Creative Class is a book about people who create the future

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Not so long ago, the creative class seemed to be something new and unusual, but today you will not surprise anyone with this term. People in the creative class have and continue to influence work styles, the economy and society in general. Lifehacker publishes an excerpt from Richard Florida's book on the free style of modern office workers and flexible working hours.

Chapter 6. Without a tie

One day in the spring of 2000, I was late for a meeting and called to warn about it. It was a meeting with a lawyer and a securities accountant, so I asked the woman who answered my call if I could take a few more minutes to change my jeans, black T-shirt and boots for more formal attire. “It's not necessary here,” she said.

My heart sank as I parked my car and walked up to the imposing stone building that was a magnificent example of 19th century corporate elegance in the heart of downtown Pittsburgh. I timidly opened the door, being absolutely sure that I was not dressed for the occasion. To my surprise, I saw people dressed even more informally than me - in khaki pants, polo shirts, sneakers and even sandals. Some were carrying sports bags.

Maybe I got to the wrong place - to the office of a high-tech company, for example, or to the hall of a new clothing store? No, the administrator assured me. I was in the right place - in the office of the oldest and most prestigious corporate law firm in our city.

The environment in which we work is changing not only in terms of dress code. The working environment is becoming more open and more employee-friendly in many ways: this concerns open-plan office space and other design innovations, flexible schedules, new rules of work and new management methods. Of course, any trend is limited by the time frame, but the emergence of a new type of work environment is not a tribute to a passing fashion, but an evolutionary adaptation to a change in the nature of creative work, and the sustainability of this environment is due to its higher efficiency.

In the first edition of this book, I called this change a “no-tie work environment.” Even then, I said that it was no coincidence that all these changes coincided with the development of the Internet and the growth of Internet companies.

The informal work environment is a combination of a flexible, open, interactive model of a science lab or art studio and a mechanical model of an industrial plant or traditional corporate office.

The informal work environment did not appear overnight: many of its elements have evolved over the decades and continue to evolve. Some of the new features of the work environment that seemed startling and even revolutionary just ten years ago have become so common today that there is nothing more to say about them, except to emphasize that they have become an integral part of the nascent creative economy.

New dress code

When I wrote the first edition of the book, few trends in shaping the work environment of the future were getting as much attention as the relaxation of style requirements.

About a quarter of information technology professionals who took part in the 2000-2001 InformationWeek salary survey said that being able to wear casual clothes was one of the most important conditions in their work.

In the first edition, I talked about walking into Barney’s upmarket clothing store in Seattle, full of young men wandering among the hangers, sipping mineral water and chilled white wine. The black-suit manager, a woman in her early thirties who has worked in the store since its opening, said that over the past several years she has noticed significant changes in the shopping habits of Seattle's creative class, especially those of its representatives who worked for Microsoft, known as a paradise for nerds (from the English nerd - a bore, "nerd"; a person excessively deeply immersed in mental activity and research, unable to reasonably divide time for work and other aspects of public and private life. Ed.).

Since the store opened, sales of traditional costumes have declined every year, as have the clothes that geeks usually wear Ed.) - that is, khaki pants, turtlenecks and blue jackets. However, the store made good money selling fashionable clothes in New York style: black trousers, Helmut Lang T-shirts, Prada outerwear and shoes, leather jackets and fashionable tote bags.

Noting that some top Microsoft executives prefer products from Prada and other brands of contemporary designers, the author of an article in the September issue of the Wall Street Journal called the new style "geek-chic." A decade later, the techie gave way to an even more artsy hipster look: sneakers, hooded jackets, skinny jeans, and V-neck tees.

Over the decades, before changing the office dress code outside the office, the style of clothing gradually became more casual. During the first decades of the twentieth century, men wore suits and ties even to baseball games, and women wore long dresses and fancy hats for picnics. By the mid-1960s, around the time when gloves were no longer an obligatory attribute of formal ladies' attire, and men abandoned hats, the suit became primarily an element of business attire and was less and less common outside the office.

Casual wear made its way into offices in the 1980s - partly because it is more comfortable, but also because of the rise in the importance of creative work. The looser style of dress was not only related to the way employees looked. It was also a sign of a tolerance for difference and diversity in the work environment, in line with employees' desire for a free schedule and their desire to express their individuality.

