THE HIPSTER ECONOMY

Creative economy is one of the paradigmatic economic imaginaries of our age, that shapes national policies and economic behaviours. Recently, an ongoing colonisation of labour-intensive sectors by the imaginary of creative economy is observable, resulting in the birth of a new hybrid «hipster economic imaginary», that combines key features typical of canonical creative occupations with the ones of manual, labour-intensive occupations. This dissertation will be devoted to the analysis of some businesses consistently influenced by such a «Hybrid economic imaginary». As businesses are shaped and conducted by their owners, our focus will be on the micro-entrepreneurs that manage them. Accordingly, an exploratory empirical research will be performed with the main objective of analysing micro-entrepreneurs in the specific sector of food and beverage retailing. The choice to focus on this sector, and more specifically on «hybrid bars» and gourmet food trucks has been taken both for their relevance in the Italian scenario, their centrality in Milanese urban policies and for their intense recourse to the imaginary. The micro-entrepreneurs owners of these businesses will be analysed in the three dimensions that characterise them as economic actors, that is, their identities, working conditions and practises. The aim is to develop an overall picture of how retailers profession change under the influence of the hybrid imaginary of «hipster economy», how they interact and exercise their limited agency in relation to it and implicitly thus also to test the opening hypothesis just illustrated. Moreover, as creative economy imaginary is today also powerfully shaping local processes of urban transformation, we will also analyse how «hipster economic imaginaries» can also shape local identities and influence urban development taking one case study from Milan, deeply connected with the development of hybrid bars. In Chapter 1 we will first outline a critical history of the creative economy imaginary and then illustrate the general literature review of the approaches and theoretical frameworks used along the dissertation. In chapter 2 we will concentrate on the professional subjectivity of micro-entrepreneurs as it emerges from the interaction between their individual limited agency and the imaginary. Passing to chapter 3, we will analyse their working conditions using the lens of passionate work. Chapter 4 is devoted to the actual practises of micro-entrepreneurs during their everyday work, through which they deal to the customers an authentic experience. Ultimately, in chapter 5 we will analyse the case study of the so-called «NoLo» neighbourhood. Lastly, in the conclusions we will attempt to summarise the findings to develop a more comprehensive and detailed description of the hipster economy imaginary and of the micro-entrepreneurs that work under it.