Renaissance Revisited: Singapore as a ‘Global City for the Arts’

Singapore is renowned as a global business and financial centre, an international hub of air and sea transport, and Asia's leading convention city. In the new millennium, the government has envisioned a new role for the city‐state as a ‘Renaissance City’ and ‘Global City for the Arts’. This vision is premised on Singapore becoming an investment base for leading arts, cultural and entertainment enterprises in the region, the theatre hub of Southeast Asia, and an entertainment destination for tourists. This article examines the challenges and accomplishments in Singapore's quest to be a Renaissance City. Drawing on literature on ‘global cities’ and concepts relating to ‘globalization’ and ‘localization’, it argues that the key challenge facing Singapore is how best to ‘go global’ and ‘stay local’ at the same time. Developing a Renaissance City entails a balancing act between globalizing local sensibilities on the one hand, while localizing global best‐practices on the other. This global‐local nexus can be approached in three ways: (1) by striking a balance between the economic and humanistic objectives of the arts; (2) by importing world‐class arts talents and exporting home‐grown skills; and (3) by globalizing local peculiarities in line with best practices from around the world. The need to balance global standards with local interests is not easily achieved, however, making Singapore's ‘Global City for the Arts’ vision one of its most ambitious goals to date. Singapour est célèbre en tant que centre mondial de la finance et des affaires, pivot du transport aéro‐maritime international, site de premier plan pour les salons en Asie. Avec le millénaire naissant, le gouvernement a envisagé une nouvelle fonction pour la cité‐État, celle de ‘Ville de la Renaissance’ et ‘Ville mondiale des Arts‘. Préalablement, Singapour doit devenir non seulement une base d'investissement pour les grands projets artistiques, culturels et de divertissement dans cette partie du monde, mais aussi le nud théâtral de l'Asie du Sud‐Est et une destination touristique de loisirs. L'article étudie les défis et réalisations qui jalonnent cette entreprise. Exploitant les documents traitant des ‘villes mondiales’ et des concepts liés à la ‘mondialisation’ et à la ‘localisation‘, il démontre que le grand problème auquel Singapour se heurte est de concilier simultanément les deux démarches ‘agir mondial‘ et ‘rester local‘. Développer une Ville de la Renaissance implique un équilibrage entre la mondialisation de sensibilités locales d'un côté, et la localisation des meilleures méthodes internationales de l'autre. On peut aborder ce lien mondial‐local de trois manières différentes: trouver un juste milieu entre les objectifs économiques et humanistes des arts; importer des talents artistiques de dimension mondiale et exporter les compétences nationales; mondialiser les particularités locales cohérentes avec les meilleures méthodes internationales existantes. Atteindre l'équilibre nécessaire entre normes mondiales et intérêts locaux est loin d'être aisé, ce qui fait de la vision de Singapour en ‘Ville mondiale des Arts‘ l'un des buts nationaux les plus ambitieux à ce jour.     

The ‘win–win’ paradigm and stakeholder integration

Firms are under pressure to invest in environmental management systems (EMSs) to reduce the environmental impacts of their activities. Many advocates of EMS adoption promote the idea of ‘win–win’ gains, where improvements in environmental performance are accompanied by financial rewards. The empirical evidence on this is mixed and suggests that the' right' conditions must exist within the firm for genuine environmental performance gains to materialize. The paper uses a survey of 129 Spanish manufacturing firms to investigate managerial perceptions about what these right conditions might be. Results indicate that enhanced environmental performance following EMS adoption is linked to managers' belief in the win–win paradigm, and that managers who adhere to the win–win story also tend to integrate other stakeholder demands into their business strategies. Policy implications conclude the paper. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

The ‘science’ and ‘practice’ of HRM in small firms

This paper looks at the ‘science’ and ‘practice’ of human resource management in small firms. While there is growing evidence that the practice of human resource management in small firms is characterized by informality, there is less evidence about the science, or explaining why this is the case. We look to writing on strategic human resource management, which has at its heart the resource based view of the firm, for possibilities offered to understanding the science of human resource management in small firms.     

‘Derivative’ firms,agency and economic integration

This paper proposes a ‘derivative’ firm model that emphasizes the decisions to invest in productive assets and to contract with firm managers. Contemporary examples of derivative firms include joint ventures and LBOs. The traditional joint venture is recast as a derivative firm with the model pointing out why managerial contracts and asset investment decisions should be made simultaneously for optimal shareholder wealth.     

