Categories of Local Economic Development: An Empirical Analysis

In examining local economic development incentives, scholars have found it useful to employ typologies of development practices. Such typologies have been based on assumptions that techniques reflect functional categories, such as marketing and financial incentives, or can be organized by the nature of costs and benefits, or by the nature of incentive goals. While useful heuristic devices, little effort has been made to test these typologies empirically. This research note provides an empirically based typology of local economic development incentives, using data from 967 cities collected by the International City Management Association.     

Geographical Leadership Mobility and Policy Isomorphism: Narrowing the Regional Inequality of Social Spending in China

The link between geographical leadership mobility and policy isomorphism is rarely discussed in the extant literature. We argue that the geographical leadership mobility encourages local executives to converge their development experiences in their original working jurisdictions and their current positions. The distinct Chinese political personnel system provides an ideal environment that allows researchers to examine the isomorphic effects of geographical leadership mobility. This research builds a dataset of local social spending between 1998 and 2011 as well as a database of the leadership mobility history of provincial executives in China. Results of the spatial panel analysis (SPA) demonstrate that the geographical leadership mobility (i.e., horizontal, top-down, and bottom-up) of governors stimulates the regional isomorphism of provincial education and health care spending. The empirical findings affirm the effectiveness of the effort of the Chinese central government in narrowing the regional inequality of social welfare provision through the geographical mobility of local leadership.     

Understanding Local Leadership in Building the Capacity of Rural Communities in Australia

Current approaches to rural community development in Australia provide for limited government intervention. Such intervention is usually housed within programmes that seek to build the internal capacity of communities to achieve long term socio‐economic sustainability. A fundamental implementation strategy for capacity building has been developing local leadership. The underlying assumption of this approach is that good leadership will result in existing resources being mobilised for a more sustainable function and new resources attracted. What though is good leadership in terms of building the capacity of rural communities to develop sustainable socio‐economic futures? This paper compares the conceptualisation of leadership within rural development policies and leadership training programmes with the nature of local leadership as it exists in on‐ground community building projects. From an in‐depth review of the role and nature of local leadership within six Australian rural communities it was found that local leadership could result in improved adaptive capacity if the leadership is similar in nature to Burn's (1978 ) transformational model of leadership. Within policy, local leadership was most often conceptualised as being similar to this transformational model. However, rural leadership training programmes tended to conceptualise leadership as a top‐down process, similar to Burn's (1978 ) transactional model. While this study of leadership within rural communities revealed that transactional skills, as taught in leadership training programmes, were important for successful project management, such skills did not necessarily result in improved community adaptive capacity. It is suggested that, while transactional leadership can have an important role in influencing the development of rural communities, greater attention needs to be given to developing strategies to support transformational leadership.     

Local Democracy and Local Government Efficiency: The Case of Elected Executives in Australian Local Government

In the international context it has been argued that institutional reform to leadership in local government can improve the sector in terms of both its democratic legitimacy and its operational efficiency. In Australia, despite two decades of far-reaching reform processes across state government jurisdictions, focused heavily on structural change, local government still faces daunting problems, yet the potential of reform to political leadership as a method of alleviating these problems has not been fully explored. This paper thus examines the applicability of alternative leadership models to Australian local government, in particular the elected executive model which characterises some American and European local government systems. We argue that the introduction of elected executives could prove problematic in terms of accountability and representation in Australian local government.     

Economic Resources and Political Power at the Local Level in Post-Soviet Russia

In the 1990s in local government in Russia, the dominant trends might be described as neo-Soviet because of their apparent continuity with patterns that prevailed before the end of communist rule in that country. The promise of independence for "local self-government," as set forth in the Russian Constitution of 1993 and subsequent legislation, largely has been frustrated. The tendency of privatized economic enterprises to divest themselves of responsibility for social benefits, and the lack of an adequate base for financial independence for local governments, have made it necessary for local officials to rely heavily on the regional authorities for support. Within local government, the elected legislature usually is subordinate to a dominant executive leadership. Those features of contemporary local government in Russia are explained by the consequences of decisions adopted by the country's post-Communist leadership, including the method and content of economic reform. The results are unfavorable both for the resurgence of the local economy and the growth of democracy at the local level.     

Assessing Reagan's Legacy

Abstract

I have argued in other research that modern presidents have been facilitators rather than directors of change. They are highly dependent on their environments and can do little to increase their resources of influence. This article probes such a theory of presidential leadership further by examining the congressional leadership of George Washington.

