Florida - The Rise of the Creative Class Exzerpt
Aus Leowiki
Florida, R. (2002): The Rise of the Creative Class …and how it’s transforming work, leisure, community & everyday life. New York: Basic Books
“Human creativity is the ultimate economic resource” (p. xiii)
„Creativity – ‘the ability to create meaningful new forms,’ As Webster’s dictionary puts it – is now the decisive source of competitive advantage. In virtually every industry, from automobiles to fashion, food products, and information technology itself, the winners in the long run are those who can create and keep creating.” (p. 5; italics by the author)
“With no big company to provide security, we bear much more risk than the corporate and working classes of the organizational age did.” (p. 10)
“The nation’s geographic center of gravity has shifted away from traditional industrial regions toward new axes of creativity and innovation.” (p. 11)
“While the no-collar workplace certainly appears more causal than the old, it replaces traditional hierarchical systems of control with new forms of self-management, peer recognition and pressure and intrinsic forms of motivation, which I call soft control.” (p. 13; italics by the author)
“As the Stanford University economist Paul Romer likes to say, the big advances in standard of living – not to mention the big competitive advantages in the marketplace – always have come from ‘better recipies, not just more cooking.’” (p. 21)
“The creative process is social, not just individual, and thus forms of organization are necessary.” (p. 22)
“Creativity involves the ability to synthesize. Einstein captured it nicely when he called his own work ‘combinatory play’. It is a matter of sifting through data, perceptions and materials to come up with combinations that are new and useful.” (p. 31; italics by the author)
“And so through history practitioners of the different forms of creativity have tended to congregate and feed off one another in teeming, multifaceted creative centers – Florence in the early Renaissance; Vienna in the late 1800s and early 1900s; the many fast-growing creative centers across the United States today.” (p. 33; Anm.: vgl. Paul Graham’s Bezug auf Florenz und seine Maler)
„Creativity is largely driven by intrinsic rewards. Surely some creative people are driven by money, but studies find that truly creative individuals from artists and writers to scientists and open-source software developers are driven primarily by internal motivations.” (p. 34)
“Thus a continued outpouring of creativity ‘cannot and should not be taken for granted,’ Mokyr warns – even today.” (p. 35; Anm.: vgl. Das Problem zu restriktiver intellectual property rights regimes)
“A good idea, like the concept of the wheel, ‘can be used over an over again’ and in fact grows in value the more it is used. It offers not diminishing returns, but increasing returns.” (p. 36; italics by the author)
“But as Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig has powerfully argued, our penchant for overprotecting and overlitigating intellectual property may well serve to constrain and limit the creative impulse.” (p. 37)
“The image of the factory as an arena only for rote physical labor was always wrong. It never gave a complete picture of the economic activity that went on inside. Workers always used their intellect and creative capabilities to get things done.” (p. 39)
“Creativity comes from individuals working in small groups, which Brown and Duguid refer to as ‘communities of practice. These communities emphasize exploration and discovery […] But to link these communities to one another, transfer knowledge, achieve scale and generate growth requires process and structure. Practice without process becomes unmanageable, but process without practice damps out the creativity required for innovation; the two sides exist in perpetual tension.” (p. 41)
“These industries produce intellectual property in the form of patents, copyrights, trademarks and proprietary designs.” (p. 46)
“Paul Romer has argued that ‘the most important ideas of all are meta-ideas,’ which are ‘ideas about how to support the production and transmission of other ideas.’” (p. 48)
“As Schumpeter noted long ago, people with ideas need money to turn those ideas into business.” (p. 49)
“Venture capital and high-tech industries reinforced each other’s growth. […] The reason for this pattern was that venture capital, by itself, did not produce home-grown innovation.” (p. 50-51)
“The main point I want to make here is that the basis of the Creative Class is economic. I define it as an economic class and argue that its economic function both underpins and informs its members’ social, cultural and lifestyle choices.” (p. 68)
“Creative Core […] Along with problem solving, their work may entail problem finding: not just bulding a better mousetrap, but noticing first that a better mousetrap would be a handy thing to have.” (p. 69)
“While money may be looked upon as a marker of achievement, it is not the whole story.” (p. 78; Anm.: vgl. Schumpeters (1934, p. 93) fast wortgleiches Zitat)
“But meritocracy also has its dark side. Qualities that confer merit, such as technical knowledge and mental discipline, are socially acquired and cultivated. Yet those who have these qualities may easily start thinking they were born with them, or acquired them all on their own, or that others just ‘don’t have it’” (p. 78)
“Diversity can be a signal of meritocratic norms at work. Talented people defy classification based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference or appearance.” (p. 79)
“Yet but passion for what? There is no one-sice-fits-all answer. Passion varies because people are different.” (p. 88)
“In a small firm, everyone counts.” (p. 92; Anm.: vgl. Paul Grahams Betonung der Dynamik in start-ups sowie ähnliche Dynamiken in politischen Basisgruppen bzw. grassroot-movements.)
