Global competition on the sustainability front has recently taken the form of contests among nations and cities vying for the honorific of becoming the most sustainable or “greenest” city in the world. Notable examples of these rivals include Vancouver, where its mayor Gregor Robertson has pledged to establish the foundations to make his world-class city “the” premier city on the global sustainability map. Meanwhile Freiburg, Germany, has sought to lay claim to this accolade through its decades-long experimentation with “green” community living. An example of one of its latest initiatives can be seen in a section of the city named Vauban, built as a “model sustainability district” (Fitzgerald, 2010: 1–2). In the Scandinavian countries, sustainability advocates have touted Växjö, Sweden, where a single power plant provides its electricity needs and the city relies on woodchips and other biomass waste for its fuel. In addition, the gases generated by the power plant go through a process that condenses these negative externalities into liquid before purifying the liquid for household needs and heating. Through this and other technologies and programs, the city has succeeded in lowering percapita carbon emissions by 25 percent, leading to the lowest urban emissions level in Europe. These global achievements and ambitions point to the need to discover and publicize tools and best practices that other cities and towns across the world can emulate or modify to fuel their efforts to align urban development and sustainability.

Introduction

A revolution is occurring amidst the humdrum activities and commonplace concerns of everyday life in the city. It is a virtually unseen revolutionary transformation whose signs only subliminally reach our consciousness when we enter our homes, travel in our automobiles or step into our workplaces. That quiet transformation is the dawning of the ethereal city, the signposts of which include the miles of cables and fiber-optic wires or cellular towers tucked inconspicuously (or not so inconspicuously) just above or below the skin of the city (Graham and Marvin, 1996). It is a gilt-edged revolution in that it is unleashing progressive and productive possibilities for enhancing community social relations, as well as regressive and destructive possibilities tending toward degrading further the foundations of communitarian relations and alienating inhabitants of the city from others, the physical environment and urban fabric.

Sweeping as it is, this telecommunications revolution is a part of a more farreaching and thoroughgoing revolution operating at the global scale. Manuel Castells (1989: 7–33) has drawn out the implications of the role of knowledge, data and information for the international political economy and cities, positing the emergence and increasing hegemony of an “information mode of development” and the dawning of an increasingly bifurcated “information city.” That is, at the global level, he sees a process of “informationalization” where knowledge and data become the growing basis for capital accumulation by major corporate and transnational corporate players in the global economy.

The sustainability city program in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which began in the early eighties, is one that attracted enormous public attention and comment by public officials, government bodies, academic analysts, policy researchers, journalists and other media around the nation. In general, it received extravagant praise for its efforts and accomplishments, being variously characterized as “crown jewel” or “belle” of America's national sustainability efforts and portrayed as a modern-day “Cinderella story” yielding a model strategy dubbed the “Chattanooga Process” or “Chattanooga Way.” Indeed, scholarly case analyses and policy studies of the “iron city to greenest sustainable city” narrative have brought to this southeastern railway hub (historically symbolized by its iconic train, the Chattanooga Choo-choo) not only a raft of regional and national awards and recognition. It has put this city on the sustainability map as one of two dozen or so cities that “take sustainable cities seriously” (Portney, 2003). That this southeastern mid-sized Tennessee city should have achieved such a hallowed status in the annals of the short history of sustainability in the United States was neither self-evident to most Chattanoogans nor a matter of destiny, given its origins and circumstances in the tumultuous decades of the sixties.

In this chapter, we offer a case study of the Chattanooga sustainability program that begins with the officially-sponsored story of its rise and success constructed from mainstream promoters and supporters of this campaign who often had strong interests in telling this story in a manner that gave Chattanooga's efforts maximum positive exposure and played to their personal benefit.

Introduction

China, the sleeping giant, slumbers no more. Whether in climate change strategies, the global food crisis, economic globalization, growing world ecological scarcities (including oil) or the urban-rural balance, China is a major player in exacerbating, mitigating or overcoming these portentous twenty-first century problems. In its drive toward world-class status and its fever pitch efforts toward economic development, this Asian powerhouse has raised its voice in the global dialogue on sustainable development. Even as its city-building programs have moved with unrelenting speed to construct a projected 300 new cities between 2005 and 2010 (Jao, 2005), it has looked both inwards and outwards to experts with ideas for fostering economic and cultural development within its rural countryside.