Status is no longer associated with a high position or reputation as a good employee, it is due to belonging to the creative elite, and people in creative professions do not wear uniforms.

Creative people dress to express their character, as artists and scientists do; they dress in a simple and practical way so that they can focus on the serious creative tasks they are doing at the moment. In other words, they wear what they want.

Immediately after the appearance of the new dress code, he received a flurry of criticism from supporters of the traditional style of clothing. In the late 1990s, the Wall Street Journal featured women who walk into the office wearing “too daring” clothes. USA Today criticized casual dressing as a path to promiscuity, denouncing it as a process of "casualizing America."

I came across such opposing views of what is happening on my own experience. In the 1980s, at the very beginning of my career, I went to meetings and speeches in a business suit and tie. But when I started giving lectures on this book at the turn of the century, some organizers asked me to stick to a less formal style in order to give more weight to what was said, while others (sometimes in the same organizations) took a different position.

In the winter of 2001, I received numerous emails from the organizers of one event with suggestions not only for the content of my speech, but also for the style of dress. Their authors believed that I should be dressed in a business suit and tie and not touch on such controversial topics as homosexuality. One of the main organizers of the event responded to his concerned colleagues: “I spoke with Dr. Florida and he assured me that there was no cause for concern. He will perform in African American English, wearing a pink tutu and a large sombrero. Finally, he will crush a light bulb wrapped in a white napkin. His only requirement is to place everything in the hall according to feng shui rules to create a positive atmosphere."

The creative economy is not characterized by a uniform dress code, but by many different styles of clothing. I realized this one day in 2000 when I was looking at people in a conference room at a large Washington law firm. One man was wearing a business suit; the other wore a khaki jacket and trousers. A girl in a short skirt and a bold blouse flashed a ring in her tongue. At that moment, the conversation was about the dress code, and when someone drew attention to the variety of clothing styles among those present, we all realized that we did not even notice this, the changes that had taken place became so familiar.

Flexible working hours and - longer working hours

Office workers not only dress differently than they did just a decade ago, but they also have a different approach to work schedules. Rather than adhering to the strict routines of the organizational era (five days a week, nine to five), more workers in all industries are able to choose both hours and days of work.

In the first edition of the book, I cited data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics for 1997, according to which more than 25 million (27.6 percent of all full-time full-time employees) changed their work schedules to one degree or another, either officially or through informal agreements with employers.

According to the Institute of Family and Labor, more than two-thirds (68 percent) of workers could periodically change the start and end of the working day; more than half (55 percent) sometimes took work home. In May 2004, this figure rose to 36.4 million workers, or about 30 percent of the total working population.

Flexible working hours were much more often used by representatives of the creative class. In 2004, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 50 percent of programmers and mathematicians, 49.7 percent of biosciences, natural sciences and sociologists, 46.7 percent of managers, 44.5 percent of architects and engineers, and 41. 9 percent of those working in the arts, design, media and entertainment industries - compared with 13.8 percent of manufacturing workers.

Flexible working hours came about in part in response to the realities of modern life. For example, in families with two working parents, someone must be able to leave work early in order to pick up the children from school. In addition, creative work in most cases is associated with projects, and their implementation occurs cyclically: periods of intensive work are replaced by quieter periods.

Creative work requires tremendous concentration and cannot be done without rest breaks, even during the day.

Many report that they enjoy working hard for hours on end and then taking a long run or cycling to recharge the rest of their workday, which can last into the evening, essentially turning into another workday.

Plus, creative thinking is almost unmanageable. Sometimes a person ponders an idea for a long time or unsuccessfully searches for a solution to a problem, and then at the most unexpected moment everything falls into place.

Flexible working hours by no means mean that the working day is getting shorter. The development of modern capitalism throughout its long history has invariably been accompanied by an increase in the length of the working day. At first, this was facilitated by the emergence of electricity, and nowadays - personal computers, mobile phones and the Internet.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the longest working week (over 49 hours) is for professionals and technical and management personnel, while the longest working day is for the creative class.

“Creative class. People who are creating the future”, Richard Florida