David Bailey
Biographic Data
| ID | 3673600 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David Bailey |
| GIVEN NAMES | David |
| FAMILY NAME | Bailey |
| SIGNATURE | BAILEY D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Birmingham |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1956-0556 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 107 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 584 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 107 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1980 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
How Practice-Oriented Research Is Essential for Transformation
Practice-oriented or practice-based research is growing in popularity in the social, built environment and health fields for its important role in driving transformative changes at policy, programme/service and practice levels. As planning is a practice with performative characteristics occurring in a socio-political-legal context, practice-oriented research has been utilised to inform and help shape change. However, to be truly effective, practi…
A critical review of the UK's Modern Industrial Strategy
Trains, planes, ships and automobiles
Beyond the agglomeration orthodoxy
Industrial strategy reborn
Regions and just transitions
The UK’s automotive industry is spatially highly concentrated and hence a rapid move towards a net-zero economy has profound spatial implications. The paper combines a novel survey of union workers in two regions with a series of interviews to understand the policy implications of the shift towards ‘net zero’ from an industrial strategy perspective. Our findings suggest that skill acquisition needs to be complemented by a wider place-based indust…
Regional prices reconsidered
Purchasing power parities are widely used in cross-country international comparisons of macroeconomic aggregates. Despite their importance, there is much less information about how prices differ across regions within countries. This paper contributes to a growing body of literature seeking to fill this gap by combining consumer price index (CPI) microdata and a variety of other data sources to develop more detailed price measures than has hithert…
Author Correction
Retooling local economies
Since the early 2000s, plant closures have been a significant concern in Ontario, Canada. Scholars and policymakers alike aim to investigate the causes of plant closures and determine how to mitigate their impacts. Despite the large body of literature on plant closures, local economic development practitioners’ perspectives and experiences have been neglected. To fill this gap, this paper interviewed twenty-two practitioners from various cities i…
Contemporary Social Science
Welcome to this fifth issue of Volume 19, our second ‘non-themed’ general issue featuring a mix of gold open access articles (OA) and ‘traditional’ non-OA articles. These non-themed issues aim to o
Just transitions in the Australian automotive sector
The closure of the Australian passenger vehicle industry in 2017 ended an important phase in the nation’s economic history. Closure affected up to 100, 000 employees working across the Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and the supply chain, with the impacts concentrated in two Australian states. This paper examines both the processes and the outcomes of this closure, making use of a Just Transitions lens to assess the wider impacts of this …
A ‘just transition’ for workers in the automotive sector? Survey evidence from the West Midlands
Employment in the automotive sector is typically spatially concentrated and hence the impact of the transition to low-carbon technologies will have profound subnational effects. Although there is a rich literature around the spatial impact of automotive plant closures, the novelty of this paper lies in its focus on the impact on workers throughout the supply chain in the automotive sector. As such, this paper reports on lessons for supplier firms…
Place, devolution and industrial strategy
On 4 July 2024, the UK elected the first Labour Government for fourteen years. On 30 October 2024, the new Labour Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, presented her first budget of the new administration, promising to restore economic stability and ‘begin a decade of national renewal’. Commentators quickly observed similarities in approach to that of the former 1997–2008 Labour Chancellor Gordon Brown. This paper considers the new government’s likely appro…
Beyond levelling up
Environmental protest outcomes in austerity-era neoliberalism
This paper explores environmental protest outcomes during the decade of the 2010s in the UK. In doing so, it presents the results of a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) of all 54 major environmental protest campaigns during the period. The study explores alternative causal conditions relating to a number of strategic and tactical options that environmental movements typically face. It finds that two alternative routes were sufficient for env…
Worker-Led Dissent in the Age of Austerity
The decline of the power of organised labour, which is a central feature of neoliberalism, was compounded during the 'age of austerity'. Yet, the potentially disruptive agency of workers remains. This article presents a qualitative process-tracing exercise for over 150 prominent episodes of worker-led dissent in the period 2010-2019 in the UK, the results of which are also made available in a website accompanying the article: ' Contesting the UK'…
Regional pathologies of late-stage neoliberalization
