“Creative” has become a favoured adjective among marketing and management gurus, but they do not always mean what they seem to be saying.

He’s young, passionate, photogenic, holds a senior position in marketing at Bang & Olufsen and, according to the lead article in the December 2004 “creative issue” of Fast Company — without doubt the silliest magazine to survive the dotcom bust — the pinnacle of creativity.

He’s Zean (pronounced Shawn) Nielsen and according to the editors of Fast Company he’s on the cover of their creative issue because “he’s a prolific idea champion who’s helping his organisation grow rapidly. And he works for a company whose smart design and technology have produced a stream of blow-me-away televisions, music systems and speakers.”

Nowhere in the editorial or the accompanying article is it explained how Zean’s creativity is actually manifested. He champions ideas (which seems to suggest that he leaves it to others to actually come up with them, otherwise why make the distinction?), organises promotional events and tie-ins, and has helped launch a string of Bang & Olufsen stores in North America.

He also works long hours – 70-hour weeks – and, according to Fast Company‘s editors, “loves it”. All of which reads like a pro forma job description for the position of marketing director in any large firm.

Zean may have many other fine qualities that the Fast Company editors have neglected to mention, but his strongest claim to the title of being creative seems to be that he works long hours for a manufacturer of expensive, spiffy-looking TVs and CD players.

Fast Company‘s creative issue is a good example of the contemporary cult of creativity.

No longer is it good enough for individuals or firms to be merely competent at what they do, deliver products on time at a reasonable price, or perform better than their competitors. According to this month’s batch of gurus, if you want to succeed in today’s world you’ve got to have that certain indefinable, even mystical quality, of creativity – even if, as in Zean’s case, the overt signs of it are not immediately apparent.

Indeed, talk about creativity has spread at such a pace that, if it were a plant, it would be tagged a weed and marked for immediate eradication.

And like most half-baked ideas picked up by the business community, governments have joined the creativity cult with the enthusiasm of a zealot.

Governments now prostrate themselves before the altar of creativity in the hope that if they keep repeating the mantras sooner or later they’ll be blessed with low crime rates, a healthier, more engaged, more learned citizenry, a reinvigorated civic life and a robust economy.

In December last year, Victorian Labor’s idea champion John Brumby was touting Melbourne’s creative credentials on the front page of The Age. In Britain, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s 2001 green paper Culture and Creativity: The Next 10 Years decrees that: “Everyone is creative. From the pre-school child to the most distinguished scientist or artist, imagination, innovation and original expression are vital components of what it is to be human and to be part of society.

“Successful societies in the 21st century will be those that nurture a spirit of creativity and foster the cultural activity that goes hand in hand with it. Governments cannot of course enforce creativity; but we can recognise that creativity will be central to the country’s future and put in place the framework of funding and support to ensure that everyone has the opportunity and freedom to develop their creative talents.”

Universities have not been slow to latch on to the changed lexicon, updating and re-badging course offerings with the magical “C” word. Queensland University of Technology has been the frontrunner in Australia. In 2001 it created a creativity industries faculty, incorporating literature and print media; the performing arts; music composition and publishing; visual arts and crafts; electronic media and film and heritage activities as part of an interdisciplinary bachelor of creative industries.

The fixation on creativity is not new but a re-working of older arguments about the importance of knowledge to contemporary society and economy.

For example, in his 1973 book The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, US sociologist Daniel Bell argued that knowledge would become the primary driver of economic prosperity. When the social relations of production in industrial society were organised around the interactions between the individual and the machine – Bell referred to it as “a game against fabricated nature” – in postindustrial society, relations between people would assume much greater importance in production and society. Consequently, scientists and those with intellectual training would be accorded the highest social status and the university would supplant the firm as the key socio-economic organisation.

Bell optimistically predicted that one result of the rise of knowledge workers would be that quality-of-life issues would become the defining political issues of postindustrial society, replacing “quarrels between functional economic-interest groups for distributive shares of the national product”.

There is something to Bell’s argument — intellectual labour has become more central to economic processes than in the past, for example – but many of his claims rested on a good deal of optimism fuelled by a leap of technological faith. The rise of knowledge work has been far more politically and socially ambiguous than Bell had allowed for.

Routinised, repetitive and boring work requiring minimal knowledge hasn’t disappeared, even though to some it might seem that way because much of it is carried out on foreign shores. And quality of life issues have come to overlay, rather than replace, quarrels between different economic groups.

In spite of this and even with the benefit of hindsight, the heirs to Bell have been content to serve up essentially the same arguments, substituting creativity in place of knowledge.

Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class, which has caused ripples of excitement among some Australian business and political leaders, is a case in point.

For Florida, human creativity, which he follows Webster’s dictionary in defining as “the ability to create meaningful new forms”, is the central driver of economic growth, eclipsing other factors of production such as capital and labour. He argues that those who work in creative industries – which includes everyone from people who dream up new investment strategies to hip-hop artists – now account for about a third of the US workforce.

The Rise of the Creative Class sets itself the task of delineating the character of this grouping, finding out where and why they work and feed, their tastes and leisure activities, so as to better advise civic and political leaders how they can attract more of these colourful characters to their backyards.

Like Bell before him, Florida does have a point. What Florida refers to as the creative class is essentially a new name for knowledge workers. Although it is questionable whether such people can be considered a class in a strict sense – a problem that Florida acknowledges – the number of people with some sort of intellectual training has rapidly increased in the past two generations to the point at which, in advanced economies at least, they have come to play a central role in the production process.

But instead of offering a serious examination of this social and economic transformation, Florida opts for hyperbole. For instance, he claims that, “the ultimate intellectual property – the one that really replaces land, labour and capital as the most valuable human resource – is the human creative faculty”.

Later, in a comment on the consumption patterns and leisure activities of the creative class, he declares “this much is certain: experiences are replacing goods and services because they stimulate our creative faculties and enhance our creative capabilities”.

Unless the word “replacing” is being used here in some new and interesting sense, almost everything about contemporary life contradicts these two sentences. Although the organisation of land, labour and capital is certainly different in today’s economy as compared with the past, they’re no less valuable or important than they’ve always been.

And suggesting that experiences are replacing goods and services as consumables would seem to imply that food, shelter and tools of one sort or another have become optional extras for the creative class. By this account, the average “creative” resembles a graphic designer who has developed the ability to photosynthesise.

Part of the problem with current discussions of creativity is that the term is defined so broadly and inclusively as to be almost meaningless. Declaring that everyone is creative is rather flattering, but it’s about as enlightening as saying “everyone is talented”. Just as everyone has some level of talent, whether it’s darning socks or kicking a goal from the 50-metre line, everyone has some level of creativity, whether it’s colour co-ordinating a room or composing a piano concerto.

Writers on creativity usually go on to specify particular types and degrees of creativity. Florida, for example, identifies a “super-creative core” within the creative class to distinguish those who “fully engage in the creative process”.

Included in this category are scientists, engineers, university professors, poets, novelist, artists, entertainers, designers, architects, non-fiction writers, editors, cultural figures, researchers and software programmers. Yet this is still too broad to be useful. Is the creativity of a poet really the same as that of an engineer?

Even for those activities that might seem to be paradigmatic cases of creative work, it is questionable whether the notion of creativity adequately captures them.

Academic research is a good example. From one point of view, research might appear to be an unequivocal example of creative expression; certainly this is the impression conveyed by Florida. However, and although there certainly are creative aspects to academic research, it is not necessarily the only or even the primary feature of such endeavours.

For example, to say that “Smith offered a creative interpretation of the data” might be another way of saying that Smith requires a stern talking-to at his or her next annual performance review.

You don’t have to believe that those working in academia provide absolutely unbiased or transparent accounts of the world to take this view. The point is simply that the creative dimension of intellectual labour is qualified by other values and consideration, such as the search for truth, ethical considerations, critical reflection, rigorous interpretation and the like, some of which, as in the case of ethics and truth, may place significant constraints on its creative dimension.

Why then, is there a rush to label almost everything and everyone creative?

One explanation, advanced by British sociologist Frank Furedi in his book Where Have all the Intellectuals Gone?, is that creativity has become a feel-good term, intended to make us all feel a little bit better about what we do, whether it’s data entry or conducting a choir. As Furedi wryly observes: “These days the word ‘creative’ is routinely used to describe any endeavour undertaken by a human being.

“The promiscuous designation of the label ‘creative’ overlooks the fact that achievement involves hard work, painful encounters and personal development. Creativity is not a personal characteristic but the outcome of inspired, hard-earned achievement. That is why most of us are not only not special, but too often do not have the opportunity or the inclination to become special.”

US-born physicist David Bohm came to a similar conclusion. In his essay On Creativity, Bohm argued that creativity is difficult to achieve and consequently rare. In Bohm’s view, most of what we do as humans is mediocre, humdrum and routine. For most of us, only occasionally is life marked by flashes of creativity. He did not regard this as a failing of individuals, but of a society that encourages us to conform and think in repetitive, mechanical ways.

