US manufacturing policies increasingly steer resources toward the act of innovation. Emerging cas... more US manufacturing policies increasingly steer resources toward the act of innovation. Emerging case-study evidence suggests that this innovation leads to manufacturing job growth. However, the case-study evidence from which this claim is assembled is incomplete and selective. Using regional-level industry-occupation data for US manufacturing sectors, we test the contribution of manufacturing innovation activities to production employment growth within US regions, for the 2000-2006 and 2006-2010 periods. While production employment continued to disperse from sites of historical manufacturing concentration over both time periods, innovation activities provided some advantages. From 2000 to 2006, regions with higher innovation concentrations in high-tech and medium-low technology industries, experienced slower rates of production employment decline. From 2006 to 2010, a period spanning the Great Recession, innovation activities were associated with reduced production job losses for industries of all technology levels. These results indicate that innovation has benefits beyond high-technology industries, but that those benefits are limited and selective.
Local workforce authorities in liberal market states are increasingly charged with mitigating lon... more Local workforce authorities in liberal market states are increasingly charged with mitigating long-term unemployment rooted in macroeconomic forces beyond their immediate control. In the US, and now elsewhere, these authorities have begun to establish partnerships with the temporary staffing industry as a means of extending their limited resources and improving job placement outcomes. Such partnerships are especially prominent in the US, where the Department of Labor has sanctioned policy experiments between local workforce authorities and the temporary staffing industry. In order to appraise these experiments, we present case-study evaluations of three diverse and highly touted employment schemes undertaken by American workforce authorities in conjunction with temporary staffing agencies. We find that under even the most favourable circumstances, the modest mechanisms of these programmes are unable to produce appreciable impacts within local labour markets.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Sep 1, 2016
In New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, formal alliances between labor unions and community organiz... more In New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, formal alliances between labor unions and community organizations have spurred successful workplace and policy organizing cam paigns. As a result, the institutional form of the community-labor coalition is travelling to smaller, less unionized and more politically conservative cities, where the replication of established organizing strategies must contend with political, economic and institutional differences that often go unnoted. Comparing community-labor alliances in Indianapolis, St. Louis and Chicago, this article identifies heretofore unobserved conditions of possibility for successful urban labor organizing in the US. Compared to smaller cities, Chicago and the large urban areas from which ideal practices are abstracted feature higher levels of union membership, significantly more funding of basic social and neighborhood services, and larger immigrant communities. Operating with minimal human services and limited recourse to the social and institutional networks of immigrant workers, labor coalitions in St. Louis and Indianapolis face recurrent barriers to identifying workplace problems, mobilizing lowwage workers and sustaining citywide reform campaigns. This indicates geographical limits to the current organizing model and highlights the limitations of urban scholarship derived from large cities unrepresentative of urbanity as a whole. The minimum wage will soon reach $15 in Los Angeles, Seattle and San Fran cisco. In response to pressure from organizers, onetime labor antagonist Mayor Rahm Emanuel signed legislation empowering the city of Chicago to confiscate the business license of any firm found to deliberately steal pay from workers. And a growing number of cities, once again including San Francisco and Seattle, have passed sicktime and paid leave measures that confer on workers basic rights state and federal law do not. Individually striking, these developments cumulatively signal the unlikely arrival of the municipal scale as a site of reform for the deep workplace inequalities that characterize the US. These political victories rest on the organizing and mobilization efforts of community-labor coalitions-occasionally ad hoc, but increasingly formal alliances between community organizations and local labor unions seeking workplacelevel collective bargaining and public policy reforms favorable to workers. As organizing and policy victories mount in large cities, activists and scholars have begun to codify and formalize community-labor organizing techniques, with lessons learned in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles fueling the diffusion of organizing tactics and repertoires to cities typically left off the map of urban studies. The most recent round of US 'Fight for 15' fast food strikes covered more than 200 cities, with names ranging from Memphis to Columbia and Peoria. Placebased worker centers, which combine service delivery with labor organizing, can currently be found in Brewer, Maine and Marion, North Carolina. The many and varied dissimilarities between these places and the large cities from which organizing and advocacy lessens are frequently abstracted raises the question of whether and how communityorganizing repertoires will function as they travel to places with fewer union members, small immigrant populations and thin communityorganizing networks. I address this question by comparing the mechanics I wish to thank Chris Tilly, David Wilson and three anonymous IJURR reviewers for comments that improved this article. Special thanks go to Scott Humphrey for his excellent research assistance.
