This article explores the influence of international financial capital on the production of exclusionary housing markets and spatialities in the city of Prague, Czech Republic. It focuses on the regeneration of Karlín, a district of Prague increasingly defined by the presence of luxury housing and high-specification office developments. Through a critical discussion of two private companies heavily implicated in the renewal of the district, it is possible to examine the ways in which these actors are contributing to this regeneration. I argue that the regeneration of the district is intimately bound up with processes of capitalist uneven development that couple networks of foreign investors with local municipal authorities through an asymmetric set of power relations. These relations are heavily skewed in favour of the private sector, and the complexity of the linkages between these actors makes meaningful regulation of foreign investment extremely challenging. I also suggest that such practices should not be seen as a transitory position between state socialist planning mechanisms and mature 'Western' practices of regeneration, but rather as explicitly post-socialist in nature, and only as a partial reading of a number of different post-socialisms, instead of being seen as representative of a singular 'post-socialist condition'. Copyright (c) 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research(c) 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
In this article we highlight the effects of heterogeneous institutional contexts on transnational professional service firms, a relatively poorly studied issue. Specifically, we provide empirical analysis of how the specificities of the Italian institutional context affect the activities of English legal professional service firms in Milan. This reveals the intimate connection between a variety of capitalism, place specific workplace cultures and practices, and the institution‐related challenges transnational professional service firms and all transnational corporations (TNCs) face. We also reveal the way institutionally generated differences at the level of work practices are managed in transnational law firms through worldwide training programmes designed to ‘govern’ the practices of workers in different parts of the TNC's network. This emphasizes the importance of studying attempts to manage institutional heterogeneity at the level of workplace practices, something often missed in existing mesoscale studies of TNC governance structures. Consequently, we highlight detailed empirical archaeologies that explore the direct links between institutions and practices as an important component of future research on the effects of institutions on TNCs.
The authors examine the ways in which recruitment and selection processes facilitate the reproduction of elites and elite cultures within City law firms. The research is based upon original research carried out during 2009, consisting of in-depth semistructured interviews, semiotic and content analyses of recruitment materials and websites, and the analysis of publicly available data demonstrating the educational backgrounds of lawyers practising in the City. By deploying Bourdieusian concepts including the field, 'doxa', cultural capital, and habitus, the authors show that, in the firms studied, homologous elite cultures and social groups are maintained and legitimated as part of attempts to reproduce 'normalised' expectations about the identity and practice of a City professional. Maintenance is ensured by assessing the objectified, institutionalised, and embodied cultural capital of applicants in recruitment and selection processes, with only those possessing certain types of capital being recruited. This selection by cultural capital limits social mobility in City professions, which are dominated by the upper-middle classes, and helps explain why, in the face of critique and in the context of programmes designed to widen social diversity, the City legal profession remains socially exclusive.
This paper serves to offer an exploration of the everyday geographies of transnational elites (TNEs) living and working in Prague, Czech Republic. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu regarding the existence of multiple forms of capital, the author suggests that by reconsidering the role of place in understandings of cultural capital, and the links and interactions between social and cultural capital, original insights concerning the everyday lives of spatially dislocated individuals can be arrived at. Through a combination of in-depth interviews and secondary data, the spatio-temporal development of everyday social practices is investigated, paying particular attention to the interactions and social groups that TNEs are embroiled within. The qualitative analysis is embedded within a discussion of the economic and social changes that have occurred in Prague since 1993 in order that the historical specificities relevant to the growth of a significant TNE community in Prague are appreciated. Figure 4 Ideal-type development of different forms of capital during an individual's stay in Prague (S = social capital, C(i) = non-place-based cultural capital, E = economic capital and C(ii) = place-based cultural capital)Placing capital(s) 427
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