Bohm’s and Furedi’s claims are not particularly palatable and lead to the rather unsettling conclusion that our societies really don’t encourage creativity – at least not to any significant degree. The wide application of “creativity” to almost any and all activity as if it is its defining, overriding feature works to hide the fact that deep inequalities still exist in people’s abilities to develop creative skills.

If you look closely at much of the current talk about creativity, it becomes increasingly apparent that it is not so much about creativity per se but another “C” word – commodification.

Increasingly, creativity has become the respectable, progressive-sounding word for describing the process of turning pretty much everything into something that can be bought and sold on the market – like rebranding a city to make it a more attractive place for investment capital, skilled workers and tourists.

The great advantage of emphasising creativity over commodification is that current economic arrangements can be made to appear as nothing more than the outcome of natural processes.

The logic runs something like this: creativity is an essential human attribute. Furthermore, creativity is increasingly the key to economic prosperity; the engine of the market. Therefore, the relations of the market are simply an extension of the fundamental workings of human nature, so it’s futile to question them – at least very deeply.

This is not to say that the boosters of creativity are completely unaware of the downside of contemporary capitalism. Florida, for example, recognises that the

gap between the “super-creative core” and the rest is growing. He also concedes that such people can frequently be self-centred and narcissistic.

However, many of his criticisms are cursory and the solutions, such as expanding opportunities for people to realise their creative potential, are based on an overly optimistic assessment of the creative class’s commitment to altruistic behaviour.

Other criticisms simply miss the point. Florida’s most substantial criticism of the market, for example, is that it leads to uniformity in product choice. Rather than getting hip cafes and independent bookstores, you get strip-malls filled with Starbucks and Borders. For Florida, the chief problem with this is that it constrains the creative class’s ability to express their creativity. Never mind low wages and minimal conditions, the more pressing problem seems to be that the creative class’s ability to distinguish themselves through consumption is being limited.

Other, similarly questionable aspects of the contemporary market, such as the blurring of work and leisure and long working hours, are celebrated by the spruikers of creativity as the expression of the free choices made by creative spirits. And since most jobs entail some element of creativity, you can make the argument that everyone should accept similar working conditions, no matter what their personal inclination or level of remuneration. Since we’re all creative, the intensification of work is the norm. As the editors of Fast Company are quick to remind us, creative types work 70 hours a week and love it.

But there’s a problem with this picture, which was neatly, if unintentionally, illustrated when the editors of Fast Company went in search of “the most innovative company in America”. Their choice – W.L.Gore & Associates, the manufacturers of Gore-Tex, the waterproof fabric frequently used in hiking boots and camping equipment – was an interesting one.

The company is private; it takes the long view rather than rushing new and untried products to market to increase shareholder value; it produces concrete things rather than trading in intangibles; and, within Gore & Associates’ office culture, face-to-face communication is preferred to email.

All of which flies in the face of many of the things that modern corporate culture – not least Fast Company – typically valorise as crucial to business success.

Assuming that this is an accurate portrait of W.L.Gore & Associates and that the company encourages creativity as is claimed, it suggests that creativity is in tension with the market and requires spaces to flourish outside of it. Ultimately, the demands of creativity – substantive creativity rather than the shallow therapeutic kind – may not be as seamlessly compatible with the contemporary market as the gurus of creativity would have us believe.

Christopher Scanlon is co-editor of Arena Magazine (www.arena.org.au) and a researcher at RMIT University’s Globalism Institute.

THE “C” LIST
Fast Company
The December issue of Fast Company is devoted to all things creative in the US, or at least, to all things the magazine’s editors are willing to label “creative”.

The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, By Daniel Bell
Bell’s work has become a classic of “knowledge society” literature.

Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? Confronting 21st Century Philistinism, By Frank Furedi
British sociologist Frank Furedi argues that the public intellectual has been replaced with the narrow expert and a culture that embraces the trivial over hard-won knowledge.

The Rise of the Creative Class,
By Richard Florida
Through a mixture of anecdotes and pop-theory, Florida charts the rise of the so-called creative class and offers pointers on how business and civic leaders can determine their own city’s level of creativity on a “creativity index”.

The Creative Economy,
By John Howkins
A guide, of sorts, for “creative” professionals who want to school themselves in the rules of success in the creative economy.

On Creativity,
By David Bohm
A peer of Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, David Bohm sees creativity as the antithesis of mechanical, repetitive thinking. He also thought it was rare, yet essential to human being and cultural renewal.

Originally published in The Age in 2005, https://www.theage.com.au/national/the-cult-of-creativity-20050205-gdzhwh.html.