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Local economy is conventionally defined through political administrative units. The continuity of this approach has been challenged as more networked forms of economy have evolved. In response, local economies are increasingly reconfigured around city-regions, on presumption of linking network potential with local dynamics. Such challenges present several problems for practitioners in local economic governance. This paper examines the continuity between city-regional articulations of local economy units (LEU) and localised dynamics. Using lower-tier localities in Staffordshire, UK, reconfigured into the Greater Birmingham & Solihull city-region, it uses a location quotient to examine industrial concentration as a determinant of related variety. It extrapolates these concentrations to define LEUs and examine their continuity with formal political designation. It argues growing dependence on the city-region is a partial representation which ignores industry-based approaches and the need for plurality in defining local economies. Adopting such approaches may be of value to local government policy practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Creative Industries (CI) is a growth sector, yet understandings of CI practice remain limited. CI represent a heterodox sector with high variation levels between firms. Pressure has emerged on CI to adopt more orthodox business practices, maximising growth and contributing towards national economic objectives. Such practices however must be cognisant of a highly esoteric sector founded upon creative intensity and project-based systems. This question of business practice is explored through the Arts-based Creative Industries (ABCI). The article uses a novel SME diagnostic to explore practices, dependencies and exposures in an environment of reduced funding and pressure for commercialisation. It proposes ABCI supplement resource limitations and demands for creative intensity through networks; techniques used by ABCI could be of value more widely to SMEs in an increasingly network-based economy. Similarly, these networks risk locking firms into unrealistic dependence on external sources of knowledge and funding which exert significant influence on business development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subnational economic governance has witnessed ongoing transformation as part of what is argued as a financialization of the policy process. Within England, recent reform has seen two specific tendencies: a transformation attempting greater integration between industrial structure and subnational spaces; and more entrepreneurial practices incorporating businesses as key actors. Here, city-regional agglomeration models have been adopted to activate internal resource. This paper explores the effect of these changes on policy continuity amongst constituent parts of the city-region through the concept of goodwill. It focuses on the Greater Birmingham and Solihull region of the UK and its relationship with a constituent locality: Southern Staffordshire. It argues reform has redrawn the subnational map with greater sensitivity around industrial structure. Adapting modes of financializing the governance process, however, using city-regions' presumed benefits around competitiveness and efficiency, frame this sensitivity. A form of goodwill has thus emerged founded around compliance with orthodox city-regional interpretations, supplementing financial shortfalls yet reinforcing further space–policy separation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SMEs make a major contribution to the economy of cities and places. The relationship between firms and place is increasingly explained through the application of city-based externality models. Such explanations have limited validity in a number of contexts. One of these is in the economies of small- and medium-sized towns and communities (SMST). Whilst convention has sought to apply core-periphery explanations to the functioning of firms within SMSTs, the economies of SMSTs and entrepreneurial processes of SME embedding, adaptation and survival in such places are more complex. This paper explores these entrepreneurial processes in the context of manufacturing firms in five SMSTs in the West Midlands, UK. The paper uses interview data to understand the relationships between SMEs and place through the development of successive and evolving linked enterprise structures. Through these linked enterprise structures, SMEs engage in a process of adaptive embeddedness, resulting in new resource configurations through fluid iterations of structural, emotional, and circumstantial embeddedness. This paper is the first to identify and explore these different forms of embeddedness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]