My latest print piece is out today. It was intended to be another, clearer - and hopefully less negative - piece inspired by the Creative Places and Spaces conference. But who knows? It mostly ended up being about Richard Florida.

When Florida speaks of the need to involve everyone in generating wealth, especially workers, it’s perfectly genuine.

But can’t we do better than “wealth”? He relates a conversation with an executive from Toyota, which was opening factories in the Midwest while the Big Three were shuttering theirs. “’We harness the creativity of each of the workers on our factory floor,’” the exec told Florida, who elaborates: “The workers themselves form teams; they improve the process themselves without an engineer telling them what to do.”

In other words, new responsibility flowed downward. But I’ll bet you clunkers to cash that the new profits still flowed upward. That’s “collaboration?” In my day we called it exploitation. And we said it over the telephone. And the phone had a cord.

I would very much like to like Richard Florida. Honestly. He occupies a somewhat undefined - and therefore potentially powerful - space. I’m just never sure who it is he thinks he’s speaking to; and call me old-school, but I don’t think you get to talk about some vaunted “creative class” until you’ve proven you can actually talk about class, period.

In one way, he reminds me of McLuhan: it seems as though he’d like to be working with activists, yet it’s mostly businesspeople who have any idea what to do with him. (The difference, of course, is no one ever had any idea what to do with McLuhan, even if they thought they did.)

Tags: Creative Class, Richard Florida

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 1:56 pm and is filed under Class, Columns, Globalization, Urbanism, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.