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Institutional work focuses on the role of actors in creating, maintaining, or disrupting institutional structures. The concept has its origin in organisational studies. In this paper, we rethink and redefine institutional work to make it fit for use in the multi actor and multi-level context of environmental governance. We survey key approaches to institutional change in the literature, and argue that institutional work should have a central place within this theorising. Drawing on the insights from this literature, weargue that studying institutional work should involve a look at both the actions taken by actors, as well as the resulting effects. We identify a critical need for attention to the fundamentally political character of institutional work, the cumulative effects of action taken by multiple actors, and communicative and discursive dimensions. Overall, the concept of institutional work opens up new possibilities for unpacking the longstanding challenge of understanding institutional change in environmental governance.

Spatial planning and place branding are allies in the discovery and creation of place narratives and assets as well as in contributing to spatial transformation or the improvement of the socio-spatial and spatial-economic conditions of a place. However, the existing and potential linkages between spatial planning and place branding are yet to be explored by both scientists and policy-makers. The objective of this paper is twofold. First, we reflect upon the central themes of this special issue by placing them in the context of larger debates on the position of place branding and spatial planning in society. Secondly, we show that this requires attention to the many ways in which planning and branding can cross-fertilize each other and to the embedding of both in evolving spatial governance structures. We then conclude with a typology expanding the understanding of this linkage between spatial planning and place branding.

Strategic management has traditionally concerned itself with delivering objectives based on an assessment of resources and the market environment. However, there are many actors considered ‘outside’ the firm that inevitably shape the dynamics within the market. Nonmarket strategies entail social, political, and legal arrangements that reinforce or enable market strategies, providing a comprehensive approach to improving performance and gaining a competitive advantage.This book introduces nonmarket strategic management within these contexts. Divided into two parts, the first part offers theories and managerial support for coping with the complex business realities surrounded by social, political and legal spheres; the second part presents examples of the challenges firms in the nonmarket environment. These examples show how firms can strategically manage and work with social, political and regulatory stakeholders to achieve their goals.Written by two leading scholars in the area, this book is essential reading for business students, managers and leaders.

This chapter argues that two different senses of financial security have taken a peculiar overlap in the government bond that critically transformed Western statehood. If security and finance converge in a common paradigm of crisis governance, security rationales and practices have also been said to be subject to financialisation. Security in the legal sense of collateral or pledge, or securities as the common term for stocks and bonds in financial discourse, seem to bear no or only distant reference to political understandings of security as protection or freedom from danger. Initially the security of public securities was contested repeatedly, and in turn both tested and transformed contractual relations of mutuality. The peculiar phenomenon of public credit refers to the gradual establishment of sovereign creditworthiness. The chapter considers the different aspects of liquidity, risk-free asset and safe haven status of sovereign debt.