Abstract In explaining the emergence of new strategic action fields, in which social movements’ and organizations’ logic, rules and strategies are forged, inter-field dynamics remain under-explored. The case of Social Enterprise and Entrepreneurship (SEE) shows how new fields can emerge through field encroachment, whereby shifts among overlapping fields create structural opportunities for the ascendency of new fields, which may adapt logics borrowed from adjacent fields to construct legitimacy. SEE leveraged the 1980s’ shift between first-order market and state fields to encroach on the political strategies of community organizing, birthing a neoliberal social movement to create a new field addressing social problems using market-based, profit-motivated approaches. With its borrowed veneer of justice, SEE rapidly developed a high academic and public profile over just three decades, despite little evidence its approach to solving social problems works. In encroaching on proven political strategies for solving social problems, it may further undermine democratic practices.

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A generation ago, American state and local experiments with worker and community ownership appeared unsuccessful. Does their current revival offer anything new to the field of economic development or is this merely a tired retread of a failed idea? Using historical analysis, case studies, and interview data from three U.S. regions, the author analyzes the current range of initiatives that seek to remove impediments, stimulate development, and provide direct technical and financial support to worker and community-owned enterprises. The author also identifies how these efforts differ from those in the past, with respect to scope, scale, and success orientation. Collectively, these differences suggest a focus on engaging with, rather than escaping from, market-based economic development. Key challenges are also identified: popular education, community capacity, competitive pressure, early-stage financing, and managing political content. While too early to assess outcomes, these differences suggest the possibility of more substantial results than in the past.

Contrasting cases in Toronto, New York, and Vancouver, we identify benefits and drawbacks associated with the publicly owned variety of community land trust, which we call a public land trust (PLT). Public ownership can obviate the need to finance a land sale, and enable sustained access to ongoing technical assistance and professional expertise, thereby reducing burdens on community capacity. While a degree of community control can also be maintained with public ownership, it may nonetheless be at greater risk when political winds change. In as much as PLTs secure affordable tenure and community control, they may warrant greater policy/planning consideration.

Under what conditions do cooperatively owned enterprises scale to stand alongside investor-owned firms? This article measures and attempts to explain large cooperatives’ variable prevalence across high-income capitalist democracies. Controlling for other known social, economic and geographic factors, statistical models confirm that state-mediated institutional arrangements, as operationalized through two comparative capitalism frameworks (Varieties of Capitalism and Welfare Regimes), are a significant factor in this variation. Cooperatives scale in a manner that complements arrangements in coordinated market economies, while exhibiting institutional incongruencies with those of liberal market economies and residual welfare states. Public policies which have variously enhanced or inhibited cooperatives’ ability to coordinate to scale are compared across four case countries (United States, France, Finland and New Zealand). Policy differences are shown to reflect the joint effect of state-mediated institutional arrangements alongside other control variables. They reveal how states privilege some ownership forms over others, suggesting a distinct political economy of ownership.

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Building from the “Progressive Cities” era toolkit, advocates of community economic development (CED) today deploy a wide range of new and well-established strategies. How can planners make theoretical and practical sense of these varying tactics? Using New York as a case and sociological strategic action field theory as a framing device, we find evidence of three distinct CED logics: exactive/concessionary, localist, and transformative/democratic. We differentiate these logics based on their relationship to neoliberalism and globalization, forces which have shaped CED’s historical development. Awareness of these ideal-type logics may assist planners and CED actors in selecting and coordinating contextually appropriate strategies.

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