International Journal of Cultural Policy

Vol. 15, No. 3, August 2009, 291300

Doing a Florida thing: the creative class thesis and cultural policy
Jim McGuigan*

Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, Loughborough LE11 3TU, UK

International
10.1080/10286630902763281
GCUL_A_376498.sgm
1028-6632
Original
Taylor
302009
15
Professor
j.t.mcguigan@lboro.ac.uk
000002009
&
and
Article
Francis
JimMcGuigan
(print)/1477-2833
Francis
Journal of Cultural
(online)
Policy

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. This paper
addresses the following questions: What are the theoretical assumptions underpinning
Floridas arguments? Is the evidence upon which these arguments are substantiated
sound? What are the implications of Floridas thesis for cultural policy? A critical
reading of Floridas key writings is presented. The paper also comments on the impact
of Floridas work around the world and focuses upon a particularly significant policy
document in Britain, the Work Foundations Staying Ahead The Economic
Performance of the UKs 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. The paper reflects upon the synthesis of cultural policy
with economic policy and argues that this is not the best way forward for the politics of
art and culture in the twenty-first century.
Keywords: cool capitalism; creative class; creative economy; creative industries;
neoliberalism

Introduction
A few years ago, on a lecture tour of Australia and New Zealand, whilst at Canberra, I
received an email 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 guru, 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,

*Email: j.t.mcguigan@lboro.ac.uk

ISSN 1028-6632 print/ISSN 1477-2833 online

2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/10286630902763281
http://www.informaworld.com
292 J. McGuigan

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 Floridas 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 Floridas 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 Floridas pronouncements with
regard to their theoretical assumptions, empirical evidence and implications for cultural
policy.
It is perhaps surprising that Floridas work should have been taken so seriously by some
cultural policy scholars (e.g. Billie 2008), especially considering the fact that he is not much
if at all interested in cultural policy itself. Floridas theorising is derivative of post-industrial
theory, which is at least 50 years old and was given its fullest enunciation in Daniel Bells
(1976 [1973]) The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting and
acknowledged by Florida himself:
Weve effectively become the post-industrial society that Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell
predicted in the 1970s, hinging our prosperity on the growth of a knowledge class, reliant on
science to bring forth innovation and social change, and more dependent on services than
goods. (2008, p. 103)

Floridas ideas or, rather, buzzwords make little in the way of an original contribution
to such questionable thought and the specious arguments he repeats constantly are either
seriously flawed or merely trite. Although Florida combines ideas from the sociology of
culture with post-industrial theory, in fact, his work is not so much that of a social theorist
or a cultural researcher as a knowledge entrepreneur, skilled at combining the ideas of
others and artful at drawing attention to his not entirely original insights and marketing
them as consultancy. He is currently a professor at the Rotman School of Management,
University of Toronto, having moved there from George Mason University in Washington
in 2007. His principal source of income, however, probably derives from his consultancy
firm, the Creative Class Group, where his many clients range from Absolut Vodka through
BBC Creativity and Audiences, Citigroup Investment Inc., Esquire Magazine, Goldman
Sachs, IBM and Microsoft to a number of city and indeed national governments, including
Dublin, San Diego, Seattle, Toronto, Washington and, of course, New Zealand. Whatever
we might wish to say for and against the relation between research and consultancy, it is
evident that Floridas work is driven by consultancy rather than by research as such; and,
indeed, consultancy of a rather promiscuous kind. According to its website, the Creative
Class Group: offers regions, companies and associations the customized information, anal-
ysis, tools and research necessary for competitiveness and greater economic prosperity
(Creative Class Group 2008). It is not surprising that some are inclined to view Florida as a
busy, globetrotting trader in a good old American product, snake oil, instead of a serious
scholar with some genuine wisdom to impart for cultural policy.

