 38.3 million Americans and 30% of the US workforce. Yet, it transpires that this claim is not quite so startling as it appears at first sight because the Creative Class is divided into two segments: the Super Creative Class and Creative Professionals. The Super Creatives, in fact, are made up of 15% of


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Americans and only 10% of the US workforce. Super Creatives range from artists and educators through – somewhat less obviously ‘super creative’ in an artistic sense - librarians, scientists, engineers and computer and mathematical occupations (Florida, 2003, p. 328). So, even the 10% calculation might be considered a little exaggerated. The rest – the Creative Professionals – include lawyers, managers, technicians and what Florida calls ‘high-end’ sales personnel. So, the Creative Class, then, is largely what would otherwise be called routinely ‘the professional-managerial class’, which also includes artistic occupations. Florida (2003, p. 68) says that the ‘distinguishing characteristic of the Creative Class is that its members engage in work whose function is to “create meaningful new forms”’. It is reasonable to ask, exactly how many of those formally listed in the category of Creative Class would this actually apply to? The American Working Class consists of 33 million workers, according to Florida, whereas there are 55.2 million Service Class workers, 43% of the workforce, which is a much more meaningful indication of ‘post-industrialism’ than a dubiously calculated Creative Class. And, as Florida (2003, p. 74) says, the Service Class ‘includes workers in low-wage, low-autonomy service occupations such as health care, food preparation, personal care, clerical work and other low-end office work’. What is the social character of this putatively new Creative Class (which is not quite so prominent, we learn on close inspection, as we might initially have supposed)? In depicting their habitus, Florida follows David Brooks’s typification of the bobo – the bourgeois bohemian – and calls it ‘the Big Morph’ whereby there is ‘a new resolution of the centuries-old tension between two value systems: the Protestant work ethic and the bohemian ethic’ (Florida, 2003, p. 192). Brooks provided a superstructural description of how the differences between business people and bohemian rebels have dissolved so that each side of the divide co-opts the other side’s modus operandi and only noted in passing that this represented ‘a cultural consequence of the information age’ (Brooks, 2000, p. 10). Florida went further in supplying a deeper, infrastructural account of the socio-economic foundation of the bobo lifestyle. These people, he says, are on ‘a passionate quest for experience’ (Florida, 2003, p. 166) but they are not against working hard and making money. Their creative energy, apparently, is the driving force of wealth creation. Florida disputes Robert Putnam’s (2000) concern with social capital. Creative people are individualistic and expressive. They like ‘cool’ scenes in which to hang out and where they can interact with other similarly go-getting bobos without having to go the whole hog by actually reinventing the intimate communal ties of a passé small-town America. The Creative City This characterisation of the Creative Class is at the crux of Florida’s arguments concerning the success of certain kinds of city, which is where a fascination with his work among cultural-policy professionals comes into the picture. Place, it seems, matters in spite of the speed and convenience of remote communications across vast tracts of space that are facilitated by the Internet in a global world. It is on this basis that his work can be connected to a cultural-policy discourse of culture-led urban regeneration, though, when looked at closely, the good sense of that connection tends to diminish in plausibility. Florida, it should be noted, is not so much concerned with cultural development as with economic development. According to Florida, ‘economic growth’ derives from a felicitous combination of three factors, ‘the three T’s’: Technology, Talent and Tolerance (Florida, 2005, p. 6). As post-industrial/information-society theorists all argue, high-tech is at the


