Economic Geography

The Artisans: no alternative to getting 
on with (imperial) business
Priestly deliberations provide the neo-liberal empire with the theological no entry
signs to prevent sustained errant thoughts. But as noted earlier the Empire needs
more focused interventions to convert its key mobilising concept, ‘competitive-
ness’ from a floating signifier to a set of practical policy guidelines in a particular
situation. So down in the street tens of thousands of Artisans shape it’s practical
local implications and consequences (which industries, groups, and places, are to
be favoured by what use of public resources, and how, etc.).
In complete contrast to the Priests, the Artisans (consultants, advisors, academ-
ics, journalists) are many in number but few in ideas, and can be identified by
their membership of networks sharing a bulldozer-simple ontology: There Is No
Alternative – to Competitiveness. The parables used to spread this – the demise
of ‘Fordism’ or arrival of the ‘Informational Society’, ‘Knowledge Economy’,
‘network paradigm’ etc. – have never been developed with any rigour, and the
shiniest are untarnished by anything vaguely approaching a historical fact (Henwood
2003). The idea that competitiveness is the only proper goal of economic develop-
ment strategies, at whatever spatial scale, was borrowed from Michael Porter’s
US studies of the late 1980s (which were about firms) and misapplied to places.
These stories make little economic or geographical sense at all. But they work
well as devices whereby the cultural capital of academia (or think-tank) can be
drawn down to impart gravitas to interventions in the policymaking arena.
The ideological veins and arteries pumping neo-liberalism around the Empire
are most visible in these Porterist networks and discourses. Here the neo-liberal
myth that entitlements depend on the ability to win a contest is spatialised, ratio-
nalising the privileging of one or other group of economic activities and actors.
The issues have been extensively discussed under the heading of the debate over
the ‘New Regionalism’ (Lovering 1999; Keating 2005) so there is no need to go
over them here, beyond noting that the latest packaging is the slogan that ‘cultural
industries’ are the key to ‘regeneration’. It’s impossible to put enough scare quotes
in a sentence containing these terms.