Search results
competition and encouraging partnership between the State and private sectors. Additionally, the State encourages the involvement of the voluntary and private sector in services typically provided by the State such as green space, health with social care, and transport. This is commonly considered privatisation of state assets and services. Devolution occurs when the responsibility for decision-making is regionalised; from national to lower governmental levels. Many argue that the neoliberal hegemony has exacerbated urban socio-economic polarisation (Musterd and Ostendorf
Manchester: Something rich and strange challenges us to see the quintessential post-industrial city in new ways. Bringing together twenty-three diverse writers and a wide range of photographs of Greater Manchester, it argues that how we see the city can have a powerful effect on its future – an urgent question given how quickly the urban core is being transformed. The book uses sixty different words to speak about the diversity of what we think of as Manchester – whether the chimneys of its old mills, the cobbles mostly hidden under the tarmac, the passages between terraces, or the everyday act of washing clothes in a laundrette. Unashamedly down to earth in its focus, this book makes the case for a renewed imaginative relationship that recognises and champions the fact that we’re all active in the making and unmaking of urban spaces.
between Birmingham and the other local authorities, as well as tensions between the different councils of Dudley, Sandwell, Solihull, Walsall and Wolverhampton. The onset of austerity and a major retrenchment of local- government spending, combined with rising social-care service demands, prompted a major change in the attitudes of local politicians who promoted greater collaboration. The WMCA city-region deal was agreed with central government in November 2015 and formally approved by the constituent local authorities in 2016. It involves the devolution of powers in
factors that the process of urbanisation – and the gradual agglomeration of once geographically distinct towns – brought into being. These include a well-established infrastructural network, both above and below ground, that connects all parts of the urban region (and far beyond it as well), as well as an increasing recognition of the need for a wider form of government, first made concrete with the 1974 creation of Greater Manchester and attempted again, more recently, with the partial devolution of power from Westminster to the provinces, with the formation of the
's Lynn. The border between Northern Ireland and the Republic was also the subject of widespread speculation, with proposals to draw a new de facto border in the Irish Sea drawing extensive criticism and threatening to accelerate devolution. But in 2020 everything seemingly changed. Remarkably, in the face of a global pandemic, ‘island-thinking’ became more, rather than less, prominent. For example, following the arrival of COVID-19 in the UK, Johnson's cod-Churchillian bluster invoked the wartime spirit, and many compared the crisis to World War II. One elderly
”?’, Journal of British Studies 46, 1: 72–90. Gorecki, P. (2009) ‘A code of practice for grocery goods and an ombudsman: how to do a lot of harm by trying to do a little good’, Economic and Social Review 40, 4: 461–84. Gough, A. and Magennis, E. (2009) The Impact of Devolution on Everyday Life, 1999– 2009: the Case of Cross-border Commerce. IBIS Working Papers 85. Dublin: Institute for British-Irish Studies, University College Dublin. Howard, K. (2007) ‘Civil society: the permeability of the North–South border’, in J. Coakley and L. O’Dowd (eds), Crossing the Border: New
continental European state-societies, unfavourably with the UK, US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, on the basis of its incremental restructuring programme ‘at the margins’: ‘Instead of relaxing general employment protection provisions, some governments have preferred to introduce short-term contracts and liberalise employment protection for part-time workers in small firms (e.g. Germany, France, Belgium)’ (OECD, 1997: 8). Despite some apparent concessions to the discourse of flexibility, seen for example in greater devolution of bargaining to the workplace and wage
. Neo-liberal discourses of hyperflexibility advocate the individualisation of the firm and the devolution of responsibility and autonomy to the level of immediate managerial production decisions. Indeed, it could be said that such discourses rely upon the abstraction of the firm from its wider relationship with state-society. The restructuring activities and debates within German and British manufacturing firms reflect and inform a web of power that extends seamlessly into banks, education institutions and civil society. The webs of power that pull together the
so-called ‘formal’ waste management with livelihoods have resulted in a proliferation of monthly clean-ups, media campaigns, work opportunity initiatives and community procurement schemes. In a context where risks of automation and surplus labour forces are met with challenges of municipal capacity (Palmer et al., 2017 ), community waste management efforts are an important tool within the commodification of waste and the devolution of state service provision, particularly in marginalised communities. Although national clean-up days and
making skilled workers the actual employers of their unskilled helpers. In the cotton industry, for instance, about twothirds of the boys and one-third of the girls were thus ‘in the direct employ of operatives’ and hence more closely watched. (Hobsbawm, 1962: 66–67) The devolution of responsibility through supply chains and contract labour is evident in this depiction of labour discipline in early British industrialisation. I am not suggesting that contemporary discourse of deregulation and labour flexibility simply follows from historical practices in a linear or