Evangelia Petridou

Conducting creativity in the periphery of Sweden : A bottom-up path towards territorial cohesion

ABSTRACT Socio-economic cohesion has been a foundational overarching objective of the European Union. The European Unions recent enlargement, not to mention the worldwide economic downturn, persisting asymmetries of globalization and deindustrialization have deepened existing cleavages and accentuated persisting effects of unbalanced development. The mainstreaming of the sustainability concept and the ascendance of creativity and innovation as regional development tools have caused municipalities and regions to explore ‘soft’ strategies aimed at fostering culture and creativity in order to revive their image and their economies. A shift in the thinking about cohesion policy after the publication of the Fifth Cohesion Report in November 2010 has signalled the need for European municipalities and regions to focus on bottom-up strategies so as to compliment top-down redistributional arrangements as paths towards regional development. This article focuses on the concept of territorial cohesion as spatial justice and its implications for the sparsely populated Swedish northern periphery. The aim of this study was to investigate the value of cultural industries (CIs) as a regional policy tool in the periphery in the context of justice, sustainability and the three dimensions of territorial cohesion: territorial identity, territorial efficiency and territorial quality. Findings suggest that viewing CIs as tools towards regional development in the periphery follows the tenets of (spatial) justice, sustainability and the dimensions of territorial cohesion.

For safety’s sake: the strategies of institutional entrepreneurs and bureaucratic reforms in Swedish crisis management, 2001–2009*

Abstract This study focuses on the bureaucratic reforms in Sweden which resulted in the creation of the Secretariat for Crisis Management and the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency. We investigate the mechanisms that lead to divergent change through the critical juncture analytical approach. The study’s findings suggest that the bureaucratic reforms were the result of the critical juncture between 2001 and 2009, which included, inter alia, the release of a commission of inquiry report, a major political crisis and a national election. Moreover, we situate entrepreneurial agency in this analysis while we contribute to the theorization of institutional entrepreneurship by focusing on the implementation stage of institutional change. In order to overcome the institutional resistance stemming from an attempt to preserve the existing power structures, institutional entrepreneurs use the following three strategies: (i) the strategy of listening; (ii) the strategy of advertising early success and (iii) the strategy of picking up the phone.

Entrepreneurship in the Swedish municipal polis: the case of Mer [*] Östersund

ABSTRACT Scholars in political science and policy studies have been paying increasing attention to a specific kind of actor, the policy entrepreneur, as an agent of change. Less attention has been paid to the contextual factors that may shape entrepreneurial action as most of the extant research is performed in pluralistic systems and in high complexity policy sectors. This is a study of a routine planning process in the municipality of Östersund in Northern Sweden with the purpose of studying the kind of actors that may act entrepreneurially (the who); the kind of strategies they use; and what contextual powers facilitate these strategies (the how). This two-and-a-half-year routine, low-complexity process was analyzed with in-depth interviews and a survey, participant observation, document analysis, and formal social network analysis. Findings suggest that professional administrators acted entrepreneurially by employing a set of six strategies while the members of civil society were central – though not entrepreneurial – participants.