Business at the margins? Business interests in edge urban politics

The issue of the organization, role and influence of business interests in urban politics at the edge of major cities is one that is overdue for investigation. This article provides an initial and empirically oriented investigation of the organization, role and influence of business interests in edge urban politics in Europe. We present findings from five members of a European network of self‐styled ‘edge cities’. Following the now extensive debate in academic literature regarding the applicability of US concepts such as growth machines and urban regimes to the European setting, we draw attention to a diversity of business involvement in urban politics at the edge of Europe’s capital cities. This diversity does include instances that, despite the very different ‘macro‐necessities’ structuring edge urban politics in Europe, approximate to these concepts. Moreover, the diversity apparent in edge urban business politics raises several important questions for future research on urban governance. Namely, the complex connection between the local dependence of business and the organization of its interests; the ‘jumping of scales’ by locally dependent edge urban actors, and the sometimes neglected articulation of business interests with party political organization.     

Where is Urban Politics?

We outline the rationale for reopening the issue of the spatiality of the ‘urban’ in urban politics. There is a long tradition of arguing about the distinctive political qualities of urban sites, practices and processes. Recent work often relies on spatial concepts or metaphors that anchor various political phenomena to cities while simultaneously putting the specificity of the urban itself in question. This symposium seeks to extend debates about the relationship between the urban and the political. Instead of asking ‘what is urban politics?’, seeking a definition of the urban as a starting point we begin by asking ‘where is urban politics?’. This question orients all of the contributions to this symposium, and it allows each to trace diverse political dimensions of urban life and living beyond the confines of ‘the city’ as classically conceived. The symposium engages with ‘the urban question’ through diverse settings and objects, including infrastructures, in‐between spaces, professional cultures, transnational and postcolonial spaces and spaces of sovereignty. Contributions draw on a range of intellectual perspectives, including geography, urban studies, political science and political theory, anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, planning and environmental studies — indicating the range of intellectual traditions that can and do inform the investigation of the urban/political nexus.     

Secessionist Automobility: Racism,Anti‐Urbanism,and the Politics of Automobility in Atlanta,Georgia

Automobility — the centering of society and everyday life around automobiles and their spaces — is one of the most contentious aspects of contemporary urban growth debates at the local, national, and global scale. The politics of automobility is a spatial struggle over how the city should be organized and for whom. Yet there is little research on how this struggle is unfolding, and how that politics is shaping urban space. Part of this stems from the essentialization of automobility in policy and academic discourses on cities. Moving beyond essentialization, this article will explore how contentious political struggles reveal nuanced and diverse discourses and ideologies surrounding automobility and space. Focusing on what I call ‘secessionist automobility’— using an automobile as an instrument of spatial secession — I examine Atlanta, Georgia’s contentious automobility debate. Secessionist automobility is bound with the blunt politics of race‐based secession from urban space, but also more subtle forms of spatial secession rooted in anti‐urban ideologies. Implications for local, national, and global contestation of automobility will be provided.     

Multi‐level Environmentalism and the European Union: The Case of Trans‐European Transport Networks

In the European Union, trans‐European transport networks (TENs) are a vital element in the constitution of one European space in order to enable the free movement of people and goods throughout the Union. Their construction, however, often causes environmental degradation. Opposition to EU politics is mostly voiced at the level of individual nation‐states. As the case of TENs reveals, however, protest against European policy projects with environmental side effects can take the form of ‘multi‐level environmentalism’, linking lobbying and ‘conscientization’ in Brussels with direct action at the national and local levels. Civil society theory, social movement theory and governance theory help ensure a theoretically informed answer to the question of how the resistance to TENs is organized and framed. By questioning dominant problem definitions and solution strategies, environmental movements and movement organizations, both in Brussels and in the individual nation‐states, point to the possibility of looking at social and political reality from another, non‐hegemonic point of view. In this way, they contribute to challenging the often biased technocratic, growth‐oriented character of the European Union.     