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heart of post-industrial prosperity (Webster, 2007). This tends to be closely correlated, according to the creative class thesis, with the attraction of talented people to particular places, Silicon Valley in California being an obvious example. For Florida, talent is defined simply by the possession of a bachelor’s degree, which is a rather crude calculator of talent, to say the least, in the era of massified higher education. Tolerance is also crucial to economic success in his scheme of things, though it is not quite clear why; and it tends to be found in cities like New York and Seattle. These are places that welcome diverse groups of people in terms of ethnic mix and lifestyle preferences. Especially notable in this respect is that they are Gay-friendly places. Florida produces indexes that demonstrate the concentration of Technology, Talent and Tolerance in particular city locations. For instance, he has, to quote him, ‘a Bohemian Index… a measure of the concentration of working artists, musicians, and the like in given areas’ (Florida, 2005, p. 19). To illustrate the point, he says, ‘Seattle, New York and Los Angeles top the list with more than 9 bohemians per thousand people’ (2005, p. 122). Moreover, Florida even has what he calls a ‘Coolness Index’ that correlates with all the other factors that make for successful places: ‘high-human capital individuals, particularly young ones, are drawn to places with vibrant music scenes, street-level culture, active nightlife, and other sources of “coolness”’ (2005, p. 101). In sum, then, making a not entirely logical connection from this kind of data, ‘ideas and intellectual capital have replaced natural resources and mechanical innovation as the raw material of economic growth [in] the age of creative capital’ (2005, p.144). It is important to emphasise that Florida is not really motivated at all by the usual concerns of cultural policy – such as the preservation of heritage, wider social access to cultural resources, opportunities for cultural production and the like – as with accounting for why some places are economically successful in an era of de-industrialisation in what were hitherto the leading centres of industrial production in the sense of making things, especially in the United States. And, he finds that certain kinds of lifestyle culture – what I have elsewhere called the culture of cool capitalism (McGuigan, forthcoming 2009) – contribute to economic success by attracting the agents of post-industrial wealth creation to particular places. Florida’s thinking, it is worth noting in passing, also resonates with Jeremy Rifkin’s (2000) notion of ‘cultural capitalism’, a term that was recently adopted favourably by Microsoft’s Bill Gates in his speech at the 2008 World Economic Forum. The Creative Economy Florida’s ideas are not so much an original contribution to cultural policy as consistent with certain questionable assumptions and conventional wisdoms on economic policy that come together around a notion of ‘the creative economy’. Take New Labour Britain, for example, where the government has enshrined this notion of ‘creative economy’ as a key plank of economic policy. Since this seems to enhance the role of cultural policy in governmental strategy, it has been seized upon enthusiastically as the leading justification – wealth creation - for subsidising culture. Thus, cultural policy discourse has, in effect, been infected by economistic reasoning and, indeed, turns into a branch – and a weak branch at that – of economic policy. Key here, of course, is the notion of ‘creative industries’, a term which seems first to have been used to widespread attention around the world in a British Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) document of 1998, Creative Industries - Mapping Document. The very notion of ‘creative industries’ used by that document covered an expansive range of practices, from advertising to software in general, not just practices like the arts, film and television. It was estimated in 1998 that the creative industries contributed £60 billion a year to the British economy and employed something in the