One such program was the Oikodrom – the Vienna Institute for Urban Sustainability's Sustainable User Concepts for China Engaging Scientific Scenarios (SUCCESS), highlighted in the previous chapter. SUCCESS's research and policy strategy was in many respects convergent with the growing thrust of various Chinese projects and programs initiated across its landmass. Over the last ten years or so, these programs have come to view the village as a focus of rural development work in China and as the appropriate scale for intervention in China by native political elites and domestic and foreign scholars (Brugmann, 1996; Hu, 2008; Stone, 2006).

Introduction

The new conditions of the twenty-first century beckon us with a future offering both enormous promise and unparalleled risk. Like the age of Dickens' two cities, the twenty-first century presents opposing faces. It will be either the century of sustainability or the century of ecological collapse. It will be the century where the continuation of the unsustainable economic practices of today precipitates irreversible catastrophes. Or it will be the century where small local successes in implementing sustainable practices and processes proliferate and transform the global economy into a balance-seeking relationship with our natural ecosystem. It may be the century where the analytical, reductionist methods of science and industry, which are the sources of both our progress and our increasingly unsustainable way of life, will continue as the central economic paradigm. Or it will be the century where a new integrative economic paradigm emerges which promises to reconcile humankind with the natural environment, whose health is the precondition for all human activity.

We are confronted with ecological and social choices of continuing our descent into the realm of unsustainability (denying all the while that it is the consumerist-materialist path that is the problem), or shifting to a new emerging paradigm. Unfortunately, in order for massive popular support to emerge to accomplish such a paradigm shift, there must first be a widespread belief that a larger, attractive, sustainable, new societal project exists and can succeed.

Sociology studies society; social theory analyses the social. These seemingly straight-forward statements mask a nest of conceptual and practical difficulties. The extent, dynamic and locale of societies have proved problematic. The status of the social, indeed its very existence, has proved hard to pin down. Such questions are well-rehearsed nowadays and are often presented in terms of “the end of the social?” Proponents of such a thesis adopt a range of positions and have variously argued that new forms of globalized, networked, complex, mobile societies have emerged which bear little resemblance to the stable nationstates which social theory has tended to assume (e.g. Castells 2000, Urry 2000) and upon which it was originally predicated. Others have questioned whether the concept of the social was ever adequate to describe the development and existence of the modern world (e.g. Latour 1993b). It has also been suggested that the social was always some kind of a simulacrum (Baudrillard 1983). Another slant has been offered by those who argue that the notion of the social was itself some kind of a historical, discursive, if not social, construction (e.g. Rose 1996). Some of the major concerns which animate such debates over the status of society and the social are evident in the following:

Every public accusation is shaped. It has some literary form, which is to say it is written in some style. Most of them, by design, convey one fairly simple idea: they preserve the particulars of their corporate wrongdoers while bringing them into conformity with a general type of wrongdoing. The red flag, for example, is a fusion of form and content so that we can discern what it means by examining not only what it says but how it says it.

Accusations are best served up through articles and aperçus. We throw a wide net over corporations using following sources: (1) LexisNexis and Dow Jones Interactive corporate data archives; (2) stories, editorials and commentary in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, San Jose Mercury News, Financial Times, and the Washington Post; (3) articles, editorials, and commentary in magazines such as Fortune, Forbes, BusinessWeek, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone; (4) Edgar Archives and regulatory filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, especially the Wells Notices of potential civil action by the SEC (a Wells Notice is issued to a target of an investigation to give the company and its executives an opportunity to provide facts or testimony to regulators to convince them that the filing of a wrongdoing complaint is unwarranted); and finally, (5) Internet sites specializing in white-collar crime filings under the False Claims Act.

We know that structural embeddedness and cultural embeddedness are variable and complex. We know they intersect in every legitimate market transaction. Where is the preponderance of the evidence in America's corporate markets of the intersection between these two? Where do markets' accusations converge? In effect, where are the hot spots in the social ecology of America's corporate economy?

The mores of the market specify the “desirable” ends toward which corporations should direct their energies. They are more than generalized guidelines facilitating economic action, and more than agreed-upon arrangements for the convenient conducting of business. Rather, they are rules that “carry conceptions of the good and desirable and must therefore be distinguished from strictly utilitarian norms” (Turner et al. 2002, 357).