Perhaps the most revered political leader in American history, Washington entered office with tremendous prestige, a Congress dominated by men he viewed as political allies, and, because he was the first president, the fewest constraining precedents of policy or process. Thus, Washington enjoyed the greatest potential to serve as a “director” and move the country in new directions through his leadership.

Yet the study reveals that Washington was mainly a facilitator, not a director of change—much like George Bush two centuries later. Systemic factors such as political culture and the structure of the constitutional system determined that Washington had to be a facilitator, dependent on the opportunities the electorate handed him rather than a director, creating opportunities for change through his own leadership. Similar features characterize the leadership of the current administration.     

Down to Now: Memory,Narrative, and Women's Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement in Atlanta,Georgia

This paper is a case study of African-American women’s leadership. It documents women’s involvement in a voter registration drive in 1946 and traces the develop-ment of an ‘official history’ of that event that emerged in the ensuing decades. This narrative shifted emphasis from the organising leadership that both women and men exhibited to a form of leadership – success in electoral politics – that pertained almost exclusively to men. Concluding remarks address the relevance of memory and narrative for writing the history of women’s leadership.     

Reformist hagiography: the Life of St Roding of Beaulieu and the struggle for power in early eleventh-century Lotharingia

This article explores an example of ‘reformist’ hagiographic production in early eleventh-century Lotharingia by focusing on the Life of St Roding of Beaulieu, a small monastery in the diocese of Verdun. Until recently, this text was interpreted exclusively in terms of the scant information it provides for this institution's early medieval history and in terms of its ideological message regarding monastic discipline and leadership. By integrating the composition of this text into the then-current regional geography and political context, this article proposes a new approach to its interpretation and to the understanding of Beaulieu’s ‘monastic reform’ in general. Close analysis of the narrative reveals that its production was inspired by specific issues relating to local and regional politics in the mid-1010s, and that parts of the institution's recent history were veiled allegorically behind the portrayal of Roding. However, rapid changes in power relationships rendered those aspects of the text outdated within a few years. This raises significant questions regarding the long-term relevance of such hidden stories and the degree to which their ideological, political and other messages remained accessible to medieval audiences.     

Preliminary archaeometric study of the Neolithic pottery from the “Le Grottelline” site (Spinazzola, Italy)

The archaeological site of “Le Grottelline”, in the territory of Spinazzola, province of Bari (southern Italy), which dates back to the Early Neolithic Age, is located in the Bradanic Trough. Abundant ceramic material was recovered, which mainly belongs to the Culture of “Archaic-Impressed Pottery” and appears similar to that found in other Neolithic sites of the Murge area. The archaeologists recognized four ceramic classes: coarse, semi-depurated, depurated, and figulina. Fine ceramics can be red paint decorated. Aim of this work was a preliminary archaeometric characterization of the ceramic material from “Le Grottelline” in order to have information about the use of local raw materials and to address subsequent studies aimed to verify the relationships among the Neolithic cultures of the Murge area. The present study evidenced two typologies of ceramic body, characterized by calcium-rich and calcium-poor pastes, respectively, and two single samples. For the two groups of ceramics, a manufacture with local raw materials is assumed by using two types of clay: carbonate clays from “Subapennine Clays” formation and residual carbonate-free clays such as the well-known “red earths”. These two ceramic typologies are very similar to those reported for the near Neolithic site of Ciccotto, and it also located in the Bradanic Trough. For the two single samples, on the contrary, a manufacturing with “Alluvial Clays” and a provenance from the site of Pulo di Molfetta are supposed. The red painted decorations are aluminum- and iron-rich, while the content of calcium can be very different.     

"This war for men's minds": the birth of a human science in Cold War America

The past decade has seen an explosion of work on the history of the human sciences during the Cold War. This work, however, does not engage with one of the leading human sciences of the period: linguistics. This article begins to rectify this knowledge gap by investigating the influence of linguistics and its concept of study, language, on American public, political and intellectual life during the postwar and early Cold War years. I show that language emerged in three frameworks in this period: language as tool, language as weapon, and language as knowledge. As America stepped onto the international stage, language and linguistics were at the forefront: the military poured millions of dollars into machine translation, American diplomats were required to master scores of foreign languages, and schoolchildren were exposed to language-learning on a scale never before seen in the United States. Together, I argue, language and linguistics formed a critical part of the rise of American leadership in the new world order - one that provided communities as dispersed as the military, the diplomatic corps, scientists and language teachers with a powerful way of tackling the problems they faced. To date, linguistics has not been integrated into the broader framework of Cold War human sciences. In this article, I aim to bring both language, as concept, and linguistics, as discipline, into this framework. In doing so, I pave the way for future work on the history of linguistics as a human science.     

