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The Making of the American Creative Class narrates the history of workers in New York's publishing, advertising, design, and broadcasting industries and their efforts to improve their working conditions, set against the backdrop of the economic dislocations of twentieth-century capitalism.
List of contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: The Labor of Culture
- Ch. 1 White-Collar Work, the Culture Industries, and the Origins of the Creative Class
- Ch. 2 The Emergence of White-Collar Unionism in New York's Culture Industries
- Ch. 3 Challenging the Culture of Consumer Capitalism
- Ch. 4 Designing Radicalism: The Popular Front, Modernist Aesthetics, and the Problem of Patronage
- Ch. 5 New York's White-Collar Unions during the Second World War and Reconversion
- Ch. 6 The Cold War in New York's Culture Industries
- Ch. 7 Creativity and Consumerism in the Affluent Society
- Ch. 8 The Cultural Deindustrialization of New York
- Epilogue: New York's Culture Industries in the Twilight of Fordism
- Appendix
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Shannan Clark teaches history at Montclair State University. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Summary
The Making of the American Creative Class narrates the history of workers in New York's publishing, advertising, design, and broadcasting industries and their efforts to improve their working conditions, set against the backdrop of the economic dislocations of twentieth-century capitalism.
Additional text
Shannan Clark has written a subtle history about a curious topic: white-collar unionism...His book serves as a kind of pre-history of today's 'creatives'-those producers of culture laboring in the offices (and virtual spaces) of contemporary, post-industrial consumer capitalism. Clark argues that long before theorists such as Richard Florida wrote paeans to the supposedly rising 'creative class' in the twenty-first century, an earlier incarnation fell from power in the twentieth.