The ‘polycrisis’ of global capitalism has regional and national particularities that are worthy of exploration. In the case of East Asia, we see rising military, political and economic tensions which mirror global trends, but take a specific concrete regional form. We offer an explanation for these tensions in East Asia that highlight their roots in developments within the national models of capitalism that make up the region, in this case from t…
Leading Change in Communities Experiencing Economic Transition
This paper considers the nature, origins and expression of place leadership in communities undergoing large-scale economic transformation. It examines where people look for leadership in the management of the places where they live, and how their perspectives are affected by an adverse event. It documents community attitudes on the influence those who occupy positions of authority have been able to exert on this transition, drawing on perceptions…
People, places and policies beyond Brexit
Levelling-up beyond the metropolis
We consider whether the UK government’s levelling-up governance model of Combined Authorities and metro-mayors is the most appropriate solution for beyond the metropolis. We draw on case study research from the Mersey Dee area between North East Wales and North West England. The paper addresses three propositions. First, that the underlying distinction between agglomeration-driven and place-based policy centres on assumptions regarding the homoge…
Brexit, trade and UK advanced manufacturing sectors
The paper examines how Brexit has impacted on Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and suppliers in the UK Midlands, and to what extent such firms are reconfiguring their supply chains with the increase in trade barriers with Brexit. To do this, the paper aims to add to macro studies in the area by using a mixed-methods approach that combines descriptive quantitative analysis of secondary data with a complementary qualitative research analysis…
Contemporary Social Science , publishing and looking forwards
Place-based industrial and regional strategy – levelling the playing field
Over the past decade there has been renewed interest in the role of industrial strategy in enhancing innovation, productivity, and competitiveness within and across firms, sectors and regions with an eye to fostering more balanced regional economic growth. This special issue explores how policymakers could adopt place-based industrial policy measures to foster regional catch up and a more balanced and cohesive regional growth. In doing so, the pa…
European social democracy during the global economic crisis
This book makes an important contribution to the existing literature on European social democracy in the wake of the 2008 financial crash and ensuing recession. It assesses how social democratic parties have responded, at the national as well as at the European Union level. A wide range of leading political scientists provide the reader with an in-depth understanding of the prospects for social democracy in the midst of an unprecedented crisis fo…
Mirage
Regions in a time of pandemic
This paper contributes to the current debate in the field of critical urban and regional studies on the meanings of the "regional" and the "urban".From a political science perspective, we focus on the European case.Firstly, we argue that the conception of the regional scale is not the same in various languages and traditions.Regions in Europe carry meanings and connotations that are not always easy to translate without losing their specific histo…
Disrupting the European Crisis
Central to much of the critical political economy (CPE) literature is a declared focus on emancipation. Yet, rather than highlight sources and instances of activity that might result in emancipatory outcomes, much of the CPE literature focuses on relations of domination and the way in which these are sustained and (re)produced. In contrast, and drawing on autonomist Marxism, we argue that an emancipation-oriented approach needs to focus upon the …
Place-based industrial and regional strategy – levelling the playing field
Over the past decade there has been renewed interest in the role of industrial strategy in enhancing innovation, productivity, and competitiveness within and across firms, sectors and regions with an eye to fostering more balanced regional economic growth. This special issue explores how policymakers could adopt place-based industrial policy measures to foster regional catch up and a more balanced and cohesive regional growth. In doing so, the pa…
Pathways of regional transformation and Industry 4.0
We explore the impact of technological changes brought in by the Fourth Industrial Revolution on local systems of industrial specialization. To do so we connect the Evolutional Economic Geography literature on regional diversification with the literature on systems change, notably the multilevel perspective (MLP) framework, expanding the latter with a place-based dimension enabling the application of technological transition to regional economies…
The 1988 reform of the European Structural Funds
With the reform of the Structural Funds, regions have gained a key role in the design and implementation of regional policy. Yet some of the weakest regions were not equipped with appropriate institutional structures and have struggled to benefit. In evaluating the reform, we revisit concepts such as justice and equity. While the reform may have given regions an entitlement to participate, we argue that some have lacked the capacity to do so effe…
Plant closures and taskforce responses
This paper explores the socio-economic impacts and associated policy responses to the collapse of MG Rover at Longbridge in Birmingham. Critically, it attempts to move beyond a ‘standard’ taskforce narrative that emphasizes the role of the regional response. While recognizing that significant policy ‘successes’ were indeed evident at the regional level in anticipating and responding to the crisis, a wider perspective is required that situates thi…
