China's Emergent City‐Region Governance: A New Form of State Spatial Selectivity through State‐orchestrated Rescaling

This article examines the emergence of city‐region governance as a specific state spatial selectivity in post‐reform China. The process has been driven by the state in response to the crisis of economic decentralization, and to vicious inter‐city competition and uncoordinated development. As part of the recentralization of state power, the development of urban clusters (chengshiqun) as interconnected city‐regions is now a salient feature of ‘new urbanization' policy. I argue in this article that the Chinese city‐region corresponds to specific logics of scale production. Economic globalization has led to the development of local economies and further created the need to foster ‘regional competitiveness'. To cope with regulatory deficit at the regional level, three mechanisms have been orchestrated by the state: administrative annexation, spatial plan preparation and regional institution building, which reflect recent upscaling in post‐reform governance.     

MEASUREMENT,EVOLUTION, DETERMINANTS,AND CONSEQUENCES OF STATE CAPACITY: A REVIEW OF RECENT RESEARCH

There is increasing realization that state capacity is a fundamental ingredient for effective governance, and is a crucial element of long‐run economic development. This paper offers an overview of the strengths and limitations in current empirical research on the measurement of state capacity. The paper also surveys the fast emerging literature on the determinants and effects of state capacity. We argue that existing measures on governance quality used in cross‐national research can be usefully exploited to capture different aspects of state capacity, and show that post the end of the Cold War, developing economies have experienced improvements in legal, administrative and bureaucratic capacity, but the gap with advanced economies is still wide. Future research should address the short temporal coverage of available measures of state capacity, as well as providing a systematic quantitative assessment of the determinants of capacity and of its effects on development outcomes, such as health and education, which have not received sufficient scrutiny.     

Towards an Agenda for Post‐carbon Cities: Lessons from Lilac,the UK's First Ecological,Affordable Cohousing Community

This article explores an agenda towards post‐carbon cities, extending and deepening established debates around low‐carbon, sustainable cities in the process. The label post‐carbon builds upon issues beyond those of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, energy conservation and climate change, adding a broader set of concerns, including economic justice, behaviour change, wellbeing, land ownership, the role of capital and the state, and community self‐management. The article draws upon a case study of an embryonic post‐carbon initiative completed in early 2013 called Lilac. Based in Leeds, Lilac stands for Low Impact Living Affordable Community and is the first attempt to build an affordable, ecological cohousing project in the UK. Its three aspects each respond to significant challenges: low‐impact living and the challenge of post‐carbon value change; affordability and the challenge of mutualism and equality; and community and the challenge of self‐governance. I conclude the article by exploring six lessons from Lilac that tentatively outline a roadmap towards post‐carbon cities: the need for holistic approaches that deal with complex challenges, prioritizing self‐determination rather than just participation, engaging with productive political tensions, adopting a process rather than an outcomes‐based approach, developing strategy for replicability, and finally, embracing a non‐parochial approach to localities.     

The Impact of the Asian Financial Crisis on Conservatism and Timeliness of Earnings: Evidence from Hong Kong,Malaysia, Singapore,and Thailand

This paper examines conservatism and timeliness of earnings in the period surrounding the 1997 Asian financial crisis in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. Prior research suggests that managers tended to be more aggressive in reporting good news and delayed recognition of bad news during the financial crisis (less conservative and less timely in financial reporting). After the crisis, these four countries implemented corporate governance measures to stabilize their financial systems and improve regulation and supervision (that should improve conservatism and timeliness). We examine and find that conservatism and timeliness of earnings during the crisis period are low, but improved in the post‐crisis period. More importantly, conservatism and timeliness in the post‐crisis period is even greater than in the pre‐crisis period. We measure conservatism using Basu's model and the accumulation of non‐operating accruals suggested by Givoly and Hayn. The findings from both measures are consistent with an increase in conservatism after the crisis period. Overall, the results indicate that corporate governance reforms in these four countries had a positive impact on conservatism and timeliness of earnings.     

Institutional Antecedents of the Corporate Social Responsibility Narrative in the Developing World Context: Implications for Sustainable Development

Efforts to understand the background to perceptions and manifestation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the developing world need to focus on establishing their link with the challenges of socio‐economic governance and societal expectations and cultural traditions. This signifies a departure from a western centric understanding of CSR but also an over‐focus on CSR as philanthropy. This study considers the Malawian tourism industry and finds that its colonial legacy, post‐colonialism development thinking and the national education system explain the prevalence of a ‘CSR as philanthropy’ agenda. When these factors interact with challenges of socio‐economic governance and societal expectations, however, the universality thesis that has often been associated with the theory and implementation CSR can be challenged. These findings therefore suggest a shift from the western centric CSR thinking to a CSR perspective that is strongly grounded in local values and norms and which meets the expectations of the global society. This indicates a way forward if CSR is to be adequately institutionalized in the developing world. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Be Berlin! Governing the City through Freedom

