Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

The rising share of intangibles in economies worldwide highlights the crucial role of knowledge-intensive and creative industries in current and future wealth generation. The recognition of this trend has led to intense competition in these industries. At the micro-level, firms from both advanced and emerging economies are globally dispersing their value chains to control costs and leverage capabilities. The geography of innovation is the outcome of a dynamic process whereby firms from emerging economies strive to catch-up with advanced economy competitors, creating strong pressures for continued innovation. However, two distinct strategies can be discerned with regard to the control of the value chain. A vertical integration strategy emphasizes taking advantage of ‘linkage economies’ whereby controlling multiple value chain activities enhances the efficiency and effectiveness of each one of them. In contrast, a specialization strategy focuses on identifying and controlling the creative heart of the value chain, while outsourcing all other activities. The global mobile handset industry is used as the template to illustrate the theory.

Location, control and innovation in knowledge-intensive industries

The Creative City is now a classic and has been republished many times. It is an ambitious book and a clarion call for imaginative action in running urban life. It seeks to inspire people to think, plan and act imaginatively in the city and to get an ideas factory going that turns urban innovations into reality. Its aim is to make readers feel: ‘I can do that too’ and to spread confidence that creative and innovative solutions to urban problems are feasible however bad they may seem at first sight.

The creative city: A toolkit for urban innovators

This article explores some current transformations of the social. It argues for a shift from a model of sociality based on community towards a network sociality. This shift is particularly visible in urban spaces and in the cultural industries. However, it seems to become paradigmatic more widely of the information society. The article is to be read as a cultural hypothesis. In the first part I introduce some examples that document the rise of a network sociality. Most of these examples are drawn from a two-year ethnographic study of London's new media. The second part consists of a critique of some theoretical accounts of contemporary transformations of sociality. The third part is an attempt to outline the concept of network sociality. It is a form of sociality that is ephemeral but intense, it is informational and technological, it combines work and play, it is disembedded and generic, and it emerges in the context of individualization.

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Toward a Network Sociality

Could social media data aid in disaster response and damage assessment? Countries face both an increasing frequency and an increasing intensity of natural disasters resulting from climate change. During such events, citizens turn to social media platforms for disaster-related communication and information. Social media improves situational awareness, facilitates dissemination of emergency information, enables early warning systems, and helps coordinate relief efforts. In addition, the spatiotemporal distribution of disaster-related messages helps with the real-time monitoring and assessment of the disaster itself. We present a multiscale analysis of Twitter activity before, during, and after Hurricane Sandy. We examine the online response of 50 metropolitan areas of the United States and find a strong relationship between proximity to Sandy's path and hurricane-related social media activity. We show that real and perceived threats, together with physical disaster effects, are directly observable through the intensity and composition of Twitter's message stream. We demonstrate that per-capita Twitter activity strongly correlates with the per-capita economic damage inflicted by the hurricane. We verify our findings for a wide range of disasters and suggest that massive online social networks can be used for rapid assessment of damage caused by a large-scale disaster.

/pdf/rapid-assessment-of-disaster-damage-using-social-media-336uh6nd9k.pdf

Rapid assessment of disaster damage using social media activity.

This article examines the role that big cities play in an ongoing change towards a ‘global cultural economy’. Starting from Allen Scott’s argument that a handful of urban flagships may benefit from...

/pdf/the-cultural-economy-of-cities-a-comparative-study-of-the-2w63mezqz1.pdf

The Cultural Economy of Cities: A Comparative Study of the Audiovisual Sector in Hamburg and Lisbon

Projects, people, professions: Trajectories of learning through a mega-event (the London 2012 case)

The paper addresses the abundant literature on the creative city that has been generated following publication in 2002 of Richard Florida’s work on the creative class. In particular, it is maintain...

Creative cities and the reflexivity of the urban creative economy

This paper starts from the assumption of a structural analogy between mega-events and large-scale disasters. Both imply forceful interruptions of everyday routines, and both involve imperatives for imminent action. Similar to the immovable deadline of an opening ceremony, a looming natural disaster triggers a complex set of precautions and preparations to cope with the inescapable forthcoming shock. In the case of mega-events, of course, this shock is self-induced. In fact, cities fiercely compete to host mega-events. In the face of the daunting challenges of hosting a mega-event—the immovable timeframe, the rigorous standards set by regulatory bodies, and the exceptional public visibility—the authorities and organizations in charge traditionally have resorted to strategies of a strict adaptation to the conditions imposed on them. Aligning all available resources and capabilities to match the foreseeable demands, however, undermines the adaptability to cope with unpredictable perturbations. This paper seeks to explore the strategies and practices to attain adaptability during the preparation, staging and implementation of legacy plans of a mega-event with an evidentially noteworthy record: the London Olympic Games 2012. The paper seeks to demonstrate that the project ecology in charge managed to enhance adaptability by implementing three key features of heterarchy: ambiguity, redundancy and loose coupling. By leveraging the principles of heterarchy, the project ecology was able to draw lessons from previous mega-events and both to anticipate and respond to unforeseen challenges.

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/3/3/527/pdf

Coping with a Self-Induced Shock: The Heterarchic Organization of the London Olympic Games 2012

The paper seeks to unravel the field-configuring capacity of Olympic Games, as a large-scale event located at the intersection of several organizational fields. The initial argument is that the Olympics, besides being a cyclically recurring “tournament ritual” in the sports field, constitute a singular flagship project in those fields connected to the preparation and legacy implementation of the event. Conceptually the paper connects, therefore, the literature on field-configuration with a particular branch of project management research. Empirically it builds upon selected results of a major case study of the London Summer Games in 2012, in particular of the massive program of venue construction and urban regeneration linked to this event. The authors maintain that the cross-field-configuring capacity of a global and publicly visible venture like the Olympics is based on the interaction of its public prominence and the performance of involved actors. However, the configuration across field boundaries exh...

Joachim Thiel

Papers

The Cultural Economy of Cities: A Comparative Study of the Audiovisual Sector in Hamburg and Lisbon

Projects, people, professions: Trajectories of learning through a mega-event (the London 2012 case)

Creative cities and the reflexivity of the urban creative economy

Coping with a Self-Induced Shock: The Heterarchic Organization of the London Olympic Games 2012

Crossing Boundaries: Exploring the London Olympics 2012 as a Field-Configuring Event