Regions in Covid-19 recovery
Covid-19 is undoubtedly a regional crisis, spatially uneven in its impacts. While it is too soon to talk about a transition ‘from pandemic to recovery’, with attention switching to regional development priorities and the implications of Covid-19 on regional policy, planning and development, increasingly we will need to focus on regions in their recovery phase. In this article we ask four leading researchers what this recovery phase will mean for …
Strategic management and regional industrial strategy
This study critically revisits extant perspectives and theories on strategic management (SM) and regional industrial strategy (RIS) and considers the scope for cross-fertilization to mutual advantage. Despite an extensive literature on value capture/creation and co-creation strategies in SM, few attempts have explored their relevance to building, and capturing value from, advantages at the regional level. Advocates of place-based approaches to RI…
Pushing regional studies beyond its borders
This paper explores how to push the field of regional studies beyond its present institutional, conceptual and methodological borders. It does this from five perspectives: innovation and competitiveness; globalization and urbanization; social and environmental justice; local and regional development; and industrial policy. It argues that the future of regional studies requires approaches that, in combination, result in the pushing on (by creating…
Labour, work and regional resilience
Recent political and economic events have thrown into question several assumptions about how regional economies work and for whom. For Regional Studies, the result is a wave of policy-relevant empirical research on fundamental issues in our field. The papers in this issue cover topics including the creative class, skills, inequality, embeddedness, innovation and immigration, across a range of industries. This kind of analysis of labour, work and …
Challenging the age of austerity
The economics behind the move to 'localism' in England
This paper explores the economic thinking behind the UK Coalition government's new framework for achieving local growth and the creation of Local Enterprise Partnerships in England. It does so in the light of recent debates about 'space-neutral' and 'place-based' policymaking. While the British government states its ambition to achieve greater spatial and industrial balance across England (and by implication the UK), we argue that so far at least…
Contending the crisis
Governance or the crisis of governmentality? applying critical state theory at the European level
This article argues that accounts of EU-level decision-making drawing upon national-level comparisons have predominantly derived their analyses from liberal democratic and social democratic accounts of the nation state. This has had a detrimental effect on the development of a more critical account of EU decision-making. Following insights made by critical state theorists at the national level, we can view developments in EU-level politics as the…
EU Structural Funds, Regional Capabilities and Enlargement
Given GDP variations across CEE regions and with CEE regional structures and development processes only emerging recently, the cohesion situation under EU enlargement is considerably more challenging than when current EU regional policy was launched in 1988. Yet even that reform ran into problems given heterogeneity in the forms of regional governance across the EU. This needs to be fully recognised in the context of enlargement where pre-accessi…
Manufacturing reshoring and its limits
This paper explores the meaning of reshoring and its drivers in the case of UK manufacturing and in particular its automotive sector. Drawing on interviews, policy reviews and a range of recent surveys, the paper finds that while reshoring is a discernable trend in UK manufacturing, it is less pronounced than many have claimed and that—in the UK case at least—there are severe limits as to how far this reshoring trend can go, particularly in relat…
Place, devolution and industrial strategy
On 4 July 2024, the UK elected the first Labour Government for fourteen years. On 30 October 2024, the new Labour Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, presented her first budget of the new administration, promising to restore economic stability and ‘begin a decade of national renewal’. Commentators quickly observed similarities in approach to that of the former 1997–2008 Labour Chancellor Gordon Brown. This paper considers the new government’s likely appro…
The urban and regional impacts of plant closures
Work on large-scale plant closures has provided a rich vein of scholarship and academic debate. This paper articulates a new set of methods and concepts for understanding how large-scale redundancies associated with the closure of manufacturing plants affects society and the economy at the local, regional and national scales. It posits the need for a more comprehensive exercise in data collection and experimentation with previously unused methods…
Regional Responses to Recession
Bailey D. and Berkeley N. Regional responses to recession: the role of the West Midlands Regional Taskforce, Regional Studies. Regional taskforces were set up across the English regions in late 2008 in response to the most severe recession since the Second World War. This paper examines the role of one such body, the West Midlands Regional Taskforce, as an example of regional response to recession, and offers potential lessons for the future in d…
Place-renewing leadership