As policy-makers and advocates seek to harness the 'Maker movement' for regional innovation and e... more As policy-makers and advocates seek to harness the 'Maker movement' for regional innovation and economic development, attention is turning to the role of regional 'entrepreneurial ecosystems' in supporting Makers' growth potential. Through interviews with 92 Maker enterprises across three industry subsectors in two regions, the paper demonstrates how the materiality of manufacturing processes, products and end markets influences Makers' growth trajectories, and their effects on the role of regional agglomeration economies. This adds an important material dimension to ongoing academic discussions of industry relatedness focused principally on knowledge transfer, and further suggests that targeted industrial retention may complement manufacturing entrepreneurship policies.
Place-bound anchor institutions provide unique resources and institutional capacity to community ... more Place-bound anchor institutions provide unique resources and institutional capacity to community and economic development. As such, these "eds and meds" play an increasingly important role in community economic development research and practice. Positive assessments of anchors' contributions, however, remain limited to single-site case studies of specialty hospitals and universities with extensive resources. To deepen inquiry into anchors, we use new data, available due to recent U.S. health care policy changes, to test the impact of hospitals' service missions and revenue sources on community economic development spending. We identify 4 basic types of hospitals: large comprehensive, specialty, neighborhood continuum of care, and regional continuum of care. Our statistical tests suggest that anchor institution activity-operationalized as community economic development spending-arises predominantly from larger, teaching-intensive hospitals. Hospital characteristics, rather than urban socioeconomic context, provide the strongest predictors of community economic development spending. These results suggest that a narrower range of urban hospitals performs community economic development. However, we discover a significant amount of hospitals in one city (Baltimore, Maryland) invested heavily in community economic development. We conclude by investigating that city's "anchor plan" policy, which appears to have successfully channeled investment from its anchoring hospitals.
Seeking regulatory power unavailable at the urban scale, community–labor coalitions have persuade... more Seeking regulatory power unavailable at the urban scale, community–labor coalitions have persuaded dozens of state legislatures to enact legislation addressing the problem of wage theft in low-wage service industries. The project of wage theft reform raises important questions about whether urban coalitions can effectively pursue their advocacy goals in State Houses. Drawing on an inventory of 255 wage theft laws proposed between 2004 and 2012, we evaluate three rival explanations of why wage theft legislation succeeds: worker grievances, political conditions, and movement strength. We find that states with larger numbers of worker centers and higher union density are more likely to both propose and enact wage theft legislation. Our results also suggest that urban reform movements maintain greater power to set legislative agendas than they do to ensure the passage of proposed laws. This suggest that “new labor” actors have developed state-level political power that warrants further scrutiny and explanation.
Journal of Planning Education and Research, May 17, 2022
This paper investigates the potential of human development theory to provide alternatives to long... more This paper investigates the potential of human development theory to provide alternatives to long-standing practical and conceptual problems in traditional economic development. We show that the capabilities approach developed by Sen and Nussbaum provides new solutions to four long-standing problems that define economic development activities focused on industrial recruitment and highly skilled professionals: (1) competition for scarce material resources, (2) connection to other planning specializations, (3) cities’ limited control over economies, and (4) coordinating the unmanageable networks that oversee plans. We demonstrate that these benefits are actual, rather than aspirational, by documenting the growth and diffusion of three types of urban economic policies that enact human development ideas: employment standards, reduced-cost education, and universal public programs
Journal of Planning Education and Research, May 19, 2015
Focusing on progressive economic development policy and the institutional form of the community–l... more Focusing on progressive economic development policy and the institutional form of the community–labor coalition—an alliance between labor unions and urban advocacy organizations—this article assesses the potential to scale equity planning “up” to political scales at which redistributive policy is both more effective and more likely to be enacted. I investigate when and why scaling up works through a comparison of two differently scaled campaigns to raise wages in Chicago’s service industries. The results indicate that equity planners in City Hall can expand their ability to address structural economic problems by allying with nationally organized activist organizations.
