Creative Class

About 14 months into the downturn in Canada, about 20 months in the U.S.A., and I’ve been examining how the recession has affected workplaces and what some longer-term implications may be. Today, I offer a Canadian perspective. I invite you to add your own. Next week I’ll try to create an American list, or compare and contrast the recessionary experience in the two countries.

Four ways the recession may have changed creative class workplaces in Canada

1. The rapid spiral from booming economy to downturn in the fall of 2008 both forced and allowed many companies to re-focus, fast. Many quickly removed employees not seen as having a long-term future with the firm; they also sharpened scrutiny on various business lines or projects, canceling those not deemed likely to be profitable in the short term. In Canada, economists now say the job shedding happened much faster than in past recessions.
2. For some employees, the “golden hand cuffs” came off and they have had an opportunity to move. For staff with bonuses tied to the profits of particular projects or the company generally, a down year can mean you’re not leaving as much money on the table if you quit. The significant increase in self-employed workers is likely a consequence of this. People are going out on their own.
3. The government “may” start to recognize that North American economic future is in knowledge-work, high technology, more than old-style industrial manufacturing. In Toronto there are now more jobs in the Finance Insurance Real Estate sector (FIRE) than manufacturing (324,000 vs 316,000), and by early 2010 there will likely be more in Professional Scientific & Technical Services as well (at 315,000 now).  Already, the financial services industry in Toronto has created an alliance to educate and lobby the government to provide a further boost to this successful sector.
4. As in the U.S., women’s jobs have tended to be less affected by the recession, which hit manufacturing and resource industries harder than service and knowledge work. This may be the start of a big shift in how families with children live and work as well.

What else?

I thought in my first blog post for CCE I should give props to Richard for helping me get to this point. I first met Richard in 2003 when he came to speak in Tampa, Florida for the first time. I had read TROCC at the suggestion of my wife (at the time), Michelle Bauer, who was the executive director of the Tampa Bay Technology Forum. They were part of a unique coalition of groups that brought Richard to Tampa.  Also key in the process were the Tampa Chamber of Commerce, the Arts Council, and Workforce Tampa.  Getting these four entities to agree on one speaker truly was historic!

TROCC and Richard’s talk got me excited about ideas in a way that I had not been excited by ideas since college. It spoke to how I worked, how I thought about my life and my community. I suspect I am not alone in this capacity. I got to know Richard and his former associate Rod Frantz and we became friends, conspirators, and colleagues.  Creative Tampa Bay was founded in 2004 and took up the mission of developing the creative economy in the region. I became its second president and within two years I had the honor of sharing a stage with Richard in Perth, Australia, where we talked about the impact of his work on communities like mine.

Richard’s work shifted the direction of my own work and has led me to other incredible thinkers and practitioners in this arena such as Charles Landry, John Howkins, and Carol Coletta. In true creative class fashion, I have been able to create my own career and am doing work I love.  Richard had a direct influence on that, and for that, I will always be grateful.

I’m sure that some people are just now recovering from the collaboration celebration par excellance that was the Creative Places + Spaces conference.  For those keeping track, this was my first “work-conference” (ooooooh!). For whatever reason it actually does make a difference somewhat.

Anyways, it was a pretty dizzying few days with incredible addresses from minds ranging from Toronto’s Poet Laureate Pier Giorgio Di Cicco challenging us to make the fabric of the city more like that of the family, to Cirque du Soleil’s Excutive Producer Lyn Heward taking us on a magic carpet ride to the seven doors of collaborative process.  There were more focused nuts and bolts type sessions on the second day, but in general it was like getting bowled over with good-idea-about-working-with-others after good-idea-about-working-with-others for three days, with peaks here or there depending on what you’re into, and more nudity than can be casually explained, even with Spencer Tunick in the house. Summaries are abound.

I personally had a few highlights:

• As much hyperbole as you might feel there was about Sir Ken Robinson, the man delivers when on stage. This is one wickedly funny, wickedly smart man.
• Favorite/Best Collaboration (in my books) goes to St. Michaels Hospital, the NFB and film maker Katerina Cizek for their exhaustively deep Filmmaker-in-Residence. How do you remake the form and process of documentary to be an agent of social change instead simply being of a window into the lives of others? Watch this movie/click this link to find out. I could gush on and on about how moved I was by this, but you really have to see what they’ve done. It’s an INCREDIBLE collaboration between media and medicine. Katerina and the NFB also announced that they’re taking that same process to the domestic urban landscape with their latest collaboration called Highrise about the apartment towers of the world. So good!
• The Most Unexpected Event (other than all of the nakedness) saw me on the final panel with Charles Landry, Tonya Surman, Allyson Hewitt, and Tim Jones. Is this what happens when you get a job? People invite you on panels?? Cool!

Charles Landry’s presentation about creative bureaucracy really made me sit up straight in my chair. I still have my bureaucrat-baby-fat and, thanks to my coworkers, my spirit has yet to be crushed by this job, so the challenge of his address resonated quite strongly with me: how do we make bureaucracy more creative?? Especially when considering the necessary dependable things they do that they can’t be creative about like payroll, or other such niceties.