From Territorial Cohesion to Regional Spatial Justice: The Well-Being of Future Generations Act in Wales

The European Union's flagship Cohesion Policy faces evidence of dubious economic effectiveness and growing political and philosophical critiques of the very ideals of furthering European integration. This article examines ambitions for territorial cohesion as they have been operationalized through regional development in Wales. We argue that a potential alternative to the failed realization of territorial cohesion lies in the principles of spatial justice. While territorial cohesion has typically emphasized the redistribution of funds to ‘lagging’ regions, spatial justice, as we define it, is premised upon enabling regions to assert their own capacity to act and pursue positive visions of regional futures, consider the implications of space and scale for the achievement of justice, and define well-being, development and the ‘good life’ in ways that reflect regional priorities. We examine three ways in which recent political discourses and policy mechanisms in Wales resonate with these ideals. We focus on attempts to envision a progressive Welsh future, develop alternative spaces and scales of governance, and redefine and pluralize understandings of progress and well-being. The article concludes by reflecting on the practical and conceptual implications of rescaling spatial justice to regional contexts.     

Models of democracy in spatial investments

Governance regarding spatial investments meets or even creates institutional tensions that process management finds difficult to cope with. Traditional democracy is confronted with new ways of policy making. New practices include multi-level governance, public?–?private partnerships and citizen participation. Central government and parliamentary control have to adapt to such practices. This article studies institutional tensions in two cases of spatial investment, using representative and participatory democracy as models of political regime and policy implementation. The analysis also links governance to characteristics of space. The authors make recommendations to combine ‘representative’ and ‘participatory’ elements of governance in a way that reduces institutional tensions in processes of spatial investment.     

More voice after more exit? Unstable industrial relations in Central Eastern Europe

The article examines the industrial relations developments in the post‐communist countries that entered the EU in 2004. Rather than introducing the ‘European Social Model’, EU accession has led to some social tensions, in spite of relatively strong economic growth, because of deregulation, European Monetary Union conditions and the enduring need to compete for foreign investment. EU institutional promotion of social dialogue through the Directive on Information and Consultation of Workers, sector social dialogue committees and the European Employment Strategy has only had limited effects in increasing the ‘voice’ of employees in employment relations. National‐level social dialogue has produced poor results and has even been weakened in Slovenia (where it was originally strong) and, initially, in Slovakia. The lack of ‘voice’ for employees has led to increased ‘exit’ through political populism/abstention and migration. A double paradox emerges. Pro‐labour policies are being developed not by the EU, but rather by its opposite, Euro‐sceptical governments (in Poland and Slovakia), while in the workplaces, employers are forced to concessions not by their employees, but by those who leave and cause labour shortages. However, there is also some evidence of a resurgent ‘voice’ from below, through strikes, organising campaigns, informal collective protests and collective bargaining innovations. Drawing on both theory and history of industrial relations, it is concluded that some preconditions for more stable social compromises including more ‘voice’ are emerging.     

Organizational political climate: Shared perceptions about the building and use of power bases

Organizational politics continues to be acknowledged as a real and important dimension of organizational functioning. Most research has focused on ‘perceptions of organizational politics’ where organizational politics is conceptualized negatively and its relationship with detrimental individual and organizational outcomes is demonstrated. We argue that organizational politics can be conceptualized as a multi-dimensional climate level construct and that ‘organizational political climate’ can be both functional and dysfunctional. We propose and explain a four dimensional model of organizational political climate informed by existing theoretical perspectives on power bases. The four key dimensions are represented by the building and use of personal power, positional power, connection power and informational power. We also highlight the need for a comprehensive measure of organizational political climate which is underpinned by the four dimensions and which enables an assessment of the extent to which the organizational political climate is functional and/or dysfunctional. In summary, we recommend that HR practitioners seek to understand the functional and dysfunctional dimensions of organizational political climate and implement practices to foster a positive political climate. We overview practical implications for HR managers and suggest a future research agenda.     

