Municipal enterprise, growth coalitions and social justice

Grabbing Grants? The role of coalitions in urban economic development

“…This is not to suggest that policy makers directly read the work of Elkin (1987) and Stone (1989), but to argue that certain aspects of this work -coinciding with favourable commentaries on locality, post-Fordism and postmodernism, which took for granted the role of business in the urban arena -influenced the nature of exchange between academia and the policy machine. As already noted in this journal, much has been made of the contributions made by the coalition theories to contemporary debates on local economic policy making (compare Cooke, 1988;Lloyd and Newlands, 1988;Valler, 1995;Strange, 1996). We offer, below, some thoughts on these approaches to date.…”

Local business representation and the private sector role in local economic policy in Britain

“…The recent adoption of "growth machine" or "growth coalition" models marks a key point of departure (Logan and Molotch, 1987;Axford and Pinch, 1994;Harding, 1991;Lloyd and Newlands, 1988;Bassett and Harloe, 1990). While critical responses to these models have characterised them as oversimplistic, theoretically flawed and highly context-specific (Cooke, 1988;Cox and Mair, 1989;Lake, 1990;Clarke, 1990;Jonas, 1992;Ward, 1996), they have begun, in potentially useful ways, to expose the material bases of local business interests and organisation. Thus, in contrast to the traditional pluralist and neo-pluralist focus on resultant interest group organisation and capacities, and the emphasis in abstract Marxist and neo-Marxist accounts on the structural power of capital, growth coalition literatures emerge from a concern with the variable nature and extent of business attachments to local economies.…”

Local Economic Strategy and Local Coalition-Building

“…In this view corporatism is constrained by a lack of local government autonomy, by the degree of centralisation of the economy and by the historic weakness of local producer organisations. Consequently the foundations of a "local" corporatism remain predominantly non-local as business involvement becomes increasingly associated with examples of central government localism, while local activity remains heavily influenced by the public sector (Bassett and Harloe, 1990;Cooke, 1988). A final point concerns the inability of corporatist models to explain the involvement of particular business interests, apart from an imputed "parallelism", where the growth of labour organisation lies at the root of an automatic capitalist response.…”