On a global market, cities aim to develop a distinct proile to attract mobile consumers. One increasingly used means to attain distinction is to brand the city as experience space. Particularly, the urban festival has become a popular organizational form for creating experience spaces, and for marketing cities. Festivals are often strategically conceived with the purpose of promoting a 'distinctive city', in line with uniqueness being the keystone of success in the experience economy. his paper applies an experience economy framework to analyse city festivals as potentially transformative practices, helping reimagine urban space and reshape urban identity. Building on empirical studies of Stockholm Culture Festival and the Nowy Kercelak Fair in Warsaw, it examines the tension between controlled image production and carnivalesque celebration and the extent to which the meanings and low of urban space can be managed. Using Lefèbvre's notion of the production of space and Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of de-and reterritorialization, this paper critically assesses the possibility of reshaping urban practices through the staging of festivals, and the potential for creativity and expression extant in managed staging of experience.

This article provides insights into the role of minority employees in reproducing and contesting the discourse of meritocracy in contemporary organizations. It also discusses the effects the contestation of meritocracy, or the lack thereof, has on organizational power relations and on the situation of individuals who are the target of meritocratic policies. Empirically, we address the experiences of a growing category of workers-women academics of non-UK origin-employed within UK business schools. Based on the analysis of narratives focusing on the career trajectories of our research participants, we show how the belief in, and paradoxically the questioning of, meritocratic principles contribute to the reproduction of inequalities. We conclude that, as a result of the overarching perpetuation, and only limited challenging of, extant power relations in organizations, both the current definitions of merit and the application of meritocratic principles remain unchanged.

This article explores the experiences of a growing but hitherto under-researched category of academics employed within UK higher education: women of non-UK origin. Drawing on an intersectional approach, we examine how gender and foreignness act as dynamic, interrelating categories in producing particular subjectivities in the context of UK business schools. We employ a qualitative methodology based on narrative interviews with 31 foreign women academics. In the analysis, we outline the broader global forces that have shaped their trajectories in choosing the UK as their destination, and the place of gender and foreignness in the participants' narratives of their experience. Our findings point to how the discourse of internationalization conceals intracategorical differences among non-national staff, further supported by a merit-based system that promotes an individualized view. However, participants' narratives provide examples of how gender and foreignness are mobilized in different ways by different actors -including themselves -in the production of social locations. As such, the paper contributes to critical debates regarding the academic workplace and the changing conditions of UK academia.

The aim of this paper is to examine the effects of evaluations of non-native speaking staff's spoken English in international business settings. We adopt a sociolinguistic perspective on power and inequalities in linguistically diverse organizations in an Anglophone environment. The interpretive qualitative study draws on 54 interviews with non-native English speaking staff in 19 UK business schools. We analyze, along the dimensions of status, solidarity and dynamism, the ways in which nonnative speakers, on the basis of their spoken English, are evaluated by themselves and by listeners.We show how such evaluations refer to issues beyond the speaker's linguistic fluency, and have consequences for her or his actions. The study contributes to the literature on language and power in international business through offering fine-grained insights into and elucidating how the interconnected evaluative processes impact the formation and perpetuation of organizational power relations and inequalities. It also puts forward implications for managing the officially monolingual, yet linguistically diverse organizations.

This article discusses contemporary practices of place branding through the concept of the imaginary. Specifically, the aim is to interrogate place branding as a politically constituted process which unfolds in relation to dominant discourses and symbols that are in circulation; how existing material structures inform the process; and what material consequences occur as a result. The process is empirically illustrated by drawing on a qualitative study conducted within a municipal project organisation charged with organising the 50th anniversary of Tapiola Garden City in Finland. The anniversary provided the decision-makers with an opportunity for re-imagining the Garden City, which in the course of time was seen to have become outdated and in need of symbolic and material rejuvenation. In the light of the study, the article examines how place branding contributes to producing discursive privileging and marginalisation of particular values and social groups.