Fast Parallels? Contesting Mobile Policy Technologies

This article extends recent examinations of incomplete or disrupted policy mobility by examining the politically volatile case of policies to manage the regional impacts of decarbonization in Australia. The article's extended case study shows how political interests differently incorporated figments of circulating policy into longstanding debates and how more‐than‐local political networks defeated an antipolitical, technocratic exercise in ‘new regional’ governance. ‘Follow the policy’ methods could not have revealed the complexities of this case. The article concludes that mobilities approaches need to be more attentive to institutional arrangements, to the contested politics of policy formation and to the ambiguities of perceived policy likenesses. This case highlights the importance of considering how antipolitical institutional architectures facilitating policy mobility relate to established political power networks.     

Urban Politics as the Unfolding of Social Relations in Place: The Case of Sexually Transmitted Disease Investigation in Mid‐Twentieth‐Century Gay Seattle

Recent debates in urban politics stress the need to broaden conceptions of what counts as urban politics, as well as of where they take place. This means shifting attention to include more quotidian and prosaic social relations, including those taking place in spaces of civil society. We answer this call with a case study of the relations between an emerging gay male community in mid‐twentieth‐century Seattle, USA and the local public health department’s disease investigators (DIs). We focus on both the biopolitics and cultural politics of the investigation process, from the perspectives of both DIs and gay men. We point out certain tensions and paradoxes in these processes as a form of governmentality, and interpret them through a ‘noir’ cultural lens that is consistent with a notion of urban politics as the unfolding of social relations in place. We conclude by stressing how our findings and framework can augment urban political inquiry both intellectually and empirically.     

Urban Vigilantism: A Study of Anti‐Terror Law,Politics and Policing in Istanbul

Focusing on the case of young socialist vigilantes who were arrested and imprisoned as ‘terrorists’ in 2007, this article illustrates how vigilantism in working‐class neighbourhoods of Istanbul with a high Alevi population evolved from an unarmed, public and participatory form of vigilantism to an armed one, and discusses the role of the anti‐terror law in this transformation. The article illustrates the ways in which the anti‐terror law, by narrowing the space for civil politics, paved the way for youth engagement in violent forms of extra‐legal security practice in spaces occupied by the historically stigmatized working‐class Alevi population. The article also argues that, over the last decade, Turkey’s ruling elites have used the anti‐terror law to wage a war against the oppositional politics conducted by the country’s historically stigmatized populations (such as Kurds and Alevis). Not only has this war put politically active and respected local figures from these communities behind bars, it also ‘polices’ (à la Rancière) these communities. Accordingly, the article illustrates how the law that considers attempts at self‐governance as a threat to state sovereignty effectively intervenes in local politics and space, leading to the reconfiguration of political space at the local level.     

What Do Cities Have to Do with Democracy?

The relationship between urbanization and democratization remains under‐theorized and under‐researched. Radical urban theory has undergone a veritable normative turn, registered in debates about the right to the city, spatial justice and the just city, while critical conceptualizations of neoliberalism present ‘democracy’ as the preferred remedy for injustice. However, these lines of thought remain reluctant to venture too far down the path of political philosophy. The relationship between urban politics and the dynamics of democratization remains under‐theorized as a result. It is argued that this relationship can be usefully understood by drawing on lessons from avowedly normative styles of political theorizing, specifically post‐Habermasian strands of critical theory. Taking this tradition seriously helps one to notice that discussions of urbanization, democracy, injustice and rights in geography, urban studies and related fields invoke an implicit but unthematized democratic norm, that of all‐affected interests. In contemporary critical theory, this norm is conceptualized as a worldly register of political demands. It is argued that the conceptual disaggregation of component values of democracy undertaken through the ‘spatial turn’ in recent critical theory reorients the analysis of the democratic potentials of urban politics around the investigation of the multiple forms of agency which urbanized processes perform in generating, recognizing and acting upon issues of shared concern.     

