ABSTRACT
It’s been nearly two decades since Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class became a runaway bestseller in announcing that one in three Americans worked in creative fields. Florida overreached in making this claim by including many quasi-artistic fields in his calculus. Nevertheless, he launched a revolution in a nation anxious about declining employment. Online creativity quickly became part of the buzz, encompassing everything from blogging to online retail. City planners soon saw the gentrifying potential of the creative class, as factory neighborhoods were overtaken by bohemian cafés and internet start-ups. Countries around the world jumped on the bandwagon by promoting local culture and national heritage. Recent reports from UNESCO now estimate $2.25 trillion (yes, trillion) is generated annually worldwide through performing arts, radio, music, books, newspapers and magazines, film, television, architecture, gaming, and advertising. Critics Luc Boltanski, Ève Chiapello, Pascal Gielen, Max Haiven, and Angela McRobbie see this creative explosion as an extension of neoliberal agendas, extending premises of bureaucratic rationalism first advanced by early sociologists like Karl Marx and Max Weber.