In this article, I examine how contemporary Berlin is governed, with a particular focus on the production of urban space. My points of reference are the term ‘government’ (as employed by Foucault) and the field of governmentality studies (where it is applied empirically). Based on a critical discourse and dispositive analysis of the city's current urban development policy, I propose that urban governance in Berlin may be analysed through the lens of three central dispositives: the dispositive of governing through citizenship; the dispositive of the creative city; and the dispositive of the social city. I discuss the characteristics of these dispositives of urban governance, drawing on a number of examples taken from the discipline of urban space production in order to look specifically at the aims and objectives of governance, its subjects and the ways it manifests itself. In conclusion, I suggest that the new forms of governance based on empowerment and cooperation have by no means replaced disciplinary technologies of governance, but are rather embedded within them.     

Spatial Imaginaries of the Dutch–German–Belgian Borderlands: A Multidimensional Analysis of Cross‐Border Regional Governance

Parallel to the proliferation of cross‐border regional cooperation initiatives in the European Union, increasing scholarly attention has been given to conceptualizing cross‐border governance in recent decades. In line with the recognition that cross‐border regions have not undermined the significance of nation‐state spaces but have added to their complexity, conceptual frameworks of analysis have become more and more refined. However, studies still tend to be framed in one spatial grammar, that of territory, scale or network, and fail to consider the ways in which these different dimensions become interlocked. The aim of this article is to address this lack by developing a multidimensional perspective, in order to finally circumvent state‐centric thinking on cross‐border regions and to offer a more nuanced account of whether and how new imaginaries of spatial governance institutionalize. These arguments are demonstrated by means of a case study of cross‐border regional governance in the Dutch–German–Belgian borderlands.     

Suburbanization of the Self: Religious Revival and SocioSpatial Fragmentation in Contemporary Poland

In this article, I trace the elective affinity between planetary suburbanization and emergent forms of radical religiosity. I show how the centuries‐long spatial hegemony of the Catholic Church in Poland has recently been undermined by the ‘fundamentalist' broadcaster Radio Maryja—the bellwether of the Polish right‐wing nationalist resurgence. I describe the twentieth‐century suburbanization of both the state and Catholicism in Poland, supported by an analysis of a village‐cum‐suburb in one of Poland's largest agglomerations. I show how the latest wave of suburbanization, triggered by Poland's opening up to global flows of capital in 2004, ran parallel to the emergence of a ‘post‐secular', ‘individual' and ‘intellectual' strain of faith. I tie these in with the life stories and changes in gender and labour regimes of two key informants. I also show that the surge of right‐wing nationalism should not be understood as a backlash against neoliberalization, but that it represents instead a project of regime change and new elite formation.     

Remaking Equality: Community Governance and the Politics of Exclusion in Bogota's Public Spaces

Bogota's public space policy is often credited with promoting inclusionary principles. In this article, I explore critically the content of Bogota's articulation of equality in public space policy. In so doing, I present a critical view of the work Bogota's insistence on equality does to mediate class relations in the city, relying on deeply held conceptions of both social extremes. This results in the construction of a version of social harmony in public space that at once depoliticizes the claims to public space of subjects such as street vendors and the homeless and claims a new role for the middle class in the city. The analysis focuses on two examples of community governance schemes, documenting the logics and methods used by communities to implement official visions of equality and justify the exclusion of street vendors and homeless people from the area. By looking at the articulation of these exclusions in local class politics through seemingly inclusionary rhetoric, the article accounts for ‘post‐revanchist’ turns in contemporary urban policy, while anchoring its production in local processes of community governance.     

Governed Through Ghost Jurisdictions: Municipal Law,Inner Suburbs and Rooming Houses

This article examines the legal geography of municipal bylaws regulating rooming houses in the City of Toronto. Using a legal geography analysis of Toronto's rooming house licensing bylaw, I argue that this bylaw is a ghost jurisdiction that designates part of the city as illegal and has implications for governance of the inner suburbs. In so doing, I push the debate on legal geography forward by suggesting that we, as urban scholars, take the temporal seriously in our analysis of space. Drawing from semi‐structured interviews, archival data and participant observation, I analyse seemingly mundane legal mechanisms through the case study of suburban rooming houses. Overall, in this article I make three contributions. First, I demonstrate how a temporal analysis is important to legal geography inquiries of uneven regulation and spaces of poverty. Second, I suggest that studies of legal governance are integral for redefining suburban governance amidst socio‐economic decline in the inner suburbs. Third, I argue that studying urban legal mechanisms in the suburbs is essential for moving beyond downtown analytical frameworks and is needed to address how low‐income suburban tenants, a large majority of whom are racialized newcomers, are unevenly regulated and unfairly governed by local government.     

