ENVIRONMENTAL PERFORMANCE, COMPETITIVENESS AND MANAGEMENT OF SMALL BUSINESSES IN EUROPE

Is it the case that more competitive SMEs have greater capacity to adopt environmental initiatives? The answer is no, according to this study which tried to link small firm environmental performance to factors such as profitability, growth, skills and research and development. This study focuses on three interrelated propositions that are concerned with the impact of environmental initiatives on firm competitiveness; the relevance of management's awareness to environment: the availability of external information and expertise to aid management, and the competitiveness of the firm. The firm's competitive strengths measured variously as above average profitability, firm growth and R&D, skills and modernity of plant and equipment, there was only scattered evidence to suggest any of these was importantly associated with the firm's environmental performance. The study showed that firms with an average economic performance were just as likely to adopt environmental initiatives as their high-performing competitors. Moreover, regardless of managers voicing personal concerns about the environment, most small firms do relatively little about the environment in practice and are reluctant to seek advice about it. Copyright (c) 2005 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG.

Gentrification on the Planetary Urban Frontier : The Evolution of Turner’s Noösphere

As capitalist urbanization evolves, so too does gentrification. Theories and experiences that have anchored the reference points of gentrification in the Global North for half a century are now rapidly evolving into more cosmopolitan, dynamic world urban systems of variegated gentrifications. These trends seem to promise a long-overdue postcolonial provincialization of the entrenched Global North bias of urban theory. Yet there is a jarring paradox between the material realities of some of the largest non-military urban displacements in human history in the Global South, alongside a growing reluctance to ‘impose’ Northern languages, theories, and politics of gentrification to understand these processes. In this paper, I negotiate this paradox through an engagement of several seemingly unrelated empirical trends and theoretical debates in urban studies and gentrification. My central argument is that interdependent yet partially autonomous developments in urban entrepreneurialism and transnational markets in labor, real estate, and education are transcending the dichotomy between gentrification in cities (the traditional focus of so much place-based research) versus gentrification as a dimension of planetary urbanization. Amidst the planetary technological transformations now celebrated as “cognitive capitalism” and a communications-consciousness “noösphere,” these developments are coalescing into a global, cosmopolitan, and multicultural tapestry of explicitly evolutionary class transformations of urban space that adapt to multiply-scaled contingencies of urban history, socio-cultural difference, state power, and terrains of resistance. The argument proceeds in three steps. First, I explain how social Darwinism was deeply embedded within conventional urban theory in the decades before Ruth Glass gave us a language for the discussion of gentrification, thus perpetuating debates over narrow empirical issues at the expense of deeper critical scrutiny of the evolutionary logics of socio-spatial classifications. Second, I examine the recent movement for a “cosmopolitan decolonization” of gentrification theory that has emerged at the precise moment when powerful alliances are consolidating the networked infrastructures of gentrification on an unprecedented scale. Third, I analyze the contemporary evolution of gentrification as a recombinant blend of old and new, as the means of class transformation of urban space are accelerated through intensified competition in work, education, and housing. The built environments of planetary urbanization provide ample opportunities not only for diverse cosmopolitan descendants of old-fashioned urban renewal in the style of Haussmann’s Paris or Moses’ New York, but also for new generations of ‘capitalists with conscience’ -- entrepreneurial coalitions closing ‘moral rent gaps’ by integrating the economic profits of gentrification with the discourses and practices of environmental sustainability, socially responsible development, and global fields of educational opportunity. All of these escalating competitions are legitimated as inclusive multicultural meritocracies. Yet the relentless optimism of competitive innovation in the cognitive-capitalist noösphere is creating dangerous new frontiers of human ecology that reproduce the social-Darwinist “form of society” that Frederick Jackson Turner envisioned in his theorization of the “recurrence of the process of evolution” in America’s colonial-settler waves of violent dispossession.Arts, Faculty ofGeography, Department ofReviewedFacult