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region of one-and-a-half million people. Prophetically, the document claimed that ‘The value of the creative industries to the UK domestic product is… greater than the contribution of any of the UK’s manufacturing industry’ (Creative Industries Task Force, 1998, p. 8), though it did not cite comparative figures for either armaments or pharmaceuticals. This was an extraordinary declaration for the historical ‘workshop of the world’ and was part of a short-live rhetoric of ‘Cool Britannia’ during New Labour’s first term of office. A couple of years later, the mapping document was revised and updated. The original definition of creative industries was retained – ‘those industries which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property’ – whilst also adding ‘the close economic relationships with sectors such as tourism, hospitality, museums and galleries, heritage and sport’ (Ministerial Creative Industries Mapping Group, 2001, p. 00.05) Recently, the DCMS commissioned the Work Foundation to further develop the government’s ‘Creative Economy Programme’. The Work Foundation report, Staying Ahead, which was published in 2007, cites Richard Florida as an inspiration. His imprimatur was hardly necessary, however, since the reduction of culture to economics is such a deeply-rooted feature of hegemonic neoliberalism today. The Work Foundation report observed that the UK – or what Raymond Williams (1983) was apt to call ‘Yookay PLC’ in his more facetious moments several years ago – has the largest creative industries sector in the European Union (EU) and is arguably the largest proportionately in relation to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the whole wide world; second only to the USA in range yet much smaller in size (and hegemonic reach), of course. The creative industries are calculated to account for 7.3% of ‘gross value added (GVA)’, twice that of the tourist industry’s contribution to the British economy and 2.7% of total employment, though the percentage is higher if jobs linked but not directly involved in creative work are included, giving a grand yet vaguely computed total of 1.8 million. In actual fact, such figures are not anything like so impressive as the report makes out. Never the less, it might be argued, the calculated growth rate of 14.9% in the late 1990s, led especially by software development, gives rather more convincing support to the claim that the creative industries are at the cutting edge of the economy as a whole. Still, a certain measure of scepticism is called for, especially considering that the largest industrial sectors in Britain include armaments, finance and pharmaceuticals, making up a much larger part of the economy than the creative industries; and of which none are noticeably in decline. In addition to establishing the quantifiable facts, the Work Foundation report is devoted to identifying what it calls ‘the ‘drivers’ of ‘the creative economy’ – such as stimulating demand and providing education and skills – and what the government can do to oil these drivers. According to the report, ‘Creativity and innovation are overlapping concepts’ ((Work Foundation, 2007, p. 6). Also, the creative industries are integral to ‘a paradigm shift’ towards ‘the knowledge economy’ and the development of a ‘new class of consumers’ (p. 117). Typical of the Work Foundation’s rhetoric is the following claim: ‘Creative origination is sparked by challenges to existing routines, lifestyles, protocols and ways of doing things and where societies want to experiment with the new’ (p. 18). Furthermore, ‘expressive value’ is said to be the fundamental source of value in the world. The purpose of cultural industries - and, more broadly, creative industries – is to commercialise expressive value; hence the importance of exploiting intellectual property rights in order to ‘grow’ the business of a country: ‘The business model of the creative industries depends significantly on their capacity to copyright expressive value’ (p 23).


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Staying Ahead addresses the thorny problem of definition and explains why it is necessary to expand the definition of cultural industries into the all-encompassing idea of creative industries in spite of the fact that advertising and art are not necessarily the same kind of thing. A diagram to illustrate what is at stake is helpfully provided.

(p. 103) At the centre – or ‘core’ – of the diagram, copyrightable expressive value, the object of ‘cultural industries’, is illustrated with a list of typical examples, including quite reasonably, no doubt, video games. Circling further out are the ‘creative industries’, including design and software other than video games, that is, rather more ‘functional’ entities; and constituting ‘an important bridge to the wider economy’ (p. 106). This circle represents the mediation between ‘cultural industries’ and ‘the rest of the economy’, illustrated by ‘the emotional ergonomics of the Apple iPod and Dyson’s vacuum cleaner or the “retailment” of service, eg Virgin Atlantic and BA’. Quite apart from the questionable choice of examples and infelicitous use of language, as the modeling of an economy, it is rather hard to take such an implausible scheme seriously. Are the creative industries – not to mention the cultural industries – being asked to do too much here? There is a pervasive blurring of categories – indeed, a category error - going on and excessive fuzzy reasoning in the construction of this model. Another currently fashionable example of such confusion is the argument that ‘creativity’ in artistic practice and business management are roughly the same kind of thing (Bilton, 2007). Moreover, in ‘the creative economy’, economy seems to be swallowing up creativity whole rather like a Pac-Man on the loose. It is tempting to agree with Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson’s (2007, p. 92) summary judgment on creative economy rhetoric: ‘Bullshit Britain reaches its apotheosis in the lionization of the cultural industries’. The Fallacies of Economistic Cultural Policy To reiterate, Florida’s principal concerns are not to do with cultural policy as such but instead are about the articulation of neoliberal economics with cool culture. This is also


