Creative class
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The creative class is a group of people that Carnegie Mellon University social scientist Richard Florida believes are a key driving force for economic development of post-industrial cities in the USA.
The "Creative Class" concept is controversial, as is Florida's methodology. He breaks the Class into two broad sections, derived from standard SOC codes data sets:
- Creative Professionals: "Knowledge workers" and expanding to include financial planners, doctors and lawyers.
- Super-Creative Core: This comprises about twelve percent of all U.S. jobs. This group is deemed to contain a huge range of occupations (e.g. architecture, education, sports) with arts, design, and media workers making a small subset.
Background
The creative class has been on the rise for the past 30 years. Ever since the 1970s the economy has been one dominated by industry and digital technology. In the 1980s and 1990s the United States economy has especially boomed in technology growth due to information technology and the Internet. Technology especially boomed in cities like California's Silicon Valley and Boston’s Route 128. The rise in jobs in the creative class is due largely to the fact that machines are taking over the drudgery of the work place leaving room for more creative jobs. More leisure time is expected as its citizens expect the "good life". Due to affluence, creative jobs are appealing as it provides a comfortable work environment and they are more interesting jobs.
Creative class occupations
The creative class is a class of workers whose job is to create meaningful new forms. The creative class is composed of scientists and engineers, university professors, poets and architects, to name a few. Their designs are widely transferable and useful on a broad scale, as with products that are sold and used on a wide scale. Another sector of the creative class includes those positions which are knowledge intensive. These careers usually require a high degree of formal education. Examples of this sector are health professionals and business management. Their main job is to think and to create new standard approaches for fixing the problem at hand. Creativity is becoming more valued in today’s global society. Employers look at creativity as a channel for self expression and job satisfaction in their employees. 38.3 million Americans and 30% of the workforce in America identify themselves with the creative class. This number has increased more than 10% in the past twenty years. In short they are shaping a new culture for the America of the 21st century. Paradoxically according to [a study by the Victoria University of Wellington], the importance of creativity has dropped relative to other factors in the hiring of new employees.
The creative class and the global economy
The creative class is not a class of workers amongst many but in reality it is the class that will bring any country who has them to great economic power and growth. The main advantage to a creative class is that it creates outcomes in new ideas, high-tech industry and regional growth. Even though the creative class has been around for centuries, the U.S. was the first large country to have this creative class that deals with information technology in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1960s less than five percent of the U.S. population was part of the creative class which is now 26%. Seeing that having a strong creative class is vital in today’s global economy, Europe is now almost equal with America's numbers for this class. Competition has developed as to who can attract the creative class to their cities.
Places of high creative class populations
Those cities which attract and retain the creative class prosper while those that do not stagnate. Cities like Buffalo, New Orleans and Louisville are examples of those which have tried to attract the creative class but in comparison to more diverse cities have failed. The creative class is looking for cities that are more tolerant, diverse and open to creativity, cities like San Francisco, Austin and Seattle. There is a strong correlation between those cities and states which allow more gay marriages and musicians, for example, and the amount of the creative class that live there. With the emergence of this class, it is no longer a geographical context as to where to live in relation to weather like the Sunbelt or Frostbelt or East Coast versus West Coast, but rather the cultural diversity of a city and the class divisions that have separated neighborhoods by income.
Downsides of Creative Jobs
In today’s society more jobs require creative thought, not just artistic jobs like musicians and painters but also in an emerging job class called the creative class. Jobs are becoming deprofessionalized. Even though the undergraduate students that make up this creative class are able to find more job opportunities due to increasing necessity their acceptance in society as a high class worker is decreasing due to deprofessionalization. A college education used to mean that a person had a professional status amongst other professionals.
External link
References
- On the Poverty of Experts: Between Academization and Deprofessionalization. Hartmann, Heinz, Hartmann, Marianne. 1982, vol 34, iss 2, pg 193
- Ray, Paul H. and Sherry Ruth Anderson. The Cultural Creative. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2000
Web References
- Cleveland, Harlan. “After Affluence, What?”. October 1977. Aspen Instit Humanistic Studies November 3, 2005. [link]
- Saenz, Tara Keniry. “Portraits of U.S. High-Technology Metros: Income Stratification of Occupational Groups from 1980-2000”. March 2005. U Texas, Austin November 31, 2005. [link]
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