The forces of globalisation now impacting on local economies pose threats to the existing paradigm of competences and routines, yet simultaneously offer opportunities to integrate new knowledge and learning. This is particularly pertinent with respect to Europe's ‘mature regions’, which are undergoing a major economic restructuring by trying to shift from traditional manufacturing activities to hybrid activities that comprise a combination of man…
Explaining the underdevelopment of `Social Europe
This article argues that existing accounts of the underdevelopment of `Social Europe' have failed to adequately integrate the contending obstacles that explain the absence they rightly identify. It argues that by employing a critical realist methodology, including the concepts of generation, emergence, and stratification, it is possible to more adequately integrate knowledge of the obstacles to `Social Europe'. Concretely, the article argues that…
Beyond levelling up
Shocks, resilience and regional industry policy
This article draws upon novel survey evidence to examine the possible regional impacts of Brexit as a ‘disruptive process’ to manufacturing operations and logistics in the automotive industry, in the context of the regional resilience literature. The current Brexit (and Covid-19) context, along with the sector’s need to re-orientate towards electrification, provides renewed urgency to reconsider industrial policy in spatial terms. The findings ha…
Austerity and Anti-Austerity
In contrast to much of the political economy literature, this article explores acts of refusal that obstruct attempts to impose austerity measures on advanced industrial democracies. It thereby complements a literature that has thus far focused far more upon the (apparently unobstructed) imposition of austerity. In doing so, it uses two typically ‘low-resistance’ countries – Japan and the UK –as least-likely cases and finds that austerity is rare…
A Bridge Too Phare? EU Pre‐Accession Aid and Capacity‐Building in the Candidate Countries
The imminent large‐scale EU enlargement raises important questions regarding the success of Phare as one of the Pre‐Accession Funds in preparing candidate countries' institutions for Structural Funding, the need to reform EU regional policy itself, and to what extent the Commission is using Phare to build regional‐level institutions and shift an enlarged EU towards multi‐level governance. Despite some successes, Phare will not be able to deliver …
A Divided Prism
Photographic Animateur
The case for a monitoring policy across Europe
The Role for a Scottish Development Bank in a Devolved Scotland
Mention finance in the same sentence as devolution and most thoughts jump to the 'tartan tax' and the tax varying powers of the new Scottish Parliament. Yet as Jackson (1999) and McCarthy and Newlands (1999) note, this is something of a distraction to the real business of managing the Scottish economy, as the demands on public spending are so large that even the most that could be raised under these powers would not go very far. Whilst accepting …
An introduction
EU Structural Funds, Regional Capabilities and Enlargement
Given GDP variations across CEE regions and with CEE regional structures and development processes only emerging recently, the cohesion situation under EU enlargement is considerably more challenging than when current EU regional policy was launched in 1988. Yet even that reform ran into problems given heterogeneity in the forms of regional governance across the EU. This needs to be fully recognised in the context of enlargement where pre-accessi…
The 1988 reform of the European Structural Funds
With the reform of the Structural Funds, regions have gained a key role in the design and implementation of regional policy. Yet some of the weakest regions were not equipped with appropriate institutional structures and have struggled to benefit. In evaluating the reform, we revisit concepts such as justice and equity. While the reform may have given regions an entitlement to participate, we argue that some have lacked the capacity to do so effe…
Globalisation, regions and cluster policies
In March 2000, BMW announced plans to restructure and sell substantial parts of the Rover Group and threatened to close Rover completely. In response the government brought together local actors through the West Midlands Regional Development Agency (RDA) and Government Office of the West Midlands (GOWM) by setting up the Rover Task Force (RTF). After a local consortium purchased Rover, and Land Rover was sold to Ford, the RTF focused on modernisi…
A Bridge Too Phare? EU Pre‐Accession Aid and Capacity‐Building in the Candidate Countries
The imminent large‐scale EU enlargement raises important questions regarding the success of Phare as one of the Pre‐Accession Funds in preparing candidate countries' institutions for Structural Funding, the need to reform EU regional policy itself, and to what extent the Commission is using Phare to build regional‐level institutions and shift an enlarged EU towards multi‐level governance. Despite some successes, Phare will not be able to deliver …
Clinical Work with Substance-Abusing Clients (Second Edition)
Shulamith Lala Ashenberg Straussner (ed.) New York, The Guilford Press, 2004, pp. 494, ISBN 1593850670, £40.00 This edited work provides a comprehensive, readable account of the issues encountered by professionals working with people who abuse substances. Given the variation of curricula input devoted to this particular client group between social work programmes, this is a welcome core text, relevant to practitioners requiring an introductory kn…
Obfuscation through Integration
Social democratic parties are increasingly supportive of European integration. Existing explanations view this as either a reassertion of social democracy at the supranational level, an adaptation to contemporary political institutions, or part of a general ideological moderation. This article argues that support for the EU enables social democratic parties to proclaim the possibility of social democracy at the supranational level, despite the ab…