It came up again on the the final panel,  and we talked a bit about how municipalities can help spur ad hoc or grassroots groupings of agents in their communities towards organization so that they can collaborate with the municipality in more meaningful ways – creative partnerships. While it wasn’t said explicitly, what’s also being inferred is that bureaucracies, in-large, don’t interface well with individuals. In the way that they operate it seems that government bureaucracies, at least, are geared towards dealing with groups – unions, church groups, neighborhoods, BIA’s.  These factors are still very relevant, but it’s interesting to note that people have access to a greater diversity of cultural inputs and that identities are increasingly individual, while also considering that bureaucracy is all about the experience of standardization. How will the creative bureaucracy keep up with increasingly individualized individuals? Hey upper management – collaborate about that on your next coffee break.

Music!

Hello friends. It has been a minute. In the interim between now and then I have certainly seen better days, but I’ll save those gory details for that autobiography I might eventually write. Lots of stuff has happened though. Let’s run down a few things:

• I initiated a program teaching music to youth through the art of sampling records. It’s called Beat Roots Ottawa, and it starts in January.
• I’ve been working with the CHRA getting them all socially networked and improving connectivity within the Youth House.
• I went to Aspen to present at an international cultural policy symposium with WESTAF. As the only Canadian, I’ve never felt more Canadian.

But last, and perhaps most important of all:

• I GOT A JOB!! For now and the foreseeable future I will be working for the City of Ottawa in a cultural planning capacity. The project, as I’ve chosen to accept it, is to renew the 20-year arts, culture, and heritage plan for the city by designing and executing a very broad and deep consultation process. All related to a much broader sustainability planning initiative for the National Capital Region called Choosing Our Future.

So this is interesting. From waxing philosophic in cyberspace to on-the-ground work for the municipality. I have not had much time to adjust, but going to work at city hall every day has certainly been a serious change of pace from my impoverished-dilettantish-freelance lifestyle. I’m sorta getting used to it. The other day I was leaving city hall and helped direct a gentleman to the gallery on the first floor. He ended up asking me what I did there, and when I explained it to them he looked at me curiously and said: “Well you don’t look like a bureaucrat…” Let’s hope that never changes.

In the spirit of theory-to-practice I wanted to share the work of Windsor Ontario’s Broken City Lab with you. These folks are doing the real, arts-based, on-the-ground work that engages people with their city in ways that might cause them to think about it differently – perhaps as more than the sum of its parts. Plus they tie their event-based activities to research. This is a genuine attempt to mend a broken place with a lot of youthful energy and ideas. Take note. I certainly am.

So a bit more stability should bring about more consistent blogging. I’ll keep the CCE abreast of what’s going on around here, now from a slightly different perspective, and hopefully we can share the kinds of ideas that will help to make this place the kind of city that it can be.

And with that, I’m back.

Music, please.

David Brock doesn’t pooh-pooh the challenges facing rural communities, but argues that rural places have the real assets which they can harness to successfully navigate and prosper in the Creative Age (h/t David Eaves).

Successful 21st-century economies require creativity. How will rural and remote Canada fare in the creative age? A prominent report portrays rural economic collapse as inevitable. David Brock disagrees, and argues that rural communities are sustainable, not in spite of the creative economy, but because of it. There are rural corridors full of tolerant and talented people, teeming with cultural diversity and innovative minds. Brock proposes viable policy options for rural and remote communities as he explores a leading contender for rural prosperity in the creative age, the Mackenzie Corridor of the Northwest Territories.

Read the full essay here (pdf).

An intriguing new study by Brent Eastwood finds that both income and employment are associated with levels of economic freedom and the creative class, but less with social capital, across U.S. metros. Here’s the abstract.

The need to sustain economic growth has dominated urban policy in the U.S. for decades. Feeling pressure to meet this need, city and state governments have rushed to adapt economic policy concepts that are untested by researchers or need an updated examination. This article explores the effects of social capital, Creative Class Theory, and “Economic Freedom,” on U.S. urban economic growth. It tests a 272 metropolitan statistical area (MSA) sample and their scores on Florida’s (2002) Creative Class Index, Rupasingha et al.’s (2006) Social Capital Index, and Pacific Research Institute’s “Economic Freedom Index.” The author measures economic growth using the percent change from 2000 to 2004 in Total Employment and Total Personal Income for each MSA in the sample. The data show a highly significant and positive relationship for economic growth among MSAs with high Creative Class ratings and high Economic Freedom scores. The social capital variable had insignificant and or negative relationships as an explanatory variable for economic growth. (EastwoodNet.com; Applied Research in Economic Development, vol. 6, issue 1, 2009)

Read more here (pdf).

Social media, communications technologies, and more flexible workplace attitudes have been driving changes to the way we view our personal and professional lives.

