Global expertise, local convincing power: Management consultants and preserving the entrepreneurial city

Anne Vogelpohl

Urban Studies, 2019, vol. 56, issue 1, 97-114

Abstract: The advice of management consultancies on urban policy is particularly influential in moments of crisis involving entrepreneurial principles. As global experts, management consultants appear as appropriate assistants for steering growth-oriented, competitive urban development. In order to show how consultants turn the urban into an entrepreneurial project to be managed, I discuss the literature on urban policy and consultants then examine the activities of private management consultancies in six German cities. Empirically, I first explore the specificities of urban policy advice given by globally operating consultancies (their methodological approach and the projectisation of the urban; global networks and comparative–competitive thinking; fast databases; reputation; externality). Second, I critically reflect on how the consultants’ advice is fundamentally reshaped by local actors in the process of policy making (through participation, appropriation, slowdown and politicisation). The paper thus critically evaluates the rise of expertise–policy relations and calls attention to mechanisms for patching the fractures of the entrepreneurial city.

Keywords: comparative urban studies; globalisation; governance; local government; management consultants; policy; æ¯”è¾ƒåŸŽå¸‚ç ”ç©¶; å…¨ç ƒåŒ–; æ²»ç †; 地方政府; ç®¡ç †é¡¾é—®; 政策 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0042098018768490 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:56:y:2019:i:1:p:97-114

DOI: 10.1177/0042098018768490

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Urban Studies from Urban Studies Journal Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().