Joe Painter

Local governance, the crises of Fordism and the changing geographies of regulation.

During the last fifteen years the local government system in Britain has been transformed into one of local governance in which a multitude of unelected agencies (public, private and voluntary) have become involved in attempting to influence the fortunes of local areas. In this paper, we locate the roots of this shift in the crisis of the Fordist mode of regulation and political responses to it, suggest that a reworked regulation theory can provide a useful perspective from which to interpret current changes and outline the research framework that such a perspective involves. Although a key role for local government in Fordist processes of regulation may be identified, it is doubtful that new forms of local governance are contributing to the emergence of stable regulation in the 1990s. One reason for this is the geographical differentiation of contemporary regulatory processes.

Spaces of citizenship: an introduction

Abstract The various papers and commentaries in this issue are framed by a brief discussion of 1. (1) the growing significance for human geographers of ‘citizenship’ as both a source of concepts and a focus for substantive research; 2. (2) the way in which citizenship serves as a meeting-point for the contemporary concerns of both political geographers and social-cultural geographers; and 3. (3) the various different kinds of ‘spaces’ in and through which citizenship is fostered, practised and contested, all of which are tackled in the contributions to the issue.

Cartographic anxiety and the search for regionality

Despite the rise of relational and antiessentialist approaches to regional theory, many accounts of regionality continue to work with territorial conceptions of regions as bounded wholes or totalities. The author suggests that this tendency can be explained in part by the continuing effect of cartographic anxiety and Eurocentrism on dominant understandings of regionality. The paper examines the relationships between regional theory, different forms of totality and the cartographic impulse, and discusses possible reasons for the Eurocentric cast of some regional research. It concludes with a consideration of how regional theory might respond to cartographic anxiety and Eurocentrism.

European Citizenship and the Regions

This article reconsiders the relationship between European citizenship and the regions in the light of theoretical developments in citizenship studies and empirical research in four sub-nation-state territories in Europe (Scotland in the UK, Catalonia in Spain, the Veneto in Italy and Upper Silesia in Poland).The article begins with an outline of the development of the idea of European citizenship and a review of some contemporary theoretical debates about the spatialities of citizenship. It then considers how European citizenship might be theorized in geographical terms, before turning specifically to the relationship between European citizenship and regionality. Drawing on the case-study research, this relationship is examined through four themes: identity, political rights, social rights and civic engagement. The article concludes with a commentary on the implications of a regional perspective for the future development of European citizenship.

Gender, Race, and Class in the Local Welfare State: Moving beyond Regulation Theory in Analysing the Transition from Fordism

In this paper we attempt to provide a conceptual framework which can help inform our analysis and understanding of current transformations taking place within the welfare state. We argue that the French school of regulationist literature, though able to provide a broad frame of reference for analysing contemporary shifts in economy and society, needs to be supplemented by an analysis which focuses on the racialised and gendered character of the welfare state. In the paper the ways in which the ‘universal’ welfare state has operated to exclude minorities and marginalised groups are charted, and we argue that in practice the Fordist mode of social regulation (MSR) operating in Britain generated a hierarchy of oppression. This hierarchy was constituted through the relations of class, race, and gender, and we show how these are currently being redefined as the British state seeks to mediate the crisis tendencies inherent in the Fordist MSR.

The Politics of the Neighbour

This paper argues that the neighbour is a neglected figure in public debate and political theory. Whereas the spatial concept of ‘neighbourhood’ has long been the focus of geographical research, its underpinning concept of the ‘neighbour’ has received less scrutiny. This paper seeks to address that gap. It takes its cue from recent British policy debates about neighbourhood renewal and the ‘Big Society’. However, it is not concerned with urban policy in a conventional sense, but with the nature of the neighbour relation and of the ethics and politics of neighbours and neighbouring. These themes are explored through a discussion of debates in political theology about the meaning of the Biblical injunction to ‘love thy neighbour’, the etymological significance of proximity to the idea of neighbour, and the importance of radical ambiguity, unknowability, and fragility in neighbourly relations. These issues are thrown into relief by The Neighbour, a short story by Naim Kattan, that records the fleeting encounters across difference that often seem to constitute neighbourliness in urban settings. The paper ends by using Kattans story to reflect on the apparently opposed understandings of the neighbour to be found in the work of Emmanuel Lévinas and Slavoj Žižek.

The geography of trade union responses to local government privatization

Since 1980, local government in Britain has seen moves towards the private provision of local services. The regulation school of political economy provides an explanation for this trend. However, privatization has been opposed by local government trade unions. The development of national trade union policy on local government privatization is discussed. This national policy is subject to local variations which are illustrated by the cases of two contrasting local authorities, in Wandsworth and Newcastle. These cases suggest that some reworking of conventional regulation theory may be required if it is fully to account for social struggles around privatization, and the resulting geographically uneven transition to a new pattern of local service provision.

The Changing Geography of Trade Unions

Recent years have been tough for the trade unions. Headline after headline has proclaimed their imminent demise, their irrelevance to changing occupational and industrial structures and to supposedly transformed ideologies. They have come under political onslaught. Given all of this, they have survived remarkably well.

The Culture of Competition

to questions of culture in the past, or that culture is of growing significance in the processes of change currently affecting the local government sector, or both. Furthermore, in the work of those analysts and academics whose implicit or explicit aim is actively to influence policy change, it has often been argued that cultural change (of particular kinds) is desirable and ’ought’ to occur. One report on the cultural impact of privatisation stated that ’together with the change in ownership, there must be a change in the culture of the workforce’ (United Research, 1990, p32), while the annual report of a major local authority spoke of ’virtually a change in culture for local government’ (Milton Keynes Borough Council, 1989, p 18). According to two local government practitioners part of the response to recent legislation in their authority is a ’change of managerial culture’ (Geeson and Haward, 1990, pl). In the academic literature a similar emphasis is present:

Trade Union Geography. Alternative Frameworks for Analysis

Academic disciplines and discourses have traditionally advanced through a process of friendly and less friendly critique and counter-critique. While this may on occasion sharpen the mind, it tends over time to blunt the spirit, as well as perpetuating particular (masculine) forms of the relation between knowledge and power. I was therefore delighted when Roger Lee and Doreen Massey invited me to join in this attempt to engage in a more collaborative style of debate than is usual in an academic journal. As Martin, Sunley and Wills (1993) point out, academic studies of the spatiality of trade unionism are few and, as a field of enquiry, the geography of trade unions remains in its infancy. Their excellent paper is, however, a significant contribution to an emerging literature. Like Doreen Massey, there is a lot here with which I wholeheartedly agree. The authors succinctly set out the key contexts in which trade unionism in Britain in the 1980s has been