The Rise of the Creative Class

Understanding the small business sector

The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms.

"Partnership" has become one of the code words of our times. Being a partial euphemism and a token of political negotiation, the concept of "partnership" contains a very high level of ambiguity. Partnership schemes are rarely well defined one-off deals between partners with clearly differentiated goals, but rather sites of continuing political and economic renegotiation. It is the purpose of this paper to try to capture some characteristic aspects of this conflict and renegotiation in a number of recent local government partnership schemes.

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Partnership: Issues of policy and negotiation

This paper summarizes 15 years of empirical research at various spatial levels on social capital and economic performance. On the firm level, results are unambiguous: there is strong evidence of the impact of social capital on firms' performance. However, the results become less clear for spatial units with a large number of anonymous actors. The contradictory results of studies on national and regional levels can be explained in part by insufficient measures of the main component parts of social capital: social networks and the norms and values distributed among them. To develop measures for values like creativity, entrepreneurship and tolerance, and to find better measures for social networks, are the main challenges to future research.

Social Capital and Economic Performance: A Meta-analysis of 65 Studies

The argument developed in this paper is that a resilient economy requires a growth agenda that is underpinned by a balanced industrial mix, the development and adoption of new knowledge or technological platforms, and risk taking in radical and incremental innovations as well as in soft and hard innovations. In other words, it is desirable to promote a sustainable and endogenous way to ‘reset’ the economy – borrowing the phrase from this study by Florida – by endorsing a growth agenda that includes also creative and cultural industries. It will further be argued that a policy agenda for the EU's economic growth takes little account of the opportunities and potential of creative and cultural industries, favouring hard technologies and services. A growing literature is starting to highlight the innovation capacity of cultural and creative industries as they intersect the innovation processes of other manufacturing and services sectors with innovative and creative outputs. The indecision of EU policy-makers ...

A policy agenda for EU smart growth: the role of creative and cultural industries

Although there is an increasing recognition of the positive role that creative industries play in innovation and growth, there is little evidence on the spatial dimension of this impact. An ongoing NESTA project employs economic geography techniques to address this gap, with the aim of improving our understanding of the mechanisms through which creative industries contribute to regional innovative performance, and to inform the development of policies to support these linkages. This interim report presents the results of the first stage of this research. The authors map the presence of creative firms across Britain as a first step towards establishing their impact on regional innovation at a second stage of the project. The mapping effort is informed by the influential concept of ‘industrial clusters’.

The geography of creativity

This article presents results of a research project examining the effects of social capital on small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) performance. The first main part of the article is a review of...

Social Capital, Embeddedness, and Market Interactions: An Analysis of Firm Performance in UK Regions

INTRODUCTION Although few dare say it, the blows suffered by local government (notably the municipal and democratic components of a "local state" that is increasingly ruled from the political centre) probably mean that it will never recover its pre-Thatcherite form. Already there are small, but visible signs of a re-thinking of the form, if not to quite the same extent the content, which might replace local government as traditionally understood in Great Britain. But so much has the Thatcherite project of eroding municipal powers proceeded that thoughts on the future of municipal activity, tend to be developing not against the grain of the "enterprise culture" but ahead of it. Like bunnies mesmerised by the eye of the cobra, it is as though "there is no alternative" to learning to come to terms with being swallowed up. This brief article considers some of the options on offer, in what will undoubtedly remain a cold climate for local democracy and the extent to which they allow scope for the furtherance of a nowadays unfashionable notion of social justice.

Municipal enterprise, growth coalitions and social justice:

Clifton N., Cooke P. and Hansen H. K. Towards a reconciliation of the ‘context-less’ with the ‘space-less’? The creative class across varieties of capitalism: new evidence from Sweden and the UK, Regional Studies. The interplay between place, individuals and creativity has, in recent years, received much attention. National differences of how capitalism is organized can be drawn into this discussion, but they are seldom examined systematically. By investigating data from the UK as a liberal market economy and Sweden as a coordinated market economy, this paper develops and tests a set of hypotheses to analyse the role of ‘varieties of capitalism’ in relation to the location dynamics of the creative class. Results confirm the effect of the coordinated market economy in flattening the distribution of the creative class, tempered by the Swedish urban hierarchy which acts to concentrate it in a smaller number of (larger) locations. Through combining both contextual and spatial elements, this approach generates...

Towards a Reconciliation of the ‘Context-less’ with the ‘Space-less’? The Creative Class across Varieties of Capitalism: New Evidence from Sweden and the UK

Phil Cooke

Papers

A policy agenda for EU smart growth: the role of creative and cultural industries

The geography of creativity

Social Capital, Embeddedness, and Market Interactions: An Analysis of Firm Performance in UK Regions

Municipal enterprise, growth coalitions and social justice:

Towards a Reconciliation of the ‘Context-less’ with the ‘Space-less’? The Creative Class across Varieties of Capitalism: New Evidence from Sweden and the UK