NEW URBAN POVERTY AND THE CRISIS IN THE CITIZENSHIP/WELFARE SYSTEM: THE ITALIAN EXPERIENCE

The paper deals with the working hypothesis and preliminary empirical research on longitudinal analysis of the new urban poor in large Italian cities. It begins by considering existing welfare provisions in Italy and the reasons why they are inadequate to the needs of the new urban poor, who are segments of an increasingly heterogeneous population hit by an accumulation of specific disadvantages, such as the socially isolated elderly with serious health problems, poorly educated young people with a low income family background, long-term unemployed adults who become in some areas professionally unemployable, migrants isolated from both local and fellow-countrymen networks. The paper then presents a preliminary analysis of data indicating the different typologies of new poverty in northern and southern Italian cities and discusses the problems raised for the Italian welfare system by the extension of these phenomena.     

Parcs nationaux et populations locales dans l’ouest canadien : de l’exclusion à la participation

Canadian national parks are well‐known for protecting natural areas dedicated to ‘the benefit and the enjoyment of the Canadian people’. The history of national parks illustrates the evolution of a concept of nature from functional conservation, such as tourism, to an environmental conception, based on ecosystem protection and biodiversity preservation. Banff, Waterton Lakes and Wood Buffalo National Parks in Alberta, and Kootenay National Park in British Columbia (four of the fourteen parks established before 1930, the year the National Parks Act was passed) have been chosen for this study in order to understand how national parks have dealt with local communities since the beginning of the national park movement, and how these relationships have changed during the last forty years. Inclusion of local communities and collaborative management processes have been well developed in northern Canadian parks since the mid‐eighties. These practices have been considered successful in this region, but the situation is very different in the southern parks, especially those that were created before 1930. However, things have changed since Aboriginal culture and rights have been recognized in judgements rendered by the Supreme Court of Canada and by the Canadian Constitution. In the four parks chosen for this study, involvement of local communities and the development of their participation have been slow. Round tables and participation in the creation of interpretation sites and exhibits of Aboriginal history can be considered a step toward further cooperation.     

Grassroots authority in rural Guangdong during late Qing and early Republican times

Gongju, or public offices, controlled by the local gentry class, were the grassroots authorities in rural Guangdong during the late Qing. These offices maintained their own armed forces and usually had powers of administration, tax collection, and self-defense, as well as judicial powers. They were considered the extension of prefecture and county governments. With the authorization of the prefecture and county governments, these offices had the power to deal with important legal cases. Although they came under attack during the 1911 Revolution, these offices were able to recover quickly in different forms. In the late Qing era, local gentry with official titles earned in middle-level or lower-level civil service examinations took the leadership roles in such grassroots offices, but they were replaced by people who had direct control over the armed forces during Republican times.     

Intervention publique sur le développement de grappes industrielles au Québec

This article describes the conditions for the development of four industrial clusters and the mechanisms of their integration in the regional economy. The case studies are the aerospace and apparel clusters in Montreal, and the agri‐food and marine science and technology clusters in the Lower St. Lawrence region. Clusters are defined as arrangements of businesses, government actors, public authorities, and local intermediary organizations in a local area. However, the study shows that clusters are based on actors and processes operating at different scales, from the local to the global. It also shows the importance of the sectoral leadership acknowledged by the different stakeholders.     

中国共产党的绝对领导与新中国国防和军队建设

坚持中国共产党对国防和军队建设的绝对领导,是适合中国国情、独具中国特色的军事领导制度,是坚持党的领导和人民民主专政的重要基石,是推进国防和军队现代化建设的根本保证。新中国成立60年的历史充分证明,坚持党对国防和军队建设的绝对领导,是巩固党的执政地位、确保国家安全、维护社会稳定的重要制度。必须坚决抵制国内外敌对势力鼓吹的"军队非党化、非政治化"和"军队国家化"等错误论调,毫不动摇地坚持这一根本原则和根本制度。     

Conceptualizing the Role of Key Individuals in Urban Governance: Cases from the Economic Regeneration of Liverpool,UK

