Michael Indergaard

Making Networks, Remaking the City

Flexible manufacturing networks (FMNs) in Europe and Japan give small firms the ability to make timely, innovative responses to market shifts. Using FMNs for community development may boost the capacities of small firms while increasing community assets. U.S. models of FMNs tend to neglect issues of social process. This article argues that FMN programs need to be localized; network arrangements should emerge from local contingencies of group formation and institution building. A project from Toledo, Ohio, is used to present a social mobilization model of FMNs. Firms aspiring to joint production are placed into collaborative encounters with each other, customers, and community supporters. The aim is to usher firms through a developmental process that brings new conceptions of self peers, community actors, and strategic possibilities. Preliminary results indicate that processes of group formation and institutional change have begun.

Retrainers as Labor Market Brokers: Constructing Networks and Narratives in the Detroit Area

For nearly two decades retraining has been touted as a means of responding to economic change. The rationale, derived from human capital theory, is that retrainers will pass on new skills that increase the bargaining power of job seekers. But researchers have not examined the roles that retrainers take when internal labor markets are in decline. Network theorists observe that in such a situation employment programs will need to connect clusters of job seekers to new sets of firms. I argue that this brokering role shapes retraining regimes and outcomes. The article presents a case study of a suburban Detroit program that was cast as a national model. The program became a business service, constructing new employment networks and narratives that reinforced firm leverage. The training itself was modest and many clients only received resocialization. The programs brokering stance reflected conditions favoring firms, its own middle class orientation, and the “frames” it used to establish credibility and leverage with business customers and working class clients. These findings indicate that policy-makers should not assume that retrainers will necessarily match workers with good jobs or even good training. What retrainers do, and with what consequences, depends on the social and cultural roles they construct in particular economic and institutional circumstances.

Beyond the Region The Rise and Fall of Economic Regionalism in Downriver Detroit

Does economic restructuring provide opportunities for remaking old industrial centers into regional industrial systems? Such regions possess institutions that allow firms and support organizations to adjust to market shifts. The case of Detroits Downriver suburbs is used to explore this question in a metropolitan setting. Downriver regionalism supported several market interventions, showing that restructuring can create opportunities for economic regionalism. However, regionalism did not produce industrial adjustment mechanisms and eventually succumbed to interlocal competition for investment. The author concludes that prospects for regional systems are diminished by metropolitan fragmentation and national policies promoting capital mobility as the primary mechanism for economic adjustment.

Corporate Corruption in the New Economy

In popular usage the “New Economy” refers to developments in the late 1990s such as the rise of the Internet, a boom in tech stocks, an explosion of dot-com start-ups, and the appearance of new business doctrines and cultures. Countless revelations that surfaced after the boom came to an illegal end, suggesting that epic fraud was as much a part of the New Economy as the dot-coms had been. The epidemic of crime among the ranks of prestigious corporations and professionals puzzled observers across the intellectual spectrum. Federal Reserve Chairman Allan Greenspan, fonnerly an exuberant fan of the New Economy, rued its “infectious greed”. Law professor Frank Partnoy asked whether, in the wake of regulatory and cultural shifts, it was possible to convict business actors of financial crimes.1 Sociologist Paul Hirsch remarked that the participants in the frauds had occupied central positions but apparently “rejected” the “legal culture” of the mainstream.2 Robert Tillman and Michael Indergaard asked, “How was it that such a broad spectrum of Corporate America ended up a field of schemes?”3

Community-Based Restructuring? Institution Building in the Industrial Midwest

The author examines change agents, agendas, and processes involved in community-based efforts to promote collaborative manufacturing in Cleveland, Athens, and Toledo, Ohio. The goals are to redefine relationships of firms with competitors, customers, and community entities and to remake institutions so as to support small firms. Contributing factors include the threat that communities will be relegated to the periphery, new pressures on small firms to design products for diverse customers, the importation of network models by state governments, and the ability of community-based organizations to translate these models to resonate with local constituencies.