“Innovation” has joined the pantheon of normative buzzwords tossed around to elevate or repudiate... more “Innovation” has joined the pantheon of normative buzzwords tossed around to elevate or repudiate cities and regions and the economic development paths they set for themselves, or more often, find themselves set on. Cities and regions are judged for the robustness of their “innovation systems.” Local institutions, firm networks and supply chains, and even labor markets are assessed for their “innovation capacity”—a shorthand for the ability of people and places to absorb or “uptake” new technologies. Within all this continuous evaluation is an assumption that we all hold a shared understanding of what innovation is and further that this shared understanding sits within a near universal acceptance of a Schumpeterian view of growth and change. That is, creative destruction results in winners and losers. You do not want to be a loser economy. And winners form an exclusive club. Acknowledging that this discourse about local and regional economies centers an inequitable form of winner-take-all innovation— “exclusive innovation”—is a vital step toward imagining and enacting possible alternative futures. Yet articulating, much less winning, a battle to define and assert a competing vision of “inclusive innovation” requires more than we can ask of local and regional economic development as it is currently constituted. By definition, “inclusive innovation” is an aspirational vision for economic development that is not present in our current practices. But there are signs of this aspiration. And these signs can serve as a foundation for constructing a new model. These articles begin to show us both where to look for this emerging model and what to look for. And perhaps more importantly, they demonstrate that alternatives are not only theoretically possible but also actually existing. A key question we see is how to give these alternative ideas, practices, and discourses the status of fully fledged models to rival the narrower visions of innovation currently in circulation: How can inclusive innovation become commonsense enough that practitioners “know it when they see it”? The challenge is both technical and—uncomfortably for many in economic development—political. For the forces that make the ground state for innovation so inequitable are the same forces that make our broader world so. The articles in this issue identify a dizzying number of barriers to inclusion. They range
N early three-quarters (73 percent) of enrollments in America's major public benefits programs ar... more N early three-quarters (73 percent) of enrollments in America's major public benefits programs are from working families. But many of them work in jobs that pay wages so low that their paychecks do not generate enough income to provide for life's basic necessities. Low wages paid by employers in the fast-food industry create especially acute problems for the families of workers in this industry. Median pay for core front-line fast-food jobs is $8.69 an hour, with many jobs paying at or near the minimum wage. Benefits are also scarce for front-line fast-food workers; an estimated 87 percent do not receive health benefits through their employer. The combination of low wages and benefits, often coupled with part-time employment, means that many of the families of fast-food workers must rely on taxpayer-funded safety net programs to make ends meet. This report estimates the public cost of low-wage jobs in the fast-food industry. Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit and the other public benefits programs discussed in this report provide a vital support system for millions of Americans working in the United States' service industries, including fast food. We analyze public program utilization by working families and estimate total average annual public benefit expenditures on the families of front-line fast-food workers for the years 2007-2011. 1 For this analysis we focus on jobs held by core, front-line fast-food workers, defined as nonmanagerial workers who work at least 11 hours per week for 27 or more weeks per year.
Journal of Planning Education and Research, Jul 21, 2017
Legalizing marijuana at the state level establishes via fiat a new industry. In practice, legal m... more Legalizing marijuana at the state level establishes via fiat a new industry. In practice, legal marijuana constitutes a large-scale test of consumption-driven economic development policies, which seek to shape industry and job growth via changes in local spending. Drawing on the critical case of Colorado, I assess the economic development outcomes and future potential of legal marijuana, and evaluate the broader applicability of consumption-driven development processes heretofore confined to the arts and isolated local cases. While most states should be able to replicate Colorado's import-substitution gains, the most enduring economic benefits to legalization require place amenities that legalization alone cannot provide.
