Andrew Wood

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• PhD
• Professor of Geography at University of Kentucky

Settlements variously termed ‘ex-urbs', ‘edge cities', ‘technoburbs’ are taken to signal something different from suburbia and as a consequence might be considered post-suburban. Existing literature has focused on defining post-suburbia as a new era and as a new form of settlement space. Whether post-suburbia can also be delimited in terms of its d...

Our objective in this paper is to understand the significance of the peak oil claim for the large, publicly-traded oil companies to whom the tasks of finding oil, extracting it and delivering it to market have been allocated. On the face of it, peak oil would appear to offer the ultimate solution to a problem that has plagued the international oil...

Consideration of the work of site selection consultants provides a window onto the frictions inherent in the location decision. In this paper, we draw upon interviews to interpret site selection consultants as intermediaries between a demand for locations emanating from MNEs and a supply of locations provided by national and subnational territories...

Large firms are faced with an ever-widening array of consultancy services and providers. From management consulting to accounting to logistics to human relations, the professional services industry has seen extraordinary growth in the number of firms and range of services they provide. In this paper, we examine the history of one consultancy firm,...

ABSTRACT Interlocality competition is a staple concern of modern economic geography. Yet, beyond the abstract bases of this competition in the very nature of capitalism, the question of how such interlocality competition arose in thepost-1945 period remains underexplored. In this article we draw on the sociology of markets and metrics literature to...

Since the 1980s US city governments have increased their use of more speculative means of financing economic redevelopment. This has involved experimenting with a variety of financial and taxation instruments as a way of growing their economies and redeveloping their built environments. This very general tendency, of course, masks how some cities h...

The local economic development practice of attracting industry, investment, and employment is a long-standing one in the United States. Yet the manner in which this investment is mediated has always been shrouded in mystery. The mediation of investment and the particular role of site selection consultants in facilitating corporate location decision...

In this paper, we examine the location consulting industry as a set of intermediaries that promote globalization when brokering between a demand for suitable sites for direct investment projects emanating from multinational enterprises and the supply of locations produced by host country governments. We outline three themes composing a research age...

Urban entrepreneurialism is a concept developed by the geographer David Harvey to characterize a profound change in the period after 1970 in the way capitalist cities are governed. The article defines urban entrepreneurialism, its distinct characteristics, and the range of urban strategies that are associated with the entrepreneurial city. The arti...

This article provides a preliminary examination of the emerging implications of UK Coalition Government planning policy as a key part of its growth agenda. Attention is directed in particular to the adoption of localism in planning policy, which is presented by the Coalition as a vital key to unlock economic growth. The empirical focus is on the 'S...

Following its rise to prominence in the 1990s work on territory, the state and urban politics continues to be a vibrant and dynamic area of academic concern. Focusing heavily on the work of one key influential figure in the development of the field - Kevin R. Cox - this volume draws together a collection of prominent and well established scholars t...

We trace the concept of “Engineering Earth” to two major interdisciplinary volumes published in the last half century: Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (1956) edited by W. L. Thomas, Jr. and The Earth Transformed (1990) edited by Billie Lee Turner et al. Both volumes included timely and frequently cited chapters about human/nature and n...

The turbulence of the current times has dramatically transformed the world’s economic geographies. The scale and scope of such changes require urgent attention. With intellectual roots dating to the nineteenth century, economic geography has traditionally sought to examine the spatial distributions of economic activity and the principles that accou...

Valler D. and Wood A. Conceptualizing local and regional economic development in the USA, Regional Studies. Contemporary literature on local and regional economic development (LRED) in the USA is predominantly empirical and pragmatic, focusing on the conduct and efficacy of economic development policy. While this work is valuable in evaluating the...

The emergence over the last 30 – 40 years of what is variously termed edge city, edgeless, and postsuburban development in North America and elsewhere raises a set of challenges for urban theory and existing ways of understanding the politics of urban growth and management. These challenges and their global import have been outlined in their broade...

The primary objective of this paper is to explore the ways in which the characteristics of owner-managers influence the extent to which their firms are embedded within local clusters of economic activity. Data are drawn from an interview survey of a random sample of small metal-working firms in Sheffield, UK. The data are analysed using non-paramet...

Global economic integration is often viewed as a process orchestrated from 'above' by constituents of an emergent transnational class. Yet such perspectives neglect the autonomous contributions made from 'below' by subnational political coalitions that mediate between global and local interests. In this article we consider the issue of political mo...

Critics of US theories of urban politics have drawn attention to the ‘localist’ nature of growth coalition and urban regime frameworks, arguing that they focus parochially on the urban scale and thereby neglect economic and political forces and processes of wider extent. Explicit attention to questions of scale raises the prospect of a more robust...