Another Washington-New York Consensus? Progressives Back in Contention

I use the case of New York to explore how federal activism in the wake of crisis affects US urban regimes. Multiscalar policy networks, formerly used to extend neoliberalism to subnational levels, now feature an odd mix of progressives and neoliberals. I use the idea of path dependence to explain this indeterminacy in terms of the contradictory effects of US federalism on national regime formation: while federalism provided havens for progressives to mobilize for regime change, it also anchors defenders of neoliberalism and its legacies. The Obama administration has exploited crisis to move scalar relations in a progressive direction. This has brought some changes to New Yorks neoliberal regime. That, along with the White Houses cool reaction to recent proposals from New York, suggest a break with the neoliberal apparatus. Yet neoliberal legacies constrain efforts to institutionalize new federal roles and scalar relations, leaving the New York regime unsettled. What seems the likely result is a heterodox national regime that combines state and market mechanisms and a policy network open to heterogeneous influences—a mix where progressives are back in contention, if not necessarily in control.

Conflict, Cooperation, and the Global Auto Factory

Since 1973, the American automobile industry has experienced a shift toward more cooperative labor relations. Many observers saw the 1984 contract between General Motors (GM) and the United Auto Workers as a pathbreaking agreement marking the beginning of a new era of cooperation. Historically, the legacy of labor relations in the auto industry has been one of conflict, from the time of bloody violence over the right to unionize in the late 1930s to the protracted standoff between workers and management over issues of workplace control at Lords town in 1972. In contrast, since the initiation of a Quality of Worklife program at GM in 1973, there have been an increasing number of cooperative arrangements to address both new issues and reemerging issues. The central provision of the 1984 GM-UAW pact—a “job bank” providing for placement of workers displaced by new technology and other causes—is one of the most noteworthy examples. However, labor relations in the auto industry are still characterized by considerable conflict, as the 1984 pact was reached only after corporate threats and a strike by the UAW. The goal of this essay is to explain the shift toward more cooperative labor relations in the auto industry, with a special focus on the role of conflict itself. The nature of this cooperation will also be examined in terms of the relative power of labor and management to pursue contradictory interests.

Detroit's Regional Question

Could metro dynamics, which have long eroded Detroits economy, have changed so drastically that they now might help stabilize it? Advocates of the new regionalism contend that increasing economic interdependence within metro areas has boosted the propensity for metro scale mobilizations to address troubles of city and suburb alike. I use the case of Detroit to examine the nature of metro economic relationships and novel episodes of metro regionalism. I find the continued effect of racial segregation, in combination with other factors, has caused Detroit blacks to be more vulnerable to recent declines in manufacturing and to be less likely to benefit from recent knowledge economy investments. New forms of metro regionalism are unlikely to economically stabilize less advantaged households or municipalities in the Detroit area, but may be creating frameworks that enable more progressive mobilizations by Detroit CBOs.

Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries

What advice do you give to young folks about jobs? I could tell them I made some investments in my employability, but it is equally true that I mostly muddled through the uncertain career paths of our times. In Frank Knight’s classic formulation, efforts to manage ‘‘uncertainty’’ turn it into ‘‘risk.’’ This idea is the starting point for Venture Labor, Gina Neff’s rich study of New York internet workers who embraced risk during the dot-com boom. This internet cluster, known as Silicon Alley, became the site of new forms of media and work. Neff seeks lessons from this first wave of digital startups even as a new wave tries to capitalize on social media, big data and the like. She wants to understand why such workers came to accept the idea that they are individually responsible for managing employment uncertainties. She offers a synthetic account of agency that contributes to debates about the role of calculation in economic action— a position usually in tension with established claims about action’s structurallyembedded or culturally-constituted nature. Chapter One outlines research on risk, work, and technology by showing how managing uncertainty has become a material necessity: government and corporations reduced supports for workers as the economy was being roiled by financialization, unstable demand, and the spread of flexible organization. What Neff wants to probe are cultural factors that have abetted and shaped the taking on of risk. While previous studies have documented broad cultural attitudes glorifying risk, she wants to explore the understandings of new media workers themselves—’’narratives, discourses, ways of talking about risk’’ (p. 12). Neff’s novel claim is that Silicon Alley workers actively embraced risk in their quest for a measure of control and autonomy. Her reasoning is that ‘‘risk and risk-taking in economic life now imply active choices while uncertainty connotes economic passivity and forces beyond one’s own control [emphasis in original]’’ (p. 15). Neff labels this sort of risktaking ‘‘venture labor’’—’’the investment of time, energy, human capital, and other personal resources that ordinary employees make in the companies where they work’’ (p. 16). She uses an array of methods to study venture labor in Silicon Alley from 1996 to 2002: participatory fieldwork, interviews with 54 individuals (e.g., owners and workers), and network mapping of participants in industry social events (over 8,000 participants at some 900 events). Neff also used trade publications to examine how the local industry talked about itself and studied how the mainstream news framed the industry. The heart of the book is two chapters which analyze how workers sought to manage risk through their narratives and networks. Chapter Three taps Boltanski and Thévenot’s work (2006) on the economies of worth to theorize narratives that surfaced in the interviews. In explaining their employment decisions, individual workers drew on different justifications—’’personal ways of evaluating the world’’ (p. 69). Based on what they esteemed in their jobs and careers, they developed different strategies for managing risk. Neff’s interviews revealed three strategies for managing risk: ‘‘creative, financial, and actuarial’’ (p. 69). The creative types had liberal arts and fine arts backgrounds while the other two groups were from a mix of content, software and business occupations. The creative strategy (40 percent of interviewees) saw that the creative projects warrant risk taking because success ‘‘could lead to further work and career reputations’’ (p. 83). One interviewee remarked that projects were all she ‘‘had to fall back on’’ if she lost her job (p. 84). A portfolio should express a unique ‘‘look’’ or ‘‘voice’’; the risk was putting in time for projects that ‘‘suck’’ (p. 85). Many creative types, who typically came to Silicon Alley before the boom began, felt they had ‘‘nothing to lose’’: jobs there often Reviews 397

A Review of “The New Economy of the Inner City: Restructuring, Regeneration and Dislocation in the Twenty-First-Century Metropolis”: Thomas A. Hutton. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. xviii and 333 pp., halftones, figures, maps, appendices, notes, references, index.

accordance with booms and slumps in the real estate market. Generally speaking, however, displacement, exclusion, and marginalization of the poor have characterized Johannesburg’s urban management strategies since the end of apartheid, as they have aligned with its aspirations to the standards of a world-class city. I found this book difficult to read and it was hard to access its key arguments. Not only does it use a dense narrative style, but it also elides theoretical argument, often developed in other contexts, with empirical data or interpretative observations about Johannesburg. I give one example, in which Murray refers to the “stubborn refusal or reluctance of ordinary people to conform to the established rules governing the use of urban space” (p. 24) in Johannesburg. He then references Pile (1997) and Groth and Corijn (2005) to elaborate this theoretically (arguing that urban planning often fails to anticipate the emergence of spontaneous, opportunistic responses to administrative power) and then seamlessly returns to discussing the activities of municipal authorities in Johannesburg. I found this style of writing bewildering, for I was often unsure whether the author was writing about Johannesburg or somewhere else or whether the authors he was quoting from were either. My second point of criticism is the extensive use of secondary sources in the first half of the book, in particular that of Simone (1998), Kihato and Landau (2000), and myself (Bremner 2000). Until the middle of the book, it is largely a rambling commentary on the writings of others. However, the second half of the book, which focuses on questions of urban poverty, rights to the city, and the failure of the Johannesburg housing market or municipal authorities to accommodate the poor humanely, offers useful new material to Johannesburg scholarship and more generally to the study of emerging societies and their aspirations, exposing the contradictions and failures of contemporary models. This brings me to my final comment on the book, which is to ask the question of to whom the book is addressed. On the one hand, it speaks to Johannesburg scholars and offers nuanced theoretical interpretations of the city’s complex urban dynamics, which have often been undertheorized, or viewed through a single explanatory lens (e.g., Beall, Crankshaw, and Parnell 2002; Beavon 2004). The author’s refusal to adopt a single theoretical stance or interpretation of the city is welcomed. On the other hand, its empirical data serve as evidence of more general urban spatial and societal logics, speaking to work being done in other contexts and aiding in the production of theory on the contemporary city more generally. Given that the book does both, in different places, it tends, to me, to exemplify the untamed city it portrays and requires patience to extract from it what one wants.