The Political Economy of Low Inflation

What are the politics of inflation? This question is usually raised solely when inflation rates are high. All levels of inflation, however, high and low, are the outcome of political conflicts. But no current approach to the study of inflation — sociological, neoclassical, modern political economy — adequately captures the full range of political issues at stake, and this leads to problems for both theory and policy. This paper critiques the existing perspectives on inflation and then focuses on three theoretical issues raised by those critiques: the economic costs of inflation; the concept of monetary neutrality from economic and political perspectives; and the importance of disaggregating economic growth statistics. Finally, the paper introduces and explores a contending approach to the analysis of the political economy of inflation: a ‘micro‐politics’ perspective. This approach is the only one to address the politics of low inflation, which is of great significance for contemporary political economy.     

Governance and the Policy Process In Contemporary Europe

Diverse recent literatures on ‘the hollow state’. ‘deliberative democracy’ and ‘governing without government’ are largely concerned with the workings of politics and public management under socio-political conditions of indeterminancy and fragmentation that are variously described as characteristics of high or late modernity (Giddens 1991) or, as some prefer to put it, of post-modernity (Fox and Miller 1995). This article, which reflects the author's interest in interdisciplinary forms of post-postmodern analysis that draw upon political science and sociology and social theory as well as administrative studies, examines a number of conceptual and empirical topics that, it is argued, are relevant to exploration of the thesis that postnational social milieux are steered via new forms of societal-cum-political governance that have largely replaced governmental institutions and processes of the kind associated with classical notions of the state, public administration and liberal democracy.     

Liberalising the German model: institutional change,organisational restructuring and workplace effects

Institutional change at supranational, European Union level affects national and firm level institutions in various ways. This article traces effects of liberalisation measures in the airport industry enacted in two airport firms in Germany. The study, based on qualitative empirical research, found that EU liberalisation facilitated company creation of subsidiaries (subsidiarisation) and elevated shareholder interest in corporate governance. These factors affected institutional practices and cultural norms within the German industrial context that in turn influenced significant alterations in employment and workplace relations. Considerable disruption of the German social partnership model of corporate governance and industrial relations was observed. However, in addition to patterns of convergence towards neoliberal practices and outcomes frequently observed in Anglo‐Saxon systems, the study found some elements of effective retention of cultural institutional resources of the German model. Both ‘path departure’ and social embeddedness appear to coexist.     

Introduction to a Debate on City-Regions: New Geographies of Governance,Democracy and Social Reproduction

In this introduction to a special Debates and Developments forum on city-regions, we argue that the recent revival of interest in city-regions has been constructed around a rather narrow set of empirical and theoretical issues relating to exchange, interspatial competition and globalization. The ‘new’ city-regionalism results in a reification of the city-region as an autonomous political agent of the global space economy. We outline an alternative approach to investigating and understanding geographies of city-regionalism, highlighting: a politics of governance and state re-territorialization around the city-region; the role of democracy and citizenship in city-region politics; and tensions around social reproduction and sustainability across the city-region.     

Community Leadership and the Construction of Political Legitimacy: Unpacking Bourdieu's ‘Political Capital’ in Post‐Apartheid Johannesburg

Apart from local monographs and normative texts on community participation, research on community leadership constitutes a blind spot in urban leadership, urban politics, social movements and urban studies. This article, based on case studies in post‐apartheid Johannesburg, contributes to theorizing community leadership, or informal local political leadership, by exploring Bourdieu's concepts of ‘political capital’ and ‘double dealings’. Considering community leaders as brokers between local residents and various institutions (in South Africa, the state and the party), we examine how leaders construct their political legitimacy, both towards ‘the bottom’ (building and maintaining their constituencies), and towards ‘the top’ (seeking and sustaining recognition from fractions of the party and the state). These legitimation processes are often in tension, pulling community leaders in contradictory directions, usefully understood under Bourdieu's concept of ‘double dealings’. Community leaders are required, more than formally elected political leaders, to constantly reassert their legitimacy in multiple local public arenas due to the informal nature of their mandate and the high level of political competition between them — with destructive consequences for local polity but also the potential for increased accountability to their followers. We finally reflect on the relevance of this theoretical framework, inspired by Bourdieu, beyond South African urban politics.     