The creative class

Floridas (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 the communist dissident, 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. In Djilass thesis, a new class was
 International Journal of Cultural Policy 293

identified as a power bloc, the party nomenklatura. Florida discerns the emergence of a
specifically middle-class formation (a power bloc?), rather more reminiscent, however, of
Pierre Bourdieus (1984 [1979]) new petite bourgeoisie, the significance of which Florida
both oversimplifies and exaggerates. Bourdieus new petite bourgeoisie was famously
characterised by him as consisting of all the occupations involving presentation and repre-
sentation (1984, p. 359). They include the cultural intermediaries of advertising, journal-
ism, 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 Bourdieus terms, engaged in a struggle for distinction. Their strat-
egy 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 Floridas creative class is a much broader formation
than even Bourdieus new petite bourgeoisie, 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 11.7% of the US
workforce. Super Creatives range from artists and educators through somewhat less obvi-
ously super creative in an artistic sense librarians, scientists, engineers and computer
and mathematical occupations (Florida 2003, p. 330). So, even the 11% calculation might
be considered a little exaggerated. The rest the Creative Professionals, making up 18.3%
of the US workforce 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 (26.1% of the workforce),
according to Florida, whereas there are 55.3 million Service Class workers, 43% of the
workforce, which is a much more meaningful indication of post-industrialism than a dubi-
ously 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 Brookss typification of the bobo the bourgeois
bohemian and calls it the Big Morph whereby there is a new resolution of the centu-
ries-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 sides 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 founda-
tion of the bobo lifestyle. These people, he says, are on a passionate quest for experience
294 J. McGuigan

(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 in the world today, not
the people who actually make things. Florida disputes Robert Putnams (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 pass small-town America.

The creative city

This characterisation of the Creative Class is at the crux of Floridas arguments concerning
the success of certain kinds of city, which is where a fascination with his work amongst
cultural-policy professionals comes into the picture. In this sense, Floridas work is readily
taken to resonate with that of Charles Landry and Franco Bianchini (1995) on the creative
city, which has been especially influential in Europe. However, as has already been
suggested, a principal concern with cultural policy, which certainly characterises
Bianchinis work, is not actually a motivating factor shared by Florida, who is much more
concerned, in effect, with economic policy and how it may be enhanced by cultural means,
thus reducing culture to economics. Place, it seems, matters today for economic
development though it is hard to imagine that was ever in doubt in spite of the speed
and convenience of remote communications across vast tracts of space facilitated by the
Internet in a global world. It is on this basis that Floridas 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 is necessary to stress yet again, is not so much concerned with cultural devel-
opment as with economic development. According to Florida, economic growth derives
from a felicitous combination of three factors, the three Ts: Technology, Talent and
Tolerance (Florida 2005, p. 6). As post-industrial/information-society theorists all argue,
high-tech is at the 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 bachelors 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 nine 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).
 International Journal of Cultural Policy 295

Florida is a writer who misses no tricks in the literary marketplace of knowledge. He is

adept at popularising his ideas, down to writing advice books for go-getting bobos about
the virtues of personal mobility. His latest book, Whos Your City? How the Creative
Economy is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision in Your Life (Florida
2008), largely repeats, like all his books, what he has said ad infinitum elsewhere but with
an added spin. This particular text reads like a meta-estate agents guide for bobos. The use
of You is very significant. It is an advice book, indicating where it would be lucrative and
comforting to live. In order to get on it might be best to move, to go where the networking
is better and the amusements are to your taste; somewhere like Toronto. Such advice reso-
nates with Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapellos ideal figure of the new spirit of capitalism,
the network-extender (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005 [1999], p. 390). As Boltanski and
Chiapello remark, Great men do not stand still. Little men remain rooted to the spot (p.
361). This mobile/immobile differential is relational in Boltanski and Chiapellos
account: the mobility of some is facilitated by the immobility of others.
It is important to emphasise that Florida is not really motivated at all by the usual
concerns of cultural policy or at least the normative concerns of agents of cultural policy
hitherto to list some obvious ones, 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 USA. And, he finds that certain kinds of lifestyle culture what I have
elsewhere called the culture of cool capitalism (McGuigan 2009) contribute to economic
success by attracting the agents of post-industrial wealth creation to particular places.
Floridas thinking, it is worth noting in passing, also resonates with Jeremy Rifkins (2000)
notion of cultural capitalism. This is a way of thinking that also characterises Bill Gatess
latest pronouncements. In his speech at the 2008 World Economic Forum, the founder of
Microsoft spoke of creative capitalism, though he was anxious, as well, to stress the nodal
importance of self-interest and the magic wand of financialisation as the driving forces of
wealth creation today (Gates 2008). This is not the place to discuss the downside of
financialisation, which is something that we have all experienced rather dramatically in the
recent period. More germane here, with regard to cultural policy, is the buzzword,
creativity.

