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School reform politics in England and the United States over the last quarter century has revolved largely around the question of performance-based accountability. Accountability school reform in both countries has entailed standardization of curricula and assessment and the spread in the use of market mechanisms in school governance. To explain how these accountability reforms have retooled local governing institutions in ways that have reduced their autonomy and lessened their capacity to administer local school systems, this article applies the analytical framework of urban governing cycles to a comparative study of school reform politics in Bristol, England, and Boston, Massachusetts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: Thomas Favent’s Historia has long been recognised as an important source for the turbulent middle years of Richard II’s reign, in particular for its praise of the actions of the Lords Appellant in the Merciless Parliament of 1388. But why did Favent write the Historia and for whom was it written? In recent years the Historia has for the first time been subjected to detailed scrutiny and a case has made for regarding it as a political pamphlet written for a community of reform-minded civil servants eager to celebrate the achievements of parliament. This study offers an alternative explanation. It seeks to place the Historia more squarely within the turbulent environment of London’s factional politics. Favent’s factional affiliations are easily discerned, but his motivations for writing the Historia were complex and multi-faceted. A new reading of this text suggests, in fact, that it was written not to perpetuate divisions within London, but to draw a line underneath them. The article highlights the use of textual representation to shape and ultimately control memories of political conflict. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

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Abstract: This paper relates the processes of strategic planning in London during the first decade of an executive Mayoral system to Doug Yates’ thesis about the ungovernability of major cities and London’s long history of conflict around metropolitan governance issues. Yates’ thesis only partially fits the London case because a separate lower tier of lower tier of borough authorities carries the main responsibilities for actual service provision. This London case, does, however, exemplify the proposition that without effective fiscal autonomy in planning for infrastructure provision, the need to manage diplomatic relations with higher levels of government (and other funders) can divert city strategies from those appropriate to the needs of the mass of their own constituents/businesses. In London as in other national capitals, this tension is intensified by a symbolic importance that inhibits central government from taking a detached stance in relation to priorities of the city administration. Examination of the experience of Mayoral Plans for London suggest that sheer complexity of relations and interdependences across a much extended, diverse and dynamic metropolitan region is also a major restraint on governability as far as strategic planning is concerned. An inability to face up to this complexity, particularly in relation to cross-border relations has – as much as the (diplomatic) obsession with the ‘global city’ priorities – so far proved a major obstacle to using Mayoral strategic planning as an effective means of steering change in the region, and addressing central issues affecting economic efficiency and residents’ quality of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tackles religion and politics as different aspects of a variety of social practices within a common culture. It examines the political and religious climate of English provincial towns with a monastic presence in the period before 1540. It demonstrates the extent to which monastic interests were fused with those of local elites, and argues those elites sought to undercut the process of dissolution and to preserve something of the monastic framework through the unfolding crisis. It challenges the notion of a natural dialectic between traditional religion and provincial politics and uncovers a dynamic of negotiation productive for both constituencies before and after the Dissolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on the ‘entrepreneurial turn’ literatures to examine the current redevelopment of East Manchester. It makes three contributions to our existing empirical and theoretical understanding of what is termed here ‘entrepreneurial urbanism’. First, attention is drawn to the spatially selective nature of entrepreneurial urbanism within cities; second, it argues that entrepreneurial urbanism actually demands a qualitative shift in the state's role in urban redevelopment and third, using the example of East Manchester, these two theoretical issues are explored empirically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The last decade has seen a proliferation of theoretical approaches, which have sought to uncover the changing form and governance of cities and regions following the dissolution of the Fordist ‘sociospatial fix’. This article provides a critical review of some of the more influential of these debates that have sought to analyse: the central?local relations of government; the growing influence of ‘regimes’ and ‘growth coalitions’ in energizing urban economies; and the rise of the ‘learning’ or ‘institutionally thick’ region. The authors argue that, although providing valuable insights, these theories suffer from: 1) a failure to integrate analytically into their inquiries a relational account of the state, and thereby to neglect the state’s influence in actively shaping the urban and regional fabric; and 2) a similar failure to problematize the issue of scale, often taking for granted the spatial context of their own particular inquiry. Thus, terms like urban regimes, urban coalitions and learning regions are deployed as if they were ontological and epistemological givens. Drawing on neo-Gramscian state theory and recent work on the ‘politics of scale’, this article seeks to open up urban and regional research towards a multiscaled analysis, and to consider political economic activity as a series of situated, context-specific and politically constructed processes. These arguments are then briefly deployed to demonstrate the multifarious and multiscalar changes that characterize London’s governance in the late 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]