An Institutional Configurational Approach to Cross‐National Diversity in Corporate Governance

Corporate governance (CG) research has typically been studied from rather disparate disciplinary approaches, thereby offering myopic and often conflicting rationales. We develop an institutional configurational approach to integrate this ‘siloed’ field and explain CG patterns around the world. To do so, we draw on an inductive, theory‐building methodology based on fuzzy‐set logic to uncover the configurations across institutional actor‐centred domains and their impact on CG patterns. Empirically, we explore the necessary and sufficient causal conditions leading to different features of codes of good governance across 32 OECD countries. We generate propositions linking configurational institutional domains to code features. Our results show that a single institutional domain by itself is not sufficient to explain CG outcomes, and that these domains need to be considered in conjunction, leading, in turn, to the identification of four distinct configurational governance prototypes. Our study offers a comprehensive account of drivers of cross‐national differences in CG and yields useful insights for managing and regulating governance.     

The CO‐City: Sharing,Collaborating, Cooperating,and Commoning in the City

This article introduces an innovative, experimental, adaptive, and iterative approach to creating legal and institutional frameworks based on urban polycentric governance to foster commons‐based urban policies. First, the theory of urban/local governance is introduced, based on an urban co‐governance matrix. A new type of regulatory system is then described that aims at transforming people in distributed nodes of collective action. Citizens and institutions can be myriad nodes of designing and problem solving in the public interest. Urban co‐governance aims at taking advantage of this galaxy of networks. I then examine design principles and a methodology to implement the urban co‐governance matrix. The concluding question concerns the need for a new research methodology to investigate the ongoing process of state transformation and institutional genesis at the urban level.     

Hybrid governance and governance performance in industrial purchasing relationships

Hybrid governance arrangements (e.g. joint action, long-term contracting and vertical coordination) feature regularly as an effective response to inter-firm dependence in the literature of business-to-business relationships. However, current empirical work has paid little attention to whether such governance arrangements really do improve governance efficacy and reduce transaction costs. The present study focuses on the governance efficacy of vertical coordination in industrial business-to-business relationships. Building on transaction costs arguments, the author examines whether vertical coordination is an effective means for adapting to inter-firm dependence, realized as the substantial employment of specific assets.Empirical findings from a survey of 170 industrial supplier–buyer relationships demonstrate that when asset specificity reaches a certain level, greater vertical coordination reduces ex post transaction costs significantly. On the other hand, this efficacy pattern is modest or non-existent in relationships with low asset specificity.The research findings support the basic TCA assumption that the performance of hybrid governance arrangements is highly dependent on a situation of substantial inter-firm dependence with subsequent small-number conditions.     

Integration and Control: The Governing of Urban Marginality in Western Europe

Drawing on the figurational sociology of Norbert Elias and the Foucauldian governmentality approach, this article outlines the political rationalities and governmental technologies pertaining to the territorial governance of urban marginality in Western Europe. Whereas many authors have suggested that segregation is key to the governing of urban marginality in the USA and perhaps the post‐industrial city generally, I suggest that, at least in Western Europe, marginality is governed through integration. The argument is illustrated with examples from the UK, the Netherlands and Belgium.     

Governance on the Ground: A Study of Solid Waste Management in Addis Ababa,Ethiopia

This article examines the management of solid waste in Addis Ababa from 2004 to mid‐2011. It describes how solid waste management has evolved and how relationships between the informal sector and the local authority have shifted in relation to the political atmosphere in the city. The author shows how good governance promoted by international donors does not necessarily result in improved service delivery on the ground. In line with the principles of good governance, the Ethiopian government decentralized the city's administration and entered into partnerships with non‐state actors in order to improve service delivery. However, these structural changes have not led to improvements in providing services for dealing with solid waste, nor have they improved accountability to or participation by civil society. The study shows that the established ways of exercising power are continuing within the new structures of the city administration, resulting in increased control over the actors involved in the process, and more conflicts and deeper mistrust of the city administration. This, in turn, has prevented the successful integration of the informal sector and provision of an improved solid waste service in the city. The city administration in Addis Ababa claims to have adopted good governance, but in reality it has adapted good governance to suit its own interests and agendas.     

