How do we define a service economy?

Recently, a lot of discussion has centered around the kinds of jobs where people expect to see the most growth in our region, the service sector. As community colleges are looked at to prepare students to enter this kind of workforce, how we define and frame the service sector is vitally important. 

At the core of who the service sector services, and the expanding need for service sector employees, is a potential to refocus how we integrate our understanding of community and employment, and how they build an economy that is centered on the quality of life for people. 

The service sector (as defined by the U.S. Census) is a broad category:

• Accommodation and Food Services (Sector 72)
• Administrative and Support and Waste Management and Remediation Services (Sector 56)
• Arts, Entertainment and Recreation (Sector 71)
• Educational Services (Sector 61)
• Finance and Insurance (Sector 52)
• Health Care and Social Assistance (Sector 62)
• Information (Sector 51)
• Management of Companies and Enterprises (Sector 55)
• Other Services (Except Public Administration) (Sector 81)
• Professional, Scientific and Technical Services (Sector 54)
• Real Estate and Rental and Leasing (Sector 53)
• Retail Trade (Sector 44-45)
• Transportation and Warehousing (Sector 48-49)
• Utilities (Sector 22)
• Wholesale Trade (Sector 42)

From: http://www.census.gov/svsd/www/economic.html

These growth and focus on these sectors is different from and potentially more diverse than tooling up for a manufacturing industry, or a specific kind of I.T. training. What we are seeing in healthcare is only the first indicator of a need our communities will face for all kinds of services that cater to the things we utilize to participate and enjoy life. As our communities are faced with limited resources, more and more our choices will become thoughtful, aesthetic, and experiential choices dictated by the quality and value of the service, rather than availability and affordability. In a time with limited resources, cheap and inferior is wasteful. There is an opportunity to re-engage our communities with what they need at a local level to find fulfillment that is not based on a material products, but based in human relationships and interactions that incorporate meaningfulness.

If an external environment reduces the availability of material consumption, that as a nation we have looked to for fulfillment, where do we turn to provide that stimulus? What had become a primarily private activity delivered by UPS trucks in nondescript cardboard boxes can shift to more public arenas, to areas of commons, or varying degrees of commons where the activities, the action and engagement, is what stimulates fulfillment.

There is a potential, as work hours are potentially curtailed in employment, for a different kind of work to supplant that, one that is based more in care giving, community, and creativity. How does one person invest in the world that he or she creates and inhabits for him or herself? How does an institution help students inspire, develop, and legitimize the independence and interdependence necessary to effect these changes in the workforce? How does the conceptualization of work ethic and purpose change for employees and industry? How do the artists balance their role in a commons based experiential economy with the material needs to continue the pursuit of art making?

Interplay of Perception

"To define another being as an inert or passive object is to deny its ability to actively engage us and to provoke our sense; we thus block our perceptual reciprocity with that being. By linguistically defining the surrounding world as a determinate set of objects, we cut our conscious, speaking selves off from the spontaneous life of our sensing bodies. [...] To the sensing body, no thing presents itself as utterly passive or inert. Only by affirming the animatedness of perceived things do we allow our words to emerge directly from the depths of our ongoing reciprocity with the world" (56).

-David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous

Abram seems to be drawing a connection to something I'm thinking of as how performativity and perceptivity are inter-related. To truly perceive a thing is to give it life and make it, as Abrams, and Abrams drawing on Merleau-Ponty, calls carnal. 

To expand on Abram's sense of the senses, the human experience is not complete without the metaphysical, the awareness of how to interpret the synaesthetic stimulation. Not in the strict form of classification and separation, but how the perceiver is acted upon and responds to the action of the perceived. 

"...Synaesthetic perception is the rule, and we are  unaware of it only because scientific knowledge shifts the center of gravity of experience, so that we have unlearned how to see, hear, and generally speaking, feel, in order to deduce, from our bodily organization and the world as the physicist conceives it, what we are to see, hear, and feel" (60, Merleau-Ponty qtd. in Abrams).

So, as we perceive and are stimulated by the physical environment, natural and human made, we are also perceiving and being stimulated by the metaphysical environment of concepts and knowledge, pertaining to both natural (wind turns a leaf through an interplay of friction and resistance) and human made (an economic crisis manifesting itself in a cold and rainy day) ideas. It would be hard to argue that a person's sense of well-being does not influence his or her act of perceiving, and that in turn is performative in how that individual's world is constructed.

To examine a thing like the economy as if it is a separate inanimate thing, or perhaps a disembodied animate thing, dehumanizes what is inherently a human construct and activity, whether it is in the design of an assembly line or the purchase of a coop farm share. Similarly, to be able to perceive a thing is natural, but that perception is altered with an increasing awareness of (or perhaps an openness to) sensuality, or how the senses interact in synaesthetic complexity and harmony. 

If our normal socialized human state is one of disconnectedness with our environment, as Abram suggests, then the process of regaining that connection with our world, participating in the dialogue, is one that must be relearned. Relearned, in a way that integrates the spheres of the natural environment with the impact of the built environment, the familial, civic, and intellectual environments, and relearned in a way that empowers the creative capacity to imagine and participate in one's own actions.

As work in the community colleges focus on the local needs of community members and job availability, we see opportunity in providing services to others, what our demographers call service sector jobs. How we perceive the field, and our actions to prepare students to participate in that field can shape the fabric of our communities in how we provide care for our growing population of elders, and how we provide for each other and steward the environment we live in.