Property, politics and the neo-liberal revolution in urban Scotland
Section snippets
Business politics in the city
According to Offe (1985), the business community in capitalist societies is not subjected to the same imperative to organise itself as a political force as other sections of the community, particularly say, labour. In his reading, this is due to the intrinsically powerful position which capital possesses in such societies, giving it unique access to the state. With globalisation, this power has clearly increased. The ever present threat, that capital operates with a heightened degree of
State/property interfaces and changing trajectories of urban governance in Scotland
In the previous chapter, it was argued that the way in which the British economy has been governed these past two decades has undergone transformation, as the rise to prominence of neo-liberal agendas has sought to transform the dominant mode of regulation based upon Keynesian demand management and the principle of the welfare state. We have noted that the question of the extent to which emerging new structures and strategies have served to steer the British state into new relationships with
Research design: identifying and surveying property mobilising agents
Having identified the context within which this study is placed—the shift in the forms of local governance in Britain in general and Scotland specifically—here we turn to consider the survey which forms the backbone of the remainder of the paper. Given that this survey represents the first major effort to reveal patterns of property politics in urban Scotland, we develop and justify the research design employed at some length. We start with an outline of the key group of property players that
Property politics in Scotland
In this chapter, we aim to provide a broad overview of the main results produced through our survey of property mobilising agents in urban Scotland. Our focus is confined, therefore, to the 108 companies who completed the questionnaire. It is worthwhile at this stage, restating the four major aims of the survey outlined in the first chapter. These were:
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to assess the degree to which property mobilising agents are politically active in Scotland, gauging the importance of local level activity in
Moving beyond state-centred perspectives
The research design adopted in this paper marks out an important new direction in the study of business politics in the city. By choosing to focus on one fraction of capital and the political activities of this fraction across a range of different cities within one political system, we have moved beyond existing work that has tended to be state-centred. The patterns of property politics we have revealed can best be characterised as anachronistic, not only in the issues which are pursued, but
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to acknowledge the financial assistance received from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, Glasgow City Council and the University of Strathclyde Research and Development Fund in the undertaking of the research on which this paper is based. The authors are grateful to Nicole Cook for her assistance in conducting the survey and in the analysis of the responses from the property mobilising agents.
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