Environmental management: from ‘fit’ to ‘stretch’

Environmental management is a budding discipline that studies the development and shaping of environmental policy in business. This article discusses what progress has been made in theory building in the field of environmental management, and what priorities should be set for future research. The level of ambition of a company with respect to its environmental performance is seen as the result of the following three variables: the coincidence of increased eco-efficiency and market opportunities; the internal structure and culture of the company (including the influence of a number of important actors in it) and the pressure from the immediate and wider social environment to take environmental measures. Research in the field of environmental management can improve our understanding of the conditions under which companies will strive for higher eco-efficiencies. It is argued that such research must concentrate on the interaction of the three variables mentioned above and on how they affect the actions of companies. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

The ‘Singapore scenario’: the uncertain prospects for labour standards in post‐Brexit Britain

The Conservative government of Theresa May asserted that labour standards would be preserved post‐Brexit. The Labour Party also privileged labour standards in its anti‐austerity programme. The threat remains however that Brexit will provide an incentive to erode labour standards in a global ‘race to the bottom’ in a ‘Singapore scenario’.     

Exploring the fluid boundary between ‘legitimate performance management’ and ‘downward bullying’: an experimental approach

Using an experimental design, this research examines the extent to which managers and employees perceive management behaviours differently. Eight simulated employment scenarios were presented to an aggregated sample of managers and non‐managerial employees (n = 435), and the respondents were asked to evaluate the extent to which the behaviours depicted are seen as bullying. It was found that employees are more likely than managers to perceive ‘legitimate performance management’ as bullying but also that managers are more likely than employees to perceive more overt bullying as bullying per se. This divergence in perceptions suggests that what constitutes bullying, ontologically speaking, depends on one's point of view and implies that reality is socially constructed. The research has important implications for organisations and trade unions in the development of bullying policies and procedures.     

The ‘Urban Age’ in Question

Foreboding declarations about contemporary urban trends pervade early twenty‐first century academic, political and journalistic discourse. Among the most widely recited is the claim that we now live in an ‘urban age’ because, for the first time in human history, more than half the world's population today purportedly lives within cities. Across otherwise diverse discursive, ideological and locational contexts, the urban age thesis has become a form of doxic common sense around which questions regarding the contemporary global urban condition are framed. This article argues that, despite its long history and its increasingly widespread influence, the urban age thesis is a flawed basis on which to conceptualize world urbanization patterns: it is empirically untenable (a statistical artifact) and theoretically incoherent (a chaotic conception). This critique is framed against the background of postwar attempts to measure the world's urban population, the main methodological and theoretical conundrums of which remain fundamentally unresolved in early twenty‐first century urban age discourse. The article concludes by outlining a series of methodological perspectives for an alternative understanding of the contemporary global urban condition.     

The ‘Graying’ of ‘Green’ Zones: Spatial Governance and Irregular Settlement in Xochimilco,Mexico City

This article details the evolving social and spatial dynamics of a planning approach that is now being used to regulate irregular or informal settlements in the conservation zone of Xochimilco in the Federal District of Mexico City. As part of the elaboration of ‘normative’ planning policies and practices, this approach counts, maps and then classifies irregular settlements into different categories with distinct land‐use regularization possibilities. These spatial calculations establish a continuum of ‘gray’ spaces, placing many settlements in a kind of planning limbo on so‐called ‘green’ conservation land. The research suggests that these spatial calculations are now an important part of enacting land‐use planning and presenting a useful ‘technical’ veneer through which the state negotiates competing claims to space. Based on a case study of an irregular settlement, the article examines how the state is implicated in the production and regulation of irregularity as part of a larger strategy of spatial governance. The research explores how planning ‘knowledges’ and ‘techniques’ help to create fragmented but ‘governable’ spaces that force communities to compete for land‐use regularization. The analysis raises questions about the conception of informality as something that, among other things, simply takes place outside of the formal planning system.     

Feeling like a State: Design Guidelines and the Legibility of ‘Urban Experience’ in Singapore

This article examines how ‘urban experience’ is objectified and transformed into something that is legible to the state and its experts. It conceptualizes design guidelines as a political technology where bodies of expert knowledge, emplaced in a planning bureaucracy, shape the way the built environment is produced and experienced. Using Singapore as an example of a centralized planning bureaucracy, I analyze how lighting, public art and advertisement signs are targeted to produce a total environment with normative narratives. This article makes two contributions. First, it unpacks the processes that translate different modes of legibility in an attempt to make ‘experience’ legible for planners. The political efficacy of guidelines and pre‐established bureaucratic boundaries means that planners can only intervene through a series of combinations, mediations and approximations. Thus, legibility proceeds in a way that is akin to ‘feeling around’. Second, it foregrounds the ‘middle layer of urban governance’ that is often ignored in the discipline. Guidelines represent one coordinate in a system of political technologies that is concerned with producing the norm, that substrate of urban production mechanized through a series of repetitions, gradations and classifications.