US manufacturing policies increasingly steer resources toward the act of innovation. Emerging cas... more US manufacturing policies increasingly steer resources toward the act of innovation. Emerging case-study evidence suggests that this innovation leads to manufacturing job growth. However, the case-study evidence from which this claim is assembled is incomplete and selective. Using regional-level industry-occupation data for US manufacturing sectors, we test the contribution of manufacturing innovation activities to production employment growth within US regions, for the 2000-2006 and 2006-2010 periods. While production employment continued to disperse from sites of historical manufacturing concentration over both time periods, innovation activities provided some advantages. From 2000 to 2006, regions with higher innovation concentrations in high-tech and medium-low technology industries, experienced slower rates of production employment decline. From 2006 to 2010, a period spanning the Great Recession, innovation activities were associated with reduced production job losses for industries of all technology levels. These results indicate that innovation has benefits beyond high-technology industries, but that those benefits are limited and selective.
Local workforce authorities in liberal market states are increasingly charged with mitigating lon... more Local workforce authorities in liberal market states are increasingly charged with mitigating long-term unemployment rooted in macroeconomic forces beyond their immediate control. In the US, and now elsewhere, these authorities have begun to establish partnerships with the temporary staffing industry as a means of extending their limited resources and improving job placement outcomes. Such partnerships are especially prominent in the US, where the Department of Labor has sanctioned policy experiments between local workforce authorities and the temporary staffing industry. In order to appraise these experiments, we present case-study evaluations of three diverse and highly touted employment schemes undertaken by American workforce authorities in conjunction with temporary staffing agencies. We find that under even the most favourable circumstances, the modest mechanisms of these programmes are unable to produce appreciable impacts within local labour markets.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Sep 1, 2016
In New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, formal alliances between labor unions and community organiz... more In New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, formal alliances between labor unions and community organizations have spurred successful workplace and policy organizing cam paigns. As a result, the institutional form of the community-labor coalition is travelling to smaller, less unionized and more politically conservative cities, where the replication of established organizing strategies must contend with political, economic and institutional differences that often go unnoted. Comparing community-labor alliances in Indianapolis, St. Louis and Chicago, this article identifies heretofore unobserved conditions of possibility for successful urban labor organizing in the US. Compared to smaller cities, Chicago and the large urban areas from which ideal practices are abstracted feature higher levels of union membership, significantly more funding of basic social and neighborhood services, and larger immigrant communities. Operating with minimal human services and limited recourse to the social and institutional networks of immigrant workers, labor coalitions in St. Louis and Indianapolis face recurrent barriers to identifying workplace problems, mobilizing lowwage workers and sustaining citywide reform campaigns. This indicates geographical limits to the current organizing model and highlights the limitations of urban scholarship derived from large cities unrepresentative of urbanity as a whole. The minimum wage will soon reach $15 in Los Angeles, Seattle and San Fran cisco. In response to pressure from organizers, onetime labor antagonist Mayor Rahm Emanuel signed legislation empowering the city of Chicago to confiscate the business license of any firm found to deliberately steal pay from workers. And a growing number of cities, once again including San Francisco and Seattle, have passed sicktime and paid leave measures that confer on workers basic rights state and federal law do not. Individually striking, these developments cumulatively signal the unlikely arrival of the municipal scale as a site of reform for the deep workplace inequalities that characterize the US. These political victories rest on the organizing and mobilization efforts of community-labor coalitions-occasionally ad hoc, but increasingly formal alliances between community organizations and local labor unions seeking workplacelevel collective bargaining and public policy reforms favorable to workers. As organizing and policy victories mount in large cities, activists and scholars have begun to codify and formalize community-labor organizing techniques, with lessons learned in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles fueling the diffusion of organizing tactics and repertoires to cities typically left off the map of urban studies. The most recent round of US 'Fight for 15' fast food strikes covered more than 200 cities, with names ranging from Memphis to Columbia and Peoria. Placebased worker centers, which combine service delivery with labor organizing, can currently be found in Brewer, Maine and Marion, North Carolina. The many and varied dissimilarities between these places and the large cities from which organizing and advocacy lessens are frequently abstracted raises the question of whether and how communityorganizing repertoires will function as they travel to places with fewer union members, small immigrant populations and thin communityorganizing networks. I address this question by comparing the mechanics I wish to thank Chris Tilly, David Wilson and three anonymous IJURR reviewers for comments that improved this article. Special thanks go to Scott Humphrey for his excellent research assistance.
