At 11:03 AM 6/26/2004, Thomas D. Cox, Jr. wrote:
---------- Original Message ----------------------------------
From: theREALmxyzptlk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>this reminds me of Florida's
>(and others) paradigm of "Cultural Creatives"
havent read the article yet, but if youre talking about richard
florida formerly of CMU, he was on my personal hit list for the
longest time. i kept hoping to see him around the city so i could
offer him to engage in fisticuffs with me because he's such an
idiot. argh. im glad he moved away.
tom
:-) I got into a bit of a debate with someone online over his thesis - my
opposite was an education major who could do nothing except spout
statistics and what they "prove". Being more in the Philosophy/English
camp, I'm always suspicious of statistics and how they are compiled/used.
Anyway he was all about Florida's book, which I grabbed just out of
curiosity. Having been steeped in the likes of Foucault for the past few
years, I can but wince at Florida's naivete (imo) concerning the choices
people make. Of course my wincing has a lot to do with my own biases, but I
keep feeling the ghost of the mythic "Amercian Dream" here - all of that
"you can do anything if you try"/"self made man/woman" by-the-bootstraps
pulling opportunism cropping up in it.
Conversely, some people DO succeed and some people DO make a difference, as
Kelli demonstrates. I just don't happen to think all of the people he calls
"cultural creatives" are culturally creative, nor do I think that where
people wind up in life always has much to do with what they choose.
Additionally - as someone who has worked on an assembly line for the past
28 years - his notion of the "changing world on the factory floor" is
sheer, oblivious nonsense.
He seems to think that big corporations like GM are changing the way they
view the hourly workers and now truly value their input. From my
perspective (and I work once a week representing the hourly workers in the
Suggestion dept - that arm which represents the "new paradigm of valuing
employee input"), what has changed is that GM understands the need to make
its hourly employees THINK that their input is valued. You can call my
windows dirty, but the dirt on them is from the factory floor.
I won't say nothing has changed since 1976 (aside from all those jobs going
overseas) with regard to the above scenario, but I can say with authority
that Florida is talking from the wrong orifice when it comes to this. That
alone makes me suspect his statistics. You know what they say : figures
can't lie, but liars can figure. My apologies in advance to all the
numbers-crunchers among us.
jeff
jeff