English This article considers the role of business interests within the devolved political and governmental arrangements introduced by New Labour. We focus on the involvement of business in shaping post-16 education and training policy in Wales. Continuities apparent in the process of devolution across its administrative and political forms have p...

In this paper we initiate a dialogue between work on the geographies of globalization and knowledge economies, areas of inquiry that have tended to develop in isolation. We argue for a critical harnessing of these two bodies of work to (1) understand how and where different types of knowledge are acquired, produced and mobilized by firms as they se...

The devolution of political power in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and the developing regional agenda in England are widely read as a significant reconfiguration of the institutions and scales of economic governance. The process is furthest developed in Scotland while Wales and Northern Ireland, in their own distinct ways, provide intermedia...

In this paper we seek to exploit some of the insights of a strategic - relational approach in examining the response of business interests to the newly devolved and regionalised governance context in Britain. In the analysis, the focus is directed particularly at the changing context within which business politics operates in the British regions an...

The efficacy of the urban regime and growth machine concepts beyond the US remains a matter of considerable debate. Some argue that these frameworks retain considerable value so long as they are 'properly' applied and that recent concerns about the limits to these frameworks result from no more than their 'misapplication'. I critically examine this...

Clusters now form a central element in many regional economic development policies. Location within a cluster of related industries is thought to increase a firm's competitive advantage resulting in higher output and productivity growth rates than in similar firms located beyond the cluster. This study focuses on owner-managers operating small firm...

Economic geographers have commonly interpreted globalization in terms of a scalar transformation of economic activities in which the dominant form of economic organization progressively shifts from local to more global scales. This article critically examines this thesis in the context of a study of the U.S. commercial property-development industry...

Political devolution in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and the developing regional agenda in England are prompting changes in the organization of business interest representation within the devolved and decentralized territories. In this paper we seek to describe the realignment of business interest representation at the ‘regional’ scale, fir...

The paper comprises an examination of the material inputs of a sample of 70 small firms in the Sheffield metal-working cluster and an assessment of the extent to which purchases are accompanied by face-to-face (embodied) transactions. It is shown that there are no significant differences between the level of embodied transactions accompanying local...

Industrial clusters can be characterised by high levels of personal interaction between the owners/managers of firms. It has been argued that within industrial clusters community and firm tend to merge. One result of the notion of a cluster as a community is that it might be expected that personal interaction between members of the community will h...

Community economic development (CED) initiatives expanded rapidly in urban and regional policy in the 1990s. Traditional evaluation methodology has, however, proved to be extremely difficult to apply effectively to CED. This paper examines existing monitoring and evaluation procedures for CED, the problems faced in applying traditional methodology...

Much of the recent literature about local governance of Britain's cities has examined the power of a newly evolving 'business elite'. However, in trying to understand changing governance forms, these analyses have generally lacked sensitivity to the role of actors (businesspeople) and their representative organizations. Analytical categories drawn...

Since 1980 the dominance of elected municipal government in Britain has given way to a broader local governance. While the precise configuration of this change has been debated in detail, approaches to the processes of restructuring and the operation and relative efficacy of new arrangements remain empirically limited and theoretically underdevelop...

David Harvey's 1989 article, ‘From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: the transformation of urban governance’, has very quickly become a ‘citation classic’. This article provides a brief summary of Harvey's argument focusing on the distinguishing characteristics of urban entrepreneurialism, the strategies undertaken by governing coalitions and th...

The broad concern of this paper is the development of modes of cooperation in competitive contexts. The concrete vehicle for examining this is local economic development policy in the United States, in particular the projects of inward investment that have been its primary expression. This foregrounds the character of social organization as necessa...

There are a number of recent trends in the organisation of local economic development activities that are seen to point to a general convergence between UK and US contexts. Various attempts have been made to encompass this convergence, primarily through the application of a set of common concepts such as the 'growth coalition' and 'urban regime'. T...

In this issue of the Policy Review Section , Anne Green of the Institute for Employment Research, University of Warwick, examines the changing structure of female participation in the labour market. Against this background it is her contention that the economic activity rate is no longer an adequate measure of contrasting patterns of labour force p...

ABSTRACT: Kevin Cox of the Department of Geography, Ohio State University, and Andrew Wood of the Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, examine the manner in which inward investment is managed in the State of Ohio. They find that in the mediation of inward investment, local authorities are part of a division of labour that also includes...

In this paper, the organization of activities designed to promote local economic development (LED) in the USA is explored. The emergence of local economic development networks (LEDNs) as critical mediators in attracting new business investment into metropolitan areas is addressed. These networks comprise private and state organizations with major i...