As policy-makers and advocates seek to harness the 'Maker movement' for regional innovation and e... more As policy-makers and advocates seek to harness the 'Maker movement' for regional innovation and economic development, attention is turning to the role of regional 'entrepreneurial ecosystems' in supporting Makers' growth potential. Through interviews with 92 Maker enterprises across three industry subsectors in two regions, the paper demonstrates how the materiality of manufacturing processes, products and end markets influences Makers' growth trajectories, and their effects on the role of regional agglomeration economies. This adds an important material dimension to ongoing academic discussions of industry relatedness focused principally on knowledge transfer, and further suggests that targeted industrial retention may complement manufacturing entrepreneurship policies.
Place-bound anchor institutions provide unique resources and institutional capacity to community ... more Place-bound anchor institutions provide unique resources and institutional capacity to community and economic development. As such, these "eds and meds" play an increasingly important role in community economic development research and practice. Positive assessments of anchors' contributions, however, remain limited to single-site case studies of specialty hospitals and universities with extensive resources. To deepen inquiry into anchors, we use new data, available due to recent U.S. health care policy changes, to test the impact of hospitals' service missions and revenue sources on community economic development spending. We identify 4 basic types of hospitals: large comprehensive, specialty, neighborhood continuum of care, and regional continuum of care. Our statistical tests suggest that anchor institution activity-operationalized as community economic development spending-arises predominantly from larger, teaching-intensive hospitals. Hospital characteristics, rather than urban socioeconomic context, provide the strongest predictors of community economic development spending. These results suggest that a narrower range of urban hospitals performs community economic development. However, we discover a significant amount of hospitals in one city (Baltimore, Maryland) invested heavily in community economic development. We conclude by investigating that city's "anchor plan" policy, which appears to have successfully channeled investment from its anchoring hospitals.
Seeking regulatory power unavailable at the urban scale, community–labor coalitions have persuade... more Seeking regulatory power unavailable at the urban scale, community–labor coalitions have persuaded dozens of state legislatures to enact legislation addressing the problem of wage theft in low-wage service industries. The project of wage theft reform raises important questions about whether urban coalitions can effectively pursue their advocacy goals in State Houses. Drawing on an inventory of 255 wage theft laws proposed between 2004 and 2012, we evaluate three rival explanations of why wage theft legislation succeeds: worker grievances, political conditions, and movement strength. We find that states with larger numbers of worker centers and higher union density are more likely to both propose and enact wage theft legislation. Our results also suggest that urban reform movements maintain greater power to set legislative agendas than they do to ensure the passage of proposed laws. This suggest that “new labor” actors have developed state-level political power that warrants further scrutiny and explanation.
Journal of Planning Education and Research, May 17, 2022
This paper investigates the potential of human development theory to provide alternatives to long... more This paper investigates the potential of human development theory to provide alternatives to long-standing practical and conceptual problems in traditional economic development. We show that the capabilities approach developed by Sen and Nussbaum provides new solutions to four long-standing problems that define economic development activities focused on industrial recruitment and highly skilled professionals: (1) competition for scarce material resources, (2) connection to other planning specializations, (3) cities’ limited control over economies, and (4) coordinating the unmanageable networks that oversee plans. We demonstrate that these benefits are actual, rather than aspirational, by documenting the growth and diffusion of three types of urban economic policies that enact human development ideas: employment standards, reduced-cost education, and universal public programs
Journal of Planning Education and Research, May 19, 2015
Focusing on progressive economic development policy and the institutional form of the community–l... more Focusing on progressive economic development policy and the institutional form of the community–labor coalition—an alliance between labor unions and urban advocacy organizations—this article assesses the potential to scale equity planning “up” to political scales at which redistributive policy is both more effective and more likely to be enacted. I investigate when and why scaling up works through a comparison of two differently scaled campaigns to raise wages in Chicago’s service industries. The results indicate that equity planners in City Hall can expand their ability to address structural economic problems by allying with nationally organized activist organizations.