This paper argues that the role of key individuals in the governance of urban regeneration is often overlooked in empirical studies and theorizations, despite it often being an important causal factor in urban change. The paper provides a “starter” conceptualization of this phenomenon through combining Weber's [(1947) The Theory of Social and Economic Organization—Translated by A.M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (London: Collier Macmillan Publishers)] conceptualizations of authority and Kim, Dansereau and Kim's [(2002) Extending the concept of charismatic leadership: An illustration using Bass’ (1990) categories, in: B. J. Avolio & F. J. Yammarino (Eds) Transformational and Charismatic Leadership: The Road Ahead, Vol. 2, pp. 143–172 (Amsterdam: JAI-Elsevier Science)] typologies of leadership. Detailed research into the economic regeneration of Liverpool, UK, between 1978 and 2008 is drawn upon and a series of key individuals highlighted which played important roles in governance and policy outcomes. It is argued that, whilst the action of individual agents should not be isolated from wider structures and institutional settings, it is often necessary to consider their activities more substantially if a deeper understanding of the causalities behind urban and economic change is to be gained.     

试析1860～1861年美国南部蓄奴州脱离联邦运动的社会基础

南部蓄奴州脱离联邦运动是美国内战前夕的重要历史事件。在南部蓄奴州脱离联邦的过程中,白人奴隶主是决定性的社会力量。非奴隶主白人在脱离联邦问题上则表现出地区性差异：在奴隶制不发达地区,非奴隶主白人的多数反对脱离联邦;在奴隶制发达地区,非奴隶主白人的多数则接受了脱离联邦的选择。造成这种地区性差异的原因,在于非奴隶主白人民众并不作为一个自为的阶级而行动,因此,在奴隶制发达地区,他们在政治上只能顺从奴隶主的领导,而在奴隶制不发达地区,他们就可以完全根据自己的意愿行事。     

‘For the Elections,We Want Women!’: Closing the Gender Gap in Zambian Politics

This article examines the causes of women's rising political participation in Zambia. It argues that women's historical paucity in politics was largely the result of widely‐shared gender stereotypes. These are now weakening due to growing flexibility in gender divisions of labour, which has been catalysed by worsening economic security. By performing work previously presumed to be beyond their abilities and valorized because of its association with masculinity, such women are increasingly perceived as equally capable of leadership. This gradual erosion of gender beliefs has fostered women's political participation and leadership in Zambia.     

Syrian refugee resettlement and the role of local immigration partnerships in Ontario,Canada

We examine Canada's recent Syrian Refugee Resettlement Initiative (SRRI) paying close attention to the resettlement role played by mid‐sized urban communities. We elaborate on a key policy dimension at work at this scale of action: local immigration partnerships (LIPs). We start with a very brief review of Canada's history of mass refugee resettlement. Second, we assess the policy of LIPs, particularly how they have been presented as a form of “place‐based policy,” and third, we offer an overview of the role the LIPs played in three case study communities (Hamilton, Ottawa, and Waterloo) during the SRRI. Finally, we present three overarching themes that emerged from our research in each of these communities: the importance of each community's history of immigration and refugee resettlement; the embeddedness of the LIP and its leadership in the local community; and how the positioning of each LIP relative to the three levels of government and its official Resettlement Assistance Program agreement holders impacted its ability to act. The history, location, and place characteristics of each community influenced the nature of intersectoral and intergovernmental relations in distinctive ways, and differentially shaped the effectiveness of each LIP's ability to contribute to the SRRI.     

Biros,Books and Big‐men: Literacy and the Transformation of Leadership in Simbu,Papua New Guinea

This article examines local strategies used to build leadership roles and enlist public support in a newly literate Papua New Guinean highlands rural community. The ethnographic evidence presented shows how the relationship between literacy and local ideas about modernisation and development has facilitated a shift in patterns of local political structures. When literacy is viewed as an unequally distributed and novel resource with inherently modernist connotations it becomes evident why male villagers in a contemporary highlands village endeavour to acquire and exploit it in rivalry with others. And while individual villagers market their reading and writing proficiency as a means to bolster their reputations within the existing socio‐political system, this has significance for traditional leadership and authority patterns, given that village leaders have traditionally been unschooled and therefore do not possess these highly regarded skills. To illustrate these processes I examine the political careers of two prominent villagers with particular attention to their respective claims to head two competing village‐based development projects. An analysis of the agendas they use to legitimate their authority roles in these projects makes clear how the quest to be seen to be literate has become a constitutive component of a prospective leader's repertoire of skills.