European Urban and Regional Studies

This article offers a first attempt to examine subnational differences in the determinants of gross employment flows in the British manufacturing sector utilizing the Annual Respondents Dataset (ARD) of the Office of National Statistics. The article has four broad aims. First, it examines how the job creation and destruction process in British manufacturing compares with the processes in other countries. Second, it examines how much job creation and destruction is the result of employment shifts from declining industries and post-code areas to growing industries and areas relative to employment turnover that occurs among plants within industries and areas.The results indicate that high rates of job creation and destruction occur simultaneously in contracting as well as expanding industries and areas, suggesting that differences in net employment change can only be considered as a first step to understanding employment turnover. Third, the article investigates differences in the driving forces of job creation and destruction for British postcode areas and uncovers pronounced variation in the forces generating and destroying employment. Fourth, the article examines how much of these subnational differences can be attributed to industrial structure and reveals that industry-mix accounts for a large part of employment turnover in postcode areas.The large variation in the driving forces of job creation and destruction leads to important consequences for employment policy.Policies which focus too narrowly on new-firm start-ups and small firms are likely to be insufficient in generating employment in all areas.

This article deals with the recent evolution of the Italian steel industry and of steel-making activities in two localities in the Mezzogiorno. After providing an account of the rise and fall of the public steel sector in Italy and its role in shifting the industry’s centre of gravity to the South, it concentrates on a conceptually informed discussion of the remarkable rise of northern mini-mill operations and the subsequent acquisition by a few of these companies of the privatized public enterprises in the 1990s. Most attention is paid to two of the leading new companies (Lucchini and Riva) and to the trajectories of some of their steel-making activities in two localities in Basilicata and Apulia. The trajectories of these companies and localized steelmaking activities are themselves explained in the light of the resources and strategies of corporate actors and the context in which these actors operate. Actors’ strategies are driven by a quest for profits and a struggle to accumulate in the face of competition from rival producers, and are examined in relation to the economics of steel production in the Italian South, the processes of workforce recomposition in Taranto and the tensions between profitability and environmental protection. The context includes cyclical and secular trends in the consumption and production of steel, some of the aid and restructuring actions of the ECSC, some of the specific characteristics of accumulation and competition in the steel sector and the legacies of earlier phases of local development that helped shape actors’ strategies.

In seeking to understand and promote long-term and inclusive models of local economic development the notion of social capital appears potentially important. In the development of the social economy, an aspect of the local economy which has attracted an increased theoretical and policy focus in recent years, the relationship with social capital appears particularly significant.Yet despite the apparent salience of notions of social capital, there remains a lack of understanding of the nature and extent of existing social capital resources and the precise manner in which these are drawn upon in the development of the social economy to generate further social capital within the local development process. In part this is a result of the conceptual confusion surrounding the notion of social capital, but it also reflects a lack of empirical research. This article explores the notion of social capital and the manner in which it is produced, reproduced and used locally within the social economy as part of the local economic development process. Findings are presented from a transnational European research project which examined the development of social enterprises and the social economy within different localities in order to seek to better understand their interrelationships with the local production and use of social capital.These findings emphasize the importance of contextualization in the study of local social capital and the importance of interpretative approaches for area-based policy development.

Innovation networks have been analysed at several spatial levels, from the local to the global, with increasing interest in innovation systems below the national level.A wide range of regions has been studied including cities as major centres of innovation. But there is often a difference between the importance of a city as a location of innovation activities and to what extent they can be influenced by politics and public institutions at the city level.This commentary focuses on Vienna, the capital of Austria. Analysing the innovation networks of firms located in Vienna shows the potential scope and limits of the city’s influence on innovation relations. Data from an innovation survey of the Viennese economy lead to the conclusion that only a minor share of the innovation relations of local firms can be influenced directly by the city’s institutions. The results give some indication of where and how the city could be able to increase its influence on the innovation activities of the local economy, reducing Vienna’s dependence on Austria’s federal research, technology and innovation policy.