Local strategic partnerships in England: the continuing search for collaborative advantage, leadership and strategy in urban governance

Local Strategic Partnerships are being established in England to provide an inclusive, collaborative and strategic focus to regeneration strategies at the local level. They are also required to rationalise the proliferation of local and micro-partnerships set up by a succession of funding initiatives over the last 25 years. This article explores their remit, resources and membership and discusses how this initiative relates to theoretical work on urban governance, community engagement and leadership. It concludes by debating whether urban policy in England is now entering a new and more advanced phase based on inter-organisational networks with a strategic purpose. But questions remain about whether the institutional capacity is sufficient to deliver strong local leadership, accountability and community engagement.

The significance of Marx's value for strategy theory: competitive advantage and the issue of tautology within the resource-based view of the firm

Marxian thinking following the TSSI (Temporal Single System Interpretation) of Marx is applied to refute the allegation of a tautology in the resource-based view of the firm--paired with providing an explanation of how and why resources create value--, where resources are synonymous with Marx's categories of constant and variable capital. Refuting the allegation naturally leads to the holy grail of resource-based thinking, i.e. the question of what, conceptually, constitutes a firm's competitive advantage within the industry context. The article achieves its objectives by tying the resource-based view into Marx's theory value.

Community empowerment or a strategy of containment? Evaluating neighbourhood governance in the city of Westminster

The longstanding emphasis on the neighbourhood as a scale for intervention and action has given rise to a variety of forms of governance with a number of different rationales. The predominant rationales about the purpose of neighbourhood governance are encapsulated in a fourfold typology developed by Lowndes and Sullivan (2008). This article sets out to test this approach by drawing on an evaluation of neighbourhood initiatives in the City of Westminster which were delivered through a third sector organisation, the Paddington Development Trust. ‘Insider’ perspectives gathered at city and neighbourhood levels regarding the infrastructure for neighbourhood management are discussed and evaluated in the light of these rationales. The conclusions, while broadly reflecting Lowndes and Sullivan and a follow-up study of Manchester, suggest that in Westminster the civic and economic rationales tend to predominate. However, the Westminster approach is contingent on the prevailing ethos and funding regimes at central and local levels and remains relatively detached from mainstream services. While community empowerment is an important part of the policy rhetoric, it is argued that in practice a ‘strategy of containment’ operates whereby residents in the neighbourhoods have relatively little control over targets and resources and that new governance mechanisms can be relatively easily de-coupled when required. In retrospect, co-production might have been a more effective model for neighbourhood governance, not least given its fit with policy direction.

Media ‘Globalization’ as Survival Strategy for Authoritarian Regimes In the Arab Middle East

Sakr challenges the notion that transnational media technologies have forced states in the Arab Middle East to cede ever more control to non-state players since the 1990s. Taking account of a long history of foreign political engineering in Arab countries, she probes the realities of Arab broadcasting privatization, intra-regional harmonization of government communication policies, and external financial support for media freedom and reform, to show how Arab governments were large successfully in harnessing forces implicated in media globalization in a way that entrenched authoritarian elements of the status quo. The findings validate an alternative to globalization theory that places a dual focus on the agency of national ruling elites and the international structures that underpin the power of those elites today, as in the past.

Revisiting the relationship between marketing capabilities and firm performance: The moderating role of market orientation, marketing strategy and organisational power

This paper extends original insights of resource-advantage theory (Hunt & Morgan, 1995) to a specific analysis of the moderators of the capabilities-performance relationship such as market orientation, marketing strategy and organizational power. Using established measures and a representative sample of UK firms drawn from Verhoef and Leeflang’s data (2009), our study tests new hypotheses to explain how different types of marketing capabilities contribute to firm performance. The application of resource-advantage theory advances theorising on both marketing and organisational antecedents of firm performance and the causal mechanisms by which competitive advantage is generated.