Legal Technologies of Primitive Accumulation: Judicial Robbery and Dispossession‐by‐Restitution in Warsaw

Among the ‘extra‐economic means’ that facilitate primitive accumulation, or accumulation by dispossession, the law plays a prominent role. But works on neoliberal urban restructuring rarely engage with concrete legal technologies. Analysing judicial property restitution (‘reprivatization’) in Warsaw, this article grasps the machine of accumulation by dispossession at a moment of faltering and exposes the distinctive legal technologies behind its troubleshooting. It makes three contributions to critical urban studies. First, it demonstrates how judicial systems can steal political conflicts that obstruct the cycle of accumulation by dispossession. It thus introduces the notion of ‘judicial robbery’, a non‐legislated expropriation of common property through judicial engineering that simultaneously deprives the public of political agency. Second, it shows that seemingly neutral legal technicalities, usually sheltered from political debate, can become a key locus of urban politics. Third, it examines the agency, scope and spatial patterns of ‘dispossession by restitution’, the term I use for a locally specific form of accumulation by dispossession in Warsaw. Lastly, I raise the question of political struggle against primitive accumulation. Is the judicial robbery reversible? If we can reclaim property, can we also reclaim political conflicts that have been stolen by the law?     

The onto-politics of entrepreneurial experimentation: re-reading Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s understanding of ‘experimental systems’

ABSTRACT

In this article, we argue that there is a need to theorize the relationship between entrepreneurship and the political beyond the currently dominant neo-liberal and emancipatory narrative by turning to an onto-political conception of entrepreneurship based on the processes of entrepreneurial experimentation. In entrepreneurship studies, the relevance and the potential of experimentation for shaping new organizational realities has only been explored marginally. Through re-reading the thinking on ‘experimental systems’ by the science historian Hans-Jörg Rheinberger and connecting it to Annemarie Mol’s notion of ‘ontological politics’, we develop a conceptual framework for entrepreneurial experimentation which we document with the illustration of an art enterprise. The framework that we propose focuses on the interwoven embodied, material and processual dynamics of entrepreneurial experimentation and reframes entrepreneurial world-making as a speculative process driven by material reconfigurations and bodily connections. As a consequence, we argue that this model is able to emphasize the intricate political dimension inscribed in processes of entrepreneurial experimentation through their onto-political force of reconfiguring systems of ‘self-others-things’. Furthermore, the model highlights that this capacity of ‘world-making’ cannot be realized without articulating the tensions and resistances that entrepreneurial endeavours often need to navigate and negotiate while reconfiguring and challenging dominant socio-material orders.     

The Symbiosis of the Urban and the Political

Historically, the urban was the condition of possibility for the political, but the symbiosis of the two has been concealed by the rise of the state and the concomitant development of the social sciences. The effort to recover the connection by denoting a separate domain of ‘urban politics’ is self‐defeating, because it re‐instantiates an ontology of the political that consigns the urban to the domain of ‘low’ politics. The dominant ontology suggests that ‘high’ politics — the most serious politics or politics proper — is always in the domain of states and empires, and that everything else is subject to it. This view is constantly reaffirmed by the political theory that underpins the state system and the modern social sciences. Nevertheless, a different ontology of the political is always already implicit in the concept of the city, understood as a local phenomenon and a global way of life. To see the political through the city is to notice how proximate diversity stimulates self‐organization and self‐government, generates politics in and between authorities in different registers, and defers the sovereignty claims it produces. On this view, the urban is neither high nor low, but is instead the very form of the political, encompassing states and empires as much as anything else.