“Innovation” has joined the pantheon of normative buzzwords tossed around to elevate or repudiate... more “Innovation” has joined the pantheon of normative buzzwords tossed around to elevate or repudiate cities and regions and the economic development paths they set for themselves, or more often, find themselves set on. Cities and regions are judged for the robustness of their “innovation systems.” Local institutions, firm networks and supply chains, and even labor markets are assessed for their “innovation capacity”—a shorthand for the ability of people and places to absorb or “uptake” new technologies. Within all this continuous evaluation is an assumption that we all hold a shared understanding of what innovation is and further that this shared understanding sits within a near universal acceptance of a Schumpeterian view of growth and change. That is, creative destruction results in winners and losers. You do not want to be a loser economy. And winners form an exclusive club. Acknowledging that this discourse about local and regional economies centers an inequitable form of winner-take-all innovation— “exclusive innovation”—is a vital step toward imagining and enacting possible alternative futures. Yet articulating, much less winning, a battle to define and assert a competing vision of “inclusive innovation” requires more than we can ask of local and regional economic development as it is currently constituted. By definition, “inclusive innovation” is an aspirational vision for economic development that is not present in our current practices. But there are signs of this aspiration. And these signs can serve as a foundation for constructing a new model. These articles begin to show us both where to look for this emerging model and what to look for. And perhaps more importantly, they demonstrate that alternatives are not only theoretically possible but also actually existing. A key question we see is how to give these alternative ideas, practices, and discourses the status of fully fledged models to rival the narrower visions of innovation currently in circulation: How can inclusive innovation become commonsense enough that practitioners “know it when they see it”? The challenge is both technical and—uncomfortably for many in economic development—political. For the forces that make the ground state for innovation so inequitable are the same forces that make our broader world so. The articles in this issue identify a dizzying number of barriers to inclusion. They range
N early three-quarters (73 percent) of enrollments in America's major public benefits programs ar... more N early three-quarters (73 percent) of enrollments in America's major public benefits programs are from working families. But many of them work in jobs that pay wages so low that their paychecks do not generate enough income to provide for life's basic necessities. Low wages paid by employers in the fast-food industry create especially acute problems for the families of workers in this industry. Median pay for core front-line fast-food jobs is $8.69 an hour, with many jobs paying at or near the minimum wage. Benefits are also scarce for front-line fast-food workers; an estimated 87 percent do not receive health benefits through their employer. The combination of low wages and benefits, often coupled with part-time employment, means that many of the families of fast-food workers must rely on taxpayer-funded safety net programs to make ends meet. This report estimates the public cost of low-wage jobs in the fast-food industry. Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit and the other public benefits programs discussed in this report provide a vital support system for millions of Americans working in the United States' service industries, including fast food. We analyze public program utilization by working families and estimate total average annual public benefit expenditures on the families of front-line fast-food workers for the years 2007-2011. 1 For this analysis we focus on jobs held by core, front-line fast-food workers, defined as nonmanagerial workers who work at least 11 hours per week for 27 or more weeks per year.
Journal of Planning Education and Research, Jul 21, 2017
Legalizing marijuana at the state level establishes via fiat a new industry. In practice, legal m... more Legalizing marijuana at the state level establishes via fiat a new industry. In practice, legal marijuana constitutes a large-scale test of consumption-driven economic development policies, which seek to shape industry and job growth via changes in local spending. Drawing on the critical case of Colorado, I assess the economic development outcomes and future potential of legal marijuana, and evaluate the broader applicability of consumption-driven development processes heretofore confined to the arts and isolated local cases. While most states should be able to replicate Colorado's import-substitution gains, the most enduring economic benefits to legalization require place amenities that legalization alone cannot provide.
Women Employed mobilizes people and organizations to expand educational and employment opportunit... more Women Employed mobilizes people and organizations to expand educational and employment opportunities for America's working women. For nearly four decades we have promoted workplace practices, increased access to training and education, and provided women with innovative tools and information to move into careers paying family-supporting wages. www.womenemployed.org Action Now Institute (ANI) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit educating, inspiring and engaging less-advantaged communities by providing them with the information and tools necessary to take a public stance on the issues that affect their neighborhoods, city and state. ANI partners the community perspective to research and policy, fusing a unique understanding of Chicago communities with extensive grassroots organizing knowledge, a network of allies and an experienced staff. ANI is dedicated to fighting for social, racial and economic justice, especially as it relates to housing, education, public safety, and living wages.
Uploads
Books by Marc Doussard
Papers by Marc Doussard