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true of the Work Foundation’s 2007 report and the discourse of the creative economy promoted by the British government in the mid 2000s. That chain of reasoning, which I have traced here, is only apparently a matter of specifically cultural policy. In consequence, I would argue, it is a fatal error on the part of agents of cultural policy in Britain – and elsewhere – to align themselves uncritically with this discourse of the creative economy, which I have sought to show is associated with the thesis of a creative class and, by implication, a particular set of class interests. Economistic cultural policy, then, is connected to a dubious set of political and, indeed, sociological assumptions that can be questioned on many different grounds. The context that has fertilised this set of assumptions is that of de-industrialisation in the formerly ‘industrial’ societies and a neoliberal regeneration strategy that is represented by an ideological rhetoric that is variously named, ‘post-industrialism’, ‘information society’, ‘knowledge society’ and, fairly recently, ‘cultural capitalism’. Like all powerful ideological forces, this complex of ideas is not entirely false. It relates to certain realities, most notably the transfer of certain kinds of work from high-wage to low-wage economies and the globalisation of economic process, informational and cultural exchange. Putting it crudely, stuff is designed and marketed in what are still comparatively high-wage parts of the world and made in low-wage parts of the world where the conditions of work are appalling. It is all coordinated by fast communications. Uncritical acceptance of this state of affairs anywhere is ethically questionable and – more consequential - politically unstable. It is quite reasonable that socially and culturally responsible people wherever they are may be keen to ameliorate the situation for their own people with, say, vocational training for the newer economic realities, strategies for reviving run-down places and staking claims on resources for making life pleasurable and meaningful. Urban regeneration strategies are typical manifestations of this reasonableness. And, it is not unusual for culture to be latched onto as the panacea for a whole plethora of woes in particular places. It is extremely doubtful, however, that culture can solve deep-seated economic and political problems in places suffering from routine forms of creative destruction. Unfortunately, this mistaken assumption has distracted exponents of cultural policy from their principal concerns, which are probably best summed up as attempts to offer something different and better for most people than the usual produce of cool capitalism. REFERENCES BILTON, C. (2007) Management and Creativity – From Creative Industries to Creative Management, Blackwell, Oxford. BOURDIEU, P. (1984 [1979]) Distinction – A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Routledge, London. BROOKS, D. (2000) Bobos in Paradise – The New Upper Class and How They Got There, Simon & Schuster, New York. CREATIVE INDUSTRIES TASK FORCE (1998) Creative Industries – Mapping Document, Department for Culture, Media and Sport, London. DJILAS, M. (1966 [1957]) The New Class – An Analysis of the Communist System, Unwyn, London. ELLIOTT, L. & D. ATKINSON (2007), Fantasy Island – Waking Up to the Incredible Economic, Political and Social Illusions of the Blair Legacy, Constable, London. FLORIDA, R. (2003 [2002]) The Rise of the Creative Class – And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life, Pluto, Melbourne. FLORIDA, R. (2005) Cities and the Creative Class, Routledge, London. McGUIGAN, J. (2009 forthcoming) Cool Capitalsm, Pluto, London.


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MINISTERIAL CREATIVE INDUSTRIES MAPPING GROUP (2001) Creative Industries – Mapping Document, Department for Culture, Media and Sport, London. PUTNAM, R. (2000) Bowling Alone – The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Simon & Schuster, New York. RIFKIN, J. (2000) The Age of Access – How the Shift from Ownershio to Access is Transforming Capitalism, Penguin, London. WEBSTER, F. (2007 3rd edn) Theories of the Information Society, Routledge, London. WILLIAMS, R. (1983) Towards 2000, Chatto & Windus, London. WORK FOUNDATION (2007) Staying Ahead – The Economic Performance of the UK’s Creative Industries, Work Foundation/DCMS, London. Jim McGuigan, Professor of Cultural Analysis, Department of Social Science, Loughborough University, Loughborough, Leicestershire, England, LE11 3TU UK Tel. +44 (0)1509 228357 Fax. +44 (0)1509 223944 E-mail [email protected]

‘doing a florida thing

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