„As Eric Ramond notes, peer recognition and reputation provide powerful sources of motivation for open source software developers. […] The only difference [to academic science] is that open source software is a commercial activity. […] The fun is the work itself - and this, I think, is a key element of the passion that Eric Raymond talks about. Can this passion come dangerously close to workaholism? Of course it can.” (p. 95; Anm.: vgl. Hirschman 1982)
“As Eric Raymond said, pay is essentially just a way to keep score. But Peter Drucker said it even better: bribing creative people just won’t work.” (p. 99)
“This is exactly the situation to which many are reverting today: finding our identities elsewhere than in the firm.” (p. 109)
“Once again, what appears to be self-undulgence (to conservatives) or new tactics of corporate oppression (to liberals) in fact turns out to be the result of the rational evolution of economic forces.” (p. 114; Anm.: zweifelhafte Formulerung bzw. Zweifelhaftes Verständnis von “rational”)
Absatz über fehlende Protestbereitschaft in den 1990ern (p.115).
„I particularly like Drucker’s observations that the key to motivation creative people is to treat them as ‚de facto volunteers,’ tied to the firm by commitment to ist aims and purposes, and often expecting to participate in ist administration and ist governance. ‘”hat motivates knowledge workers,’ writes Drucker, ‘is what motivates volunteers.” (p. 133; Anm.: erneut parallelen zu politischen Grassroot-Bewegungen)
“One very effective form of soft control is challenge.” (p. 134)
“The Open Source Exampel” (p. 136 ff.)
“In his research tracking 13.000 open source developers, the economist Josh Lerner of the Harvard Business School found that less than one-tenth of 1 percent of them contributed nearly three-quarters of all code. Nearly three-fourths made only one contribution. […] Open source software development thus relies on the intrinsic motivations of volunteers. […] The work which is complex and difficult, is rewarded largely by peer recognition as opposed to financial compensation.” (p. 137; Anm.: In dieser Analyse ist ein Widerspruch zwischen den geringen Beiträgen der großen Mehrheit und der Erklärung der Beiträge über Anerkennung, vgl. Ortmann 2004)
„the open source model reflects two other core values of the Creative Economy: openness to new ideas and meritocracy.“ (p. 138)
“As Andrew Ross has noted, the New Economy redirected a powerful passion for change away from social and political issues and directly into the business world itself. […] In propagating the myth of the New Economy as a social force, this period raised people’s expectations about what they wanted in a company and a job. As Ross sums it up: ‘ One of the most interesting stories is about the role of young people. How their passion for change, which is endemic to youth in general, somehow got channelled into a passion for corporate change.’ […] As countless people in my focus groups and interviews have told me, they made these moves in the hopes of being part of a different, more inclusive, more progressive culture. Most of them, however, were quickly disappointed.” (p. 141; Anm.: vgl. Hirschman 1982)
“It is not just a scene but many: a music scene, an art scene, a film scene, outdoor recreation scene, nightlife scene, and so on – all reinforcing one another. “ (p. 183)
“The street scene is eclectic. This is another part of its appeal. Consider that eclecticism is also a strong theme within many of today’s art forms.” (p. 185)
Parallele zu Ortmanns (1997) “Kleist-Theorem” (p. 186)
“In realtiy, the rise of the Creative Economy is drawing the spheres of innovation (technological creativity), business (economic creativity) and culture (artistic and cultural creativity) into one another, in more intimate and more powerful combinations than ever.” (p. 201)
“Homebrew Club members, many with their own tenuously financed garage firms, feely traded ideas and designs without worrying overly much about competitive consideration - a ‘hacker ethic’ that would persist in the open source software community and elsewhere.” (p. 205)
“I noticed that the Creative Class people I was interviewing, particularly the younger ones, did not like to be called Bobos – and they bridled at the suggestion that they ware in any way bohemian. […] They also disliked terms like ‘alternative’. Thus the real issue came out. Bohemians are alienated people, living in the culture but not of it, and these people didn’t see themselves that way – not even the immigrants who really were aliens.” [p. 210;
“There is much to gain economically from being an open, inclusive and diverse community.” (p. 266)
“Rather, they desired what I have come to call quasi-anonymity. In the terms of modern sociology, these people prefer weak ties to strong.” (p. 269; italics by author)
“The exclusionary side of social capital remains with us today.” (p. 272)
“The bottom line is that cities need a people climate even more than they need a business climate.” (p. 283; italics by author)
“As Mancur Olson noted in his classic book The Logic of Collective Action, those who organize around descrete goals with sustained effort have a great advantage over those who have strong interests but are diffuse and disorganized. […] To be effective, the Creative Class may ultimately have to invent new forms of collective action. I doubt that its members could ever form a unionlike organization […] or a traditional party […] The members of the Creative Class are too disparate to be herded together in such fashion.” (p. 317)
“Unlike traditionals factors of production such as land or capital, creativity cannot be passed down from generation to generation. It has to be constantly fermented and reproduced in the firms, places and societies that use it.” (p. 318; Anm.: Naja, das Vererben geht sehr wohl, wie ja die erste Welt zeigt. Es ist nur nicht so trivial wie bei einem Traktor)
“By adding to the stock of creative capital, they increase wealth and incomes substantially and generate jobs for people across the classes.” (p. 320)
“When the nature of the economy has changed, old institutions stop working.” (p. 323)
