Entrepreneurial governance in the neoliberal era : local government and the automotive industry / Oliver Cowart.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction, context, cases -- Theorizing local development strategies -- Patterns in the industry - patterns in location -- The industrial recruitment of automotive assembly plants in the South -- The business of partnerships -- The political and economic in partnership -- Axiomatic? A weird, blurred line.

"Against the background of a growing tendency among state and local governments in the United States to vie against one another, spending public funds and foregoing corporate tax revenues in order to attract private investment, this book offers an analysis of local economic development and business recruitment in the automotive industry. Asking why localities felt they could - and, more importantly, should - make deals with private capital in the first place, it examines the shift towards entrepreneurial local governance from a global and historically informed perspective. Through a study of the 19 greenfield automotive assembly plants constructed in the U.S. during the neoliberal era, the author draws on interviews with corporate and government elites, to chart the connections between increasingly global competitive industry pressures and changing attitudes towards 'incentivizing' private investment. Studying the development of an approach that has partially reoriented local governments away from managing localities and towards helping manage transnational capital flows by absorbing some of the increasing risk of long-term capital investment, Entrepreneurial Governance in the Neoliberal Era will appeal to scholars of sociology, politics and urban studies with interests in globalisation, the sociology of work and industry, the sociology of development and neoliberal governance"-- Provided by publisher.