Struggling with the Creative Class

This article develops a critique of the recently popularized concepts of the ‘creative class’ and ‘creative cities’. The geographic reach and policy salience of these discourses is explained not in terms of their intrinsic merits, which can be challenged on a number of grounds, but as a function of the profoundly neoliberalized urban landscapes across which they have been traveling. For all their performative display of liberal cultural innovation, creativity strategies barely disrupt extant urban‐policy orthodoxies, based on interlocal competition, place marketing, property‐ and market‐led development, gentrification and normalized socio‐spatial inequality. More than this, these increasingly prevalent strategies extend and recodify entrenched tendencies in neoliberal urban politics, seductively repackaging them in the soft‐focus terms of cultural policy. This has the effect of elevating creativity to the status of a new urban imperative — defining new sites, validating new strategies, placing new subjects and establishing new stakes in the realm of competitive interurban relations. L’article présente une critique des concepts de ‘classe créative’ et ‘villes créatives’ publiés récemment. La portée géographique et la pertinence politique de ces discours s’expliquent non par leurs mérites intrinsèques, ceux‐ci pouvant être remis en question à plus d’un titre, mais en tant que fonction des paysages urbains fortement néolibéraux qu’ils ont traversés. Quant à leur manifestation concrète de l’innovation culturelle libérale, les stratégies de créativité dérangent à peine les orthodoxies qui subsistent en politique urbaine, fondées sur une compétition interlocale, un marketing de lieu, une expansion axée sur la propriété et le marché, un embourgeoisement et une inégalité socio‐spatiale normalisée. Mais surtout, ces stratégies toujours plus présentes prolongent et recodifient des tendances bien installées en politique urbaine néolibérale, les rhabillant de manière attrayante dans un flou artistique terminologique de politique culturelle. Ainsi, la créativité est élevée au statut de nouvel impératif urbain pour définir de nouveaux sites, valider de nouvelles stratégies, positionner de nouveaux sujets et instaurer de nouveaux enjeux dans la concurrence interurbaine.     

STATE PATTERNS IN FAMILY INCOME INEQUALITY

It is well known that U.S. income inequality began to increase in the 1970s and increased sharply in the 1980s. Yet, what is less well known is that this upward trend was not uniform across states. Some states experienced almost no increase in family income inequality, while other states experienced dramatic increases. We use the variation in state trends to examine factors that may underlie shifts in U.S. income inequality. Among numerous factors, we include variables that allow us to examine the role that state and local economic development policy may play. Also, in examining state income inequality differences that could not be explained by economic factors, we explore the possibility that cultural and social norm factors affect state income inequality.     

Potential Profitability and Decreased Consumer Welfare Through Manufacturers' Cents-Off Coupons

This paper examines the potential increase in oligopolistic manufacturers' profits due to a policy of cents-off couponing and the resulting changes in consumer welfare and resource allocation. This paper offers support to the hypothesis that the observed couponing policies of U.S. manufacturers are motivated by their desire to increase profits through third-degree price discrimination—a practice that results in welfare losses to consumers. While some conclusions reached have been dealt with by other researchers, its approach differs in that it attempts to quantify the probable magnitudes of the welfare effects and profit potential of manufacturers' couponing policies within the framework of a third-degree price discrimination model where firms are assumed to behave as Cournot oligopolists.     

Labour Migration and Gendered Agricultural Relations: The Feminization of Agriculture in the Ejidal Sector of Calakmul,Mexico

We examine the nature of the ‘feminization of agriculture’ in the semi‐subsistence, peasant production sector of southeastern Mexico, as associated with male labour out‐migration. Presenting findings from empirical work with smallholder producers, we discuss the impact of men's migration to the United States on women's participation in agriculture and gendered relations of agricultural production. In 2007, we conducted a survey of 155 semi‐subsistence, smallholder households in six ejidos. This survey was supplemented by ethnographic research in a single ejido. Our findings demonstrate the need to distinguish between farm labour and management in this sector, and the potentially significant (but focused) changes in the local relations of agricultural production wrought by gendered patterns of labour migration – specifically in tenure, land‐use decision‐making and the management of hired labour.