The proper quantitative analysis of repertoires assesses both density and direction of cultural content. By density we mean the volume or level of accusations; by direction we mean the market-based exchange route on which they are distributed. The two can be coupled or embedded. They can be tightly coupled or loosely coupled. When a statistically significant number of cultural recipes occur on a specific market-based route, we say this concurrence of recipe and route is a repertoire.

One-fifth of the corporations account for 45 percent or more of the accusations. Some firms are repeatedly accused of wrongdoing, in several cases ten or more times during the decade under study.

In the previous chapters we looked at accusations of potentially improper business practices and their socioeconomic exchange paths or routes. In this section we examine the principal themes in greater detail. The techniques of focusing on market relationships, stripping of neutral and positive content, abbreviating the message, and attributing blame result in three types of storylines or narratives. We then analyze the relationship between these three types and their structural location on their market's socioeconomic paths because “stories are the essential vehicle for elaborating networks” (White 1992, 67). Moreover, stories of breaking rules, and lying, cheating, and stealing, puncture the “veneer of etiquette” governing the social relations of business and contract (see McLean 1998).

The content coding and the subsequent analysis sort each accusation into one of the three cultural types and its appropriate market-based tie. The data collection for written content is guided by a protocol or set of coding instructions for the researchers. As mentioned earlier, the archival sources include LexisNexis, Edgar Archives, Dow Jones Interactive, and daily review of business-related content in the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times. We analyze paragraphs and sentences in order to define what kind of wrongdoing is said to have taken place (Holsti 1968, 626). The idea is to capture and chronicle the key phrases and keywords encapsulated in the public accusation (Ghaziani and Ventressa 2005; Axelrod 1976).

C'est plus qu'un crime, c'est une faute.

Trust, honesty, and integrity are the principles upon which our financial markets function. Americans don't hate large corporations and rich executives, but they do despise those who behave as if the principles don't apply to them. The ferocity of this reaction should not surprise us.

Public accusations of misconduct are indications of how much antipathy there is towards miscreant manufacturers, bankers and other executives who don't play fair, and large, publicly traded corporations that violate the code of conduct that is supposed to guide economic behavior. The devious and underhanded violation of this code raises red flags of warning, throws an unwanted public spotlight on managers and management, leads to increased railing against bad corporate practices, reveals the negative sentiments of accusers about specific market exchanges in goods, services, and investments, and undermines the confidence of American citizens in the integrity of the market.

Accusations of wrongdoing and railing against bad corporate management and managers occur well before the law is invoked, before criminal indictments are handed down, and before people are sentenced. The techniques used by rating agencies, the fancy dressing up of quarterly financial statements by banks, bogus balance sheets, misappropriation of investor capital, and, generally, outright fraud and deception by top-level corporate management, normally relegated to the shadows of finance, can also include creative accounting techniques, which mislead rating agencies, dupe suppliers, buyers, and regulators, mask deteriorating finances – overall, artful combinations of lying, stealing, cheating, and concealing.

The red flag is a perspicuous danger-ahead warning. It is a highly charged, often offensive public signal that something is wrong between business partners or between a firm and the government's regulators.

The red flag is in the interstitial spaces between in-group innuendo and slander (gossip) and criminal charges (indictment). The intermediate nature of accusations makes them important for understanding communicative processes and the collective imagination. They contain innuendo as well as the threat of civil or criminal action.

All fraud charges generated by the SEC have criminal counterparts. Whether criminal charges ultimately emerge after the accusations and rebukes is usually a function of intent to defraud; the question is whether the charges can be proved to the far higher criminal standard of beyond a reasonable doubt.

But at the beginning of this process the red flags of rebukes always involve succinct public declarations of what went wrong in a particular economic exchange. They may even give rise to “counter accusations” stating, for example, that the complaints are without factual basis, are exaggerated and stuffed with trumped-up sucker-bait. They always take place within a rich market context full of announcements and their announcers and thus, preserving these words and voices is tantamount to observing the contentious moments in the market.

Variously called “alarm bells,” “cautionary flags,” and “warning signs,” red flags are announcements that “redefine” or “restructure” an ambiguous socioeconomic issue and locate its place in the market.