Governance or the crisis of governmentality? applying critical state theory at the European level
This article argues that accounts of EU-level decision-making drawing upon national-level comparisons have predominantly derived their analyses from liberal democratic and social democratic accounts of the nation state. This has had a detrimental effect on the development of a more critical account of EU decision-making. Following insights made by critical state theorists at the national level, we can view developments in EU-level politics as the…
Globalisation, Economic Freedom and Strategic Decision-Making
This article links the radical institutionalist approaches of Tool and Dugger with the strategic choice perspective to better understand the linkages between freedom, knowledge and participation in the context of a global economy dominated by transnational firms. A concern by economists with ‘negative’ freedom has been challenged by a renewed interest in the ‘positive’ dimension, drawing on Sen's pioneering work on capabilities. The authors argue…
Neither pragmatic adaptation nor misguided accommodation
This article contests prevailing academic conceptions of the modernisation of parliamentary Left parties. According to these accounts, 'modernisation' is viewed either as a pragmatic adaptation to international socioeconomic change, or as a misguided accommodation of ascendant neoliberal values, norms and practices. In both of these accounts, Left parties are perceived as passively reacting to the structures that contextualise their actions. Deve…
Misperceiving Matters
Explaining the underdevelopment of `Social Europe
This article argues that existing accounts of the underdevelopment of `Social Europe' have failed to adequately integrate the contending obstacles that explain the absence they rightly identify. It argues that by employing a critical realist methodology, including the concepts of generation, emergence, and stratification, it is possible to more adequately integrate knowledge of the obstacles to `Social Europe'. Concretely, the article argues that…
Auto plant closures, policy responses and labour market outcomes
This paper provides a preliminary comparative longitudinal analysis of the impact on workers made redundant due to the closure of the Mitsubishi plant in Adelaide and the MG Rover plant in Birmingham. Longitudinal surveys of ex-workers from both firms were undertaken over a 12-month period in order to assess the process of labour market adjustment. In the Mitsubishi case, given the skills shortage the state of Adelaide was facing, together with t…
Rover and out? Globalisation, the West Midlands auto cluster, and the end of MG Rover
This paper sets the scene for this Policy Studies special issue on plant closures by outlining the form of the auto cluster in the West Midlands, the nature of structural changes unfolding in the industry, and the decline and eventual collapse of MG Rover (MGR). Structural changes highlighted include: greater pressure on firms to recover costs when technological change has been intensifying, driving up the costs of new model development; increase…
A tale of two regions
In April 2004 Mitsubishi announced the closure of its Lonsdale plant in South Australia. Almost a year later, MG Rover went into administration, resulting in the immediate closure of its Longbridge plant just outside Birmingham, England. Both closures were expected to have a considerable impact on their regional economies through the loss of employment and associated economic activity. However, governments in Australia and England responded in si…
Democracy in Europe
The Political Economy of European Social Democracy
This book takes an in-depth look into recent developments in European social democracy. It begins by highlighting the somewhat paradoxical turn by a number of social democratic parties towards enhanced support for European integration, a move that has occurred despite the apparently ‘neoliberal’ direction of much of EU policy-output. A critical realist method is adopted, informed by both Marxist and anarchist critiques of social democratic partie…
The Transition to ‘New’ Social Democracy
This article argues that existing accounts of the transformation from ‘traditional’ to ‘new’ social democracy has thus far only identified the contextual changes that have prompted this move. In doing so, they have failed to account for the motives of social democratic party actors in undertaking the transition to ‘new’ social democracy in response to those changes. The article draws upon a critical realist method, and Marxist and anti-representa…
Industrial and Regional Policies in an Enlarging EU
Private equity and the flight of the phoenix four-- the collapse of MG Rover in the UK
This paper explores the nature of the co-called ‘private equity business model' (PEBM) and assesses its shortcomings, using the illustrative example of the role of private equity in structuring the finance and subsequent collapse of MG Rover, as the automotive industry has been a significant destination for private equity financing. The paper outlines the nature of the PEBM. It then details how the PEBM extracts value, before stressing how this c…
The European rescue, recommodification, and/or reterritorialisation of the (becoming-capitalist) state? Marx, Deleuze, Guattari, and the European Union
Political science (78 works) · Economics (62 works) · Sociology (59 works) · Law (48 works) · Politics (48 works) · Political economy (41 works) · Law (38 works) · Business (29 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (28 works) · Regional resilience and development (23 works)