A recent Knowledge at Wharton article examines the evolving etiquette as well as challenges surrounding the rise of mobile technologies, such as the Blackberry, as well as social media websites like Facebook and LinkedIn.

As Facebook, Twitter and 24-hour Blackberry access blur the lines between business and personal lives, managers and employees are struggling to develop new social norms to guide them through the ongoing evolution of communications technology. Wharton faculty and other experts say the process of creating rules to cope with the ever-expanding reach of modern communications has just begun, but will be shaped largely by individuals and organizations, not top-down decrees from a digital Emily Post. Generational differences in the approach to openness on the Internet will also be a factor in coming to common understandings of how and when it is appropriate to contact colleagues, superiors or clients.

The article then details some dilemmas – where do you stand?

1.  First, is there a time when “work” should stop and “personal life” should take over?  From the Wharton article:

For example, a Blackberry can allow parents to attend their childrens’ soccer games while remaining in contact with colleagues at the office in case an emergency comes up. But, [Nancy Rothbard] adds, “you have your Blackberry at your kid’s soccer game. That’s another … line you may be crossing.”

2.  Is it healthy to blur your personal self and professional self ?

…says Wharton marketing professor Patricia Williams, “There is the self we are for our friends, a self for our family [and] a professional self. What’s interesting is the degree to which we are comfortable playing all of those ’selves’ at one time.”

“I’ve heard people say that Facebook is for personal friends and LinkedIn is for professional contacts,” Williams notes. “But many of my Facebook friends are my colleagues – people who work just down the hall – and I don’t have a problem with that. I do, however, have some discomfort being ‘Facebook friends’ with my students, because it gives them access to my personal self that’s not normally available to them.”

3. Are younger people, today’s children up through college students, growing up with no separation between these different “selves”?  And what will this mean for the way we work?

Typically, business norms evolve through official policy disseminated by organizations and by “reality” that bubbles up from the organization’s grassroots. [Wharton Professor Monica McGrath] asks “The question is: How accessible do you want to be? [Today,] young people want to be very accessible, and in an international corporation you are expected to be available [around the clock]. Time zones mean nothing. The norms will continue to develop based upon generational leadership.”

To sum up, I expect that the line between personal and professional will become increasingly blurred. First, knowledge work is highly collaborative and it’s hard to work with people who you don’t like – therefore, people will forge friends through collaboration at work. Second, younger generations will have grown up with limited separation between their different personas.

How do mobile and social media technologies enhance or detract from your personal and professional life?

Many things are interesting, but one of the most interesting is how people use creativity to become more innovative. I call this entrepreneurship. People in all countries are creative and want to make a better life for themselves and their families. How well are they doing?

Over the past few years, my colleagues at the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor have developed a way to measure this activity, and to suggest ways in which countries can improve on their performance. The Global Entrepreneurship Index is a tool that allows countries to understand how your country is doing on a wide range of indicators. You can download a copy for free. While lots of indexes exist, for almost everything, they very seldom allow you to actually see how to improve your current position.

Last week at a conference in Istanbul I presented the index to an audience and suggested how the world would be able to improve its well-being by following along. The results were interesting and over the next few weeks, I will be presenting a step-by-step report on the index, how it works, how it can be improved, and how it can improve lives.

I have been involved with GEM for almost a decade and have helped move this organization toward its present global position. I hope that this new index will propel it to a new level.

Creative jobs are not only a big factor in the success of urban areas, they help to power growth in rural areas too. New research by my colleagues at the Martin Prosperity Institute examines the role of creative jobs in the economic development of rural communities in Ontario.

In the decade 1996 to 2006, creative class jobs led job growth in rural Ontario at 22 percent, considerably ahead of working class jobs which grew at 13 percent and service class jobs which expanded by nine percent. Over the same period, agricultural and resource jobs fell by 20 percent.

A summary of the research is here.

The U.S. unemployment rate is 9.7 percent, the highest in some time, but the burden of unemployment is  spread unevenly across the economy. Production workers face a 15.1 percent unemployment rate, while unemployment among construction and extraction workers stands at 17 percent. But unemployment among management and professional workers is only 5.4 percent. Researchers at the Martin Prosperity Institute (MPI) previously identified long-run differences in the unemployment rates faced by industrial workers and knowledge, professional, and creative workers.

New analysis by the MPI team tracks unemployment among management and professional – or creative class – workers from 1983 to the present. While unemployment among creative class workers as a whole is far below the rate faced by production and construction workers, there is considerable variation in unemployment among the various occupations, professions, and job types that make up the creative class.

Creative workers in arts, design, and entertainment occupations consistently face higher unemployment rates and significant spikes during recessions. In contrast to other creative fields, the unemployment rate for arts, design, and entertainment workers sometimes runs higher than the overall unemployment rate.

Computer, sciences, and engineering professionals experience lower rates of unemployment than arts, design, and entertainment workers. But the lowest rates of unemployment and the most stable employment are found in meds and eds occupations – health and education – where unemployment stays consistently low, even during downturns.

The full analysis is here.