4 results
5 - Planning with Citizenship: An Idea Whose Time has Come in Greater Manchester?
- Edited by Filippo Barbera, Università degli Studi di Torino, Italy, Ian Reese Jones
-
- Book:
- The Foundational Economy and Citizenship
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 12 March 2021
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2020, pp 105-128
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The objects of town and country planning … are to secure a proper balance between the competing demands for land, so that all the land of the country is used in the best interests of the people…. The people whose surroundings are being planned must be given every chance to take an active part in the planning process … and when they have had it, the provisional plan may need a good deal of alteration…. In the past, plans have been too much the plans of officials…. (Lewis Silkin MP, Minister for Town and Country Planning, in the House of Commons Debate on the Second Reading of the Town and Country Planning Bill, Hansard, 29 January 1947, quoted in Silkin, 1947)
Lewis Silkin was a minister in the postwar Labour government, which introduced the Town and Country Planning Act in 1947, and this Act figures in every history of UK planning as the landmark mid-century coming of age of a new practice of spatial governance that promised to make cities civilized. It is a useful reminder that the 1945 Labour government did contain radicals like Silkin, whose ambition was to change (not consolidate) urban planning practice, where his notions of participation went well beyond representative democracy and trade union balloting. Silkin argued from democratic first principles that urban planning in ‘the interests of the people’ exists to articulate a collective purpose, and that only becomes possible if plan making is participative and involves active citizens who can challenge priorities and change official plans.
This radical theme – planning reshaped by active citizens – runs like a motif throughout the subsequent academic literature. The Oxford Handbook of Urban Planning includes a chapter on planning and citizenship by Miraftab (2012), who writes from the point of view that citizenship is not a political status with formal rights but an active process of making and doing. So the question is not about what citizenship is as given by the state, but what citizenship can do when grounded in civil society. In a scholarly and broad-ranging book, Mazza (2017) distinguishes between spatial planning and governance; planning is the technical knowledge and professional know-how that properly supports broad political choices, better described as spatial governance.
b - Financialized Business Models and the Corporation
- from 3 - The Financialization of the Corporation
-
- By Julie Froud, University of Manchester, Sukhdev Johal, Queen Mary University of London, Adam Leaver, University of Manchester, Karel Williams, University of Manchester
- Edited by Grietje Baars, City University London, Andre Spicer, City University London
-
- Book:
- The Corporation
- Published online:
- 31 March 2017
- Print publication:
- 24 March 2017, pp 291-302
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
This chapter uses the concept of business model to critically explore how financialization plays out at the level of the corporation. There has been increasing concern about the extent to which financialization has changed corporate behaviour: a mounting critical consensus argues that pressure to create value for shareholders has led to a disruption of business models with unfortunate outcomes for other stakeholders and an overly short-term orientation (e.g., Aglietta and Reberioux, 2005; Martin, 2011; Stout, 2012; Mintzberg, 2013). However, such analysis often lacks a clear view of the means by which value can be captured or extracted by particular groups of interests. These processes can vary in terms of specific dynamics inside the firm, and over networks or supply chains, and will reflect the distribution and exercise of power. This chapter addresses the question of how financialization affects corporate business models and the impact on stakeholder interests. It does this by arguing that, while financialization is observed as a general pressure for shareholder returns and a reprioritisation of stakeholder interests within the company, this plays out in many different ways and is governed by specific context. Such understanding is important because a critical business model analysis can help make sense of broader economic and social issues around inequality and instability.
After a brief review of the literature on the financialization of the corporation in section 1, the second section argues that the business model concept can be used within a political economy frame; this can be done by understanding that any corporate business model must ensure the conditions of financial viability while negotiating credibility in relation to certain groups of stakeholders. Specifically, a financialized business model will prioritize the interests of shareholders over other stakeholders. However, opportunities to realize or extract value are firm- and sector-specific, reflecting different kinds of leverage on operations, balance sheets or the state; thus consequences will not be straightforward, and the distributional effects on stakeholders will vary. The third section provides illustrations of how business models are variously levered on operations, balance sheets and the state to realize value, before offering a brief conclusion.
nine - Avoiding ‘back to the future’ policies by reforming the ‘foundational economy’
- Edited by Bryn Jones, University of Bath, Mike O'Donnell
-
- Book:
- Alternatives to Neoliberalism
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 05 April 2022
- Print publication:
- 08 February 2017, pp 175-192
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The most striking feature of the political economy of Western Europe since the great financial crisis is, simply, the continuing ascendancy of neoliberal policies, practices and priorities. The term neoliberalism is more convenient shorthand than precise concept but, in this case, it serves to identify an important continuity. The doctrine of the superiority of market intelligence, and the cult of light touch regulation gave us the crisis, and we might have expected the cataclysm of 2007‒9 to have damaged it irreparably. On the contrary: in the Eurozone we have had nearly a decade more of austerity pursued in the name of the neoliberal project of creating a single currency within a unified market; and in the United Kingdom the general election result of May 2015, in returning a majority Conservative government, intensified the austerity policies pursued since 2010 in the name of shrinking the state.
Faced with the resilience of neoliberalism its opponents have been like rabbits before stoats – paralysed into immobility and ineffectiveness. In the nations of the Eurozone subjected to the most severe neoliberal policies – Ireland, Portugal, Greece – opposition has been either weak or, as in the case of Greece, brutally pushed aside. In the United Kingdom the Labour opposition has been deeply divided. On the one hand, the parliamentary inheritors of New Labour defend post-1997 Blairite achievements, accept the austerity implications of the neoliberal case and wish only to moderate its most savage consequences. Against this, a resurgent ‘retro left’ in the country (by which we mean a left still wedded to policies pursued before the neoliberal revolution) hankers after reversal of the post-1979 changes and defends the forms of an earlier settlement, including the centrally controlled, hierarchical nationalised corporation ‒ something that, of course, suits the interests of its allies at the head of centrally organised trade unions. At the time of writing, in the immediate aftermath of Jeremy Corbyn's unexpected victory in the Labour leadership campaign in 2015, it still remains uncertain how these internal divisions in the party will be resolved.
Nevertheless, a striking common assumption unites these very different visions of economic life. It might be summarised as the assumption of a mono economy – an image of economic life reduced to one set of relations summarised in a single set of whole system indicators, like the rate of growth in GDP.
Power, Politics and the City of London after the Great Financial Crisis
- Sukhdev Johal, Michael Moran, Karel Williams
-
- Journal:
- Government and Opposition / Volume 49 / Issue 3 / July 2014
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 22 May 2014, pp. 400-425
- Print publication:
- July 2014
-
- Article
- Export citation
-
Four faces of power are summarized, based on the established literature in political science and the work of Foucault: they are power over decision, the power of agenda control, hegemonic power and capillary power. The four faces correspond also to four strategies used by City elites in the UK to protect markets from democratic control. Strategies have developed out of conjunctural crises. The most recent strategy, which involved a form of capillary power, was greatly damaged in the financial crisis of 2007–8. Since then the City has been obliged to retreat to a reliance on the exercise of power over decision, which involves open lobbying.