The creative economy

Floridas 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 Docu-
ment. 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,
296 J. McGuigan

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 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 UKs
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-lived rhetoric
of Cool Britannia during New Labours 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 govern-
ments 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, which is hardly a
rhetorical overstatement in the circumstances, has been such a deeply rooted feature of
hegemonic neoliberalism since the 1970s.
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 industrys 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. Nevertheless, 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 were
noticeably in decline until the cataclysm of 2008 when the sub-prime spark of the
previous year in the USA finally blew up the tinder box of the international financial
system, impacting hugely on places like the City of London, not to mention the rest of us
wherever we are.
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 Foundations rhetoric is the following claim: Creative
origination is sparked by challenges to existing routines, lifestyles, protocols and ways of
 International Journal of Cultural Policy 297

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).
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 Dysons vacuum cleaner or the retailment
of service, e.g. Virgin Atlantic and BA. Quite apart from the questionable choice of exam-
ples and infelicitous use of language, as the modelling 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). More-
over, in the creative economy, economy seems to be swallowing up creativity whole
298 J. McGuigan

rather like a Pac-Man on the loose. It is tempting to agree with Larry Elliott and Dan
Atkinsons (2007, p. 92) summary judgment on creative economy rhetoric: Bullshit
Britain reaches its apotheosis in the lionization of the cultural industries. Bullshit is not
an unknown phenomenon in academic discourse (see Belfiore 2008) and especially in its
degenerate branch of knowledge entrepreneurship that so infects the field of cultural-policy
research.

The fallacies of economistic cultural policy

To reiterate, Floridas 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 true
of the Work Foundations 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 and, indeed, tangentially 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 and a reading of the world which has long
been questionable and especially so since the crisis of virtual capitalism in the sense of the
ruses of finance capital and hence of real, that is, neoliberal capitalism in the recent
period.
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 has not been 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 appall-
ing. It is all coordinated by fast communications. The general process has already been
named in the field of cultural-policy studies by Toby Miller and George Yudice (2002) as
the new international division of cultural labour (NICL), a sub-category of the new inter-
national division of labour in general. The effects of the NICL have been traced by them in
several cases around the world. Uncritical acceptance of this state of affairs anywhere,
which can be extremely exploitative, is ethically questionable and more consequential
politically unstable. Students of cultural policy should instead of succumbing to reductively
economistic discourse be concerned not only with the conditions of labour in general
throughout the world, like any responsible citizen, but also quite particularly, for this field
of enquiry, with the actual conditions of cultural labour that have suffered likewise from
what may become, perhaps over the next few years, an increasingly delegitimised way of
running the world (see McGuigan, forthcoming).
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 strate-
gies are typical manifestations of this reasonableness. And, it is not unusual for culture to
 International Journal of Cultural Policy 299

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 facilitate something differ-
ently pleasurable and meaningfully better for most people than the usual produce of cool
capitalism.

Acknowledgements
I should like to thank Michael Volkerling for alerting me to the Florida craze and Jen Webb for
correcting my initial mistake concerning it. I should also like to thank Kevin Mulcahy for his
constructive and helpful remarks on my paper at the International Conference on Cultural Policy
Research at Istanbul in August 2008 and for his more generally entertaining contribution to that
conference.

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