Public Enterprise and Local Place: New Perspectives on Theory and Practice by John Fenwick & Lorraine Johnston

Author:John Fenwick & Lorraine Johnston [Fenwick, John & Johnston, Lorraine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781351110976
Google: jU6fDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-06-25T12:57:16+00:00

Nicholds et al. (2017) look at the contentious concept of ‘smart cities’ in an English context but do not allow definitional issues to be the conclusion of their analysis. Instead, the authors concentrate upon concrete examples of such cities, seeking to assess the way in which local leadership plays a role in regional development. Nicholds et al. find little that is settled in such analysis of leadership, suggesting that ‘place based leadership’ is inadequately understood within ‘contested’ urban and regional ‘spaces’ (ibid., 251). To extend our knowledge, the authors advocate a research approach based on sense-making; that is, upon the interpretive tools that local leaders bring to urban problems and local development. Basing their research upon four (from a possible 15) English smart cities, their conceptual framework included ‘collaborative atmosphere’, ‘blending learning’, ‘allowing space for complex problem-solving’, ‘distributed leadership’ and ‘power sharing’ (Nicholds et al. 2017, 253). Their conclusions tend to emphasise the bottom-up and community-based aspects of local leadership, and one might say that much of their commentary simply stresses good, enlightened contemporary management practice. For our purposes, the contribution of this study is to remind us that ‘place-based’ leadership and its link to urban and regional spaces is fluid, negotiated and flexible, and that technology for development must be connected to the priorities of local residents.

Local leadership is a complex and to some degree unresolved topic, and as we discussed in Chapter 3, it may be enacted through the office of directly elected mayor. Related to this, Mitchell (2018) has considered the role of the appointed city manager in the USA, specifically relating to the extent to which such senior managers take on the leadership of local strategic initiatives. As Mitchell recognises, this poses the question of how far the city manager tackles strategic policy initiatives which are within the remit of an elected post-holder, not an appointed official. This is also a reminder of the familiar debates about the boundaries between management and leadership, which are particularly acute at local level (Fenwick and Elcock 2016). The city manager is in an ambiguous position in relation to whether he or she is a leader or a manager, and the post was not on the statute books in England and Wales for very long (from 2000 to 2007) after being adopted by only one small local council and subsequently withdrawn by popular vote.

Finally, it is important to recognise that different types of regulation exist at national, regional and sectoral levels (Schroder and Voelzkow, 2016). In a German setting, Schroder and Voelzkow argue that distinct forms of governance and of regulation exist at each of these three levels, and each has given rise to its own tradition of research. It is argued that institutional regulation at the different levels does not need to be similar, and that institutionally ‘incoherent’ institutions may in fact be ‘complementary’ (ibid., 8). The regional level in such analysis is of potential importance, as it has been argued that in a post-Fordist environment, regional economic agglomeration

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