THE CO-PRODUCTION OF NARRATIVE IN AN ENTREPRENEURIAL CITY: AN ANALYSIS OF CINCINNATI, OHIO, IN TURMOIL

In April 2001 Cincinnati, Ohio, erupted into violence and protracted unrest after the police shooting of an unarmed African‐American named Timothy Thomas. African‐American interest groups in the city subsequently organized an economic boycott of downtown businesses. In response to the demonstration and the boycott, the Cincinnati government issued a marketing campaign entitled ‘We're On the Move!’, intending to give nod to past failures and launch forward movement on their part. In this article I investigate the entirety of these events as narrative moments under the auspices of urban entrepreneurialism to answer the question: How does the local population inform, rather than simply mediate, the narrative administration of an urban entrepreneurial form of governance? I then turn to a response to the campaign by an African‐American newspaper columnist in Cincinnati to underscore a dialogic relationship between an entrepreneurial city and its citizens as it forms the presentation of entrepreneurialism. In turn, this conception allows for a more nuanced version of entrepreneurial governance more generally.