Anti‐Communism,The Growth Machine and the Remaking of Cold‐War‐Era Pittsburgh

This article develops a new perspective on urban growth machines through an analysis of the relationship between Pittsburgh's Renaissance and cold‐war‐era anti‐communism. In order to facilitate urban (re)development, growth machines foster a shared sense of metropolitan citizenship and a corresponding ideological belief that coalitions of business, government and other elite actors can renew regions for the collective good of their residents. During the early years of the cold war, anti‐communism was a key means by which growth machines could create this shared sense of metropolitan belonging. The members of Pittsburgh's widely celebrated growth coalition used anti‐communism to advance their interests in four key ways: (1) by encouraging residents to see the Renaissance as part of the larger struggle against communism; (2) by eliminating a deeply rooted radical political culture; (3) by, in the process, curtailing opposition to their effort to remake the region into a post‐industrial economy based on free capital mobility; and (4) by having it serve as a shared tactic and ideology that stitched together and legitimated capitalist development at all scales from the factory to the globe. Pittsburgh's Renaissance provides an important example of how growth machines not only produce space, but also citizenship and the conditions of political possibility.     

Generational Dimensions of Neoliberal and Post‐Fordist Restructuring: The Changing Characteristics of Young Adults and Growing Income Inequality in Montreal and Vancouver

There is growing concern over income inequality and its generational dimensions. Post‐Fordist and neoliberal restructuring have reshaped urban labour markets, resulting in growing inequalities that disproportionately afflict younger workers. This article empirically analyses the transition as experienced in Montreal and Vancouver, two Canadian cities that have undergone restructuring in different ways. The study of young adults' changing incomes reveals growing intra‐ and inter‐cohort inequality, and an increasing intergenerational income gap in both cities. Income inequality is greater in Vancouver, with its more pronounced post‐Fordist labour force composition and neoliberalized governance context. Known factors such as occupation and gender affect the earnings structure, but educational attainment has increased the most in terms of its effect on incomes. Inequalities among young adults are expected to magnify in the future due to unevenness in educational attainment. Urban research ought to pay close attention to the role of education in structuring inequalities, and the ways the impact of restructuring is unevenly distributed across generations.     

Board Antecedents of CEO Duality and the Moderating Role of Country‐level Managerial Discretion: A Meta‐analytic Investigation

CEO duality reduces boards’ monitoring capacity. But governance substitution theory holds that boards of directors who can effectively monitor their CEOs are more likely to adopt the CEO duality governance structure. By examining relationships between board characteristics underlying their monitoring capacity and CEO duality, we bring evidence to bear on governance substitution theory. Further, by applying a managerial discretion theory lens to CEO duality, we extend governance substitution theory to the cross‐country context where institutional features vary in their constraints on managerial discretion. Meta‐analytic results from a dataset of 297 studies across 32 countries/regions provided support for the majority of our predictions. As predicted, board independence and certain types of board human capital were positively related to CEO duality. Unexpectedly, board ownership was negatively related to CEO duality. Additionally, country‐level managerial discretion significantly moderated the board independence‐ and human capital‐duality relationships (but not the board‐ownership‐duality relationship) as predicted.     

Expressive Shareholder Democracy: A Multilevel Study of Shareholder Dissent in 15 Western European Countries

This study develops an expressive understanding of shareholder dissent. In this view, shareholder dissent is not only about the voting outcomes of proposals put to the vote, but also expresses an evaluation of the firm's corporate governance set‐up. We hypothesize that shareholder dissent expresses an agency theoretical evaluation of corporate governance, but that the degree to which the capitalist system of a country is a coordinated market economy (CME) leads shareholders to evaluate corporate governance more in team production terms. We test our theoretical model using multilevel techniques on a sample of 12,513 proposals voted on in 717 firms listed in 15 Western European countries and find support for our predictions. Our study not only contributes to a better understanding of the corporate governance role of shareholder dissent, but also shows that what shareholders express through dissent differs across national contexts.     

‘Don't Waste a Crisis’: Opening up the City Yet Again for Neoliberal Experimentation

This essay calls for a systematic investigation of the financial‐economic crisis as a source of new urban governance rationalities across Europe. We propose combining an understanding of neoliberalization as a variegated social phenomenon with a cultural political economy approach sensitive to the discursive dimension of variegation and the evolutionary mechanisms through which discursive variation is translated into geo‐institutional differentiation. We illustrate how this theoretical framework may help to analyse the impact of the crisis on urban governmental rationalities. Rather than offering a complete cultural political economy account of the responses of European cities to the financial‐economic crisis, we analyse how the crisis and the responses to it have been represented in discourses on urban policies and development by focusing on two discursive sites that are of strategic importance, namely OECD LEED and URBACT. Our preliminary findings suggest a re‐assemblage of existing discourses rather than the emergence of a new post‐neoliberal urban government rationality.