Jason Spicer
Biographic Data
| ID | 3720527 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jason Spicer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jason |
| FAMILY NAME | Spicer |
| SIGNATURE | SPICER J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3286-8034 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 57 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Just transition, double bind or both? Climate change action by North American community land trusts
Can socially or community-owned enterprise models systematically enable equitable climate action, as has been previously suggested by case study research? To empirically measure and test this proposition, we systematically surveyed all North American community land trusts (CLTs), which primarily serve lower-income households. We found that a majority of CLTs engage in climate action, with mitigation efforts more prevalent than adaptation efforts.…
Response to Borowiak, Safri, Pavlovskaya, and Healy’s Review of Co-operative Enterprise in Comparative Perspective: Exceptionally Un-American
A Global Organization Based on the Structure of a Social Movement: A Model to Solve Social Problems at Scale
Is it possible to build a global organization based on the model of a social movement? We analyze Project ECHO (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes), an entity with over 4 million participants in 193 countries, which claims to have operated with a social movement-like structure for over two decades. In so doing, it has achieved significant scale in addressing an entrenched social problem: the lack of specialized healthcare and social serv…
Understanding Differences Between Technocratic and Transformative Community Land Trusts: A Case of Divergent Coupling
Community land trusts (CLTs) secure permanently affordable housing and enable community control over urban space. Some CLTs, however, have been criticized for being “technocratic” instead of “transformative.” If some CLTs are systematically more transformative than others, how do the logics and practices they claim to prioritize differ or converge, and to what consequence? Analyzing matched-pair cases of North American CLTs, “transformative” CLTs…
All roads lead to Rome?” Performance evaluation across different types of community land trusts based on a large-scale survey
Community land trusts (CLTs) seek to keep homes and other urban spaces permanently affordable and community controlled. As their number across the United States has increased, different iterations of the CLT model seem to have proliferated in practice, stoking scholarly debate as to their varying outcomes and benefits. There has, however, been little attempt to empirically measure the relationship between this institutional diversity and outcomes…
Resident-Owned Resilience: Can Cooperative Land Ownership Enable Transformative Climate Adaptation for Manufactured Housing Communities
Residents of manufactured housing communities (MHCs) are disproportionately vulnerable to both hazards and displacement. The cooperative ownership model of resident-owned communities (ROCs) pioneered by ROC USA helps MHC residents resist displacement, but little research assesses how cooperative tenure impacts hazard vulnerability. To fill this gap, we conduct a spatial analysis of 234 ROC USA sites; analyze the co-op conversion process; and inte…
Why Do Planners Overlook Manufactured Housing and Resident-Owned Communities as Sources of Affordable Housing and Climate Transformation
More Americans live in manufactured housing than in public and federally subsidized rental housing combined. Of the nearly 40,000 U.S. manufactured housing communities (MHCs), more than 1,000 are resident-owned communities (ROCs), a form of cooperative ownership. Yet planning research continues to neglect MHCs and ROCs, raising questions of classism and cultural bias. We address five common biases against MHCs and argue ROCs in particular deserve…
Another organization is possible: New directions in research on alternative enterprise
Interest in alternative enterprises is again high, yielding a wave of popular experimentation with alternative organizational models, and new scholarship. From an organizational studies perspective, what have we learned about alternative enterprises since the last prior round of such experimentation in the 1970s, and what questions remain unanswered? Reflecting historical research legacies, scholarship often remains focused on micro‐aspects of in…
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit: The Publicly Owned Variety of Community Land Trust
Contrasting cases in Toronto, New York, and Vancouver, we identify benefits and drawbacks associated with the publicly owned variety of community land trust, which we call a public land trust (PLT). Public ownership can obviate the need to finance a land sale, and enable sustained access to ongoing technical assistance and professional expertise, thereby reducing burdens on community capacity. While a degree of community control can also be maint…
Cooperative enterprise at scale: Comparative Capitalisms and the Political Economy of Ownership
Under what conditions do cooperatively owned enterprises scale to stand alongside investor-owned firms? This article measures and attempts to explain large cooperatives' variable prevalence across high-income capitalist democracies. Controlling for other known social, economic and geographic factors, statistical models confirm that state-mediated institutional arrangements, as operationalized through two comparative capitalism frameworks (Varieti…
Multiple entrepreneurial ecosystems? Worker cooperative development in Toronto and Montréal
The emergence in practice of worker cooperative ecosystems, which draws on the entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs) concept, has been largely ignored in academic research. Contrasting worker cooperative development efforts in Toronto with Montréal, we affirm there are multiple and multiscalar EEs in each region, including both a dominant capitalist and a worker cooperative EE. Productive enterprises like worker cooperatives, operating with a differen…
Conceptualizing U.S. Community Economic Development: Evidence from New York City
Building from the “Progressive Cities” era toolkit, advocates of community economic development (CED) today deploy a wide range of new and well-established strategies. How can planners make theoretical and practical sense of these varying tactics? Using New York as a case and sociological strategic action field theory as a framing device, we find evidence of three distinct CED logics: exactive/concessionary, localist, and transformative/democrati…
Social entrepreneurship as field encroachment: How a Neoliberal Social Movement Constructed a New Field
In explaining the emergence of new strategic action fields, in which social movements' and organizations' logic, rules and strategies are forged, inter-field dynamics remain under-explored. The case of Social Enterprise and Entrepreneurship (SEE) shows how new fields can emerge through field encroachment, whereby shifts among overlapping fields create structural opportunities for the ascendency of new fields, which may adapt logics borrowed from …
Electoral Systems, Regional Resentment and the Surprising Success of Anglo-American Populism
As populist movements, partly fuelled by voters in excluded regions, drive national electoral backlashes to globalisation, why have their only outright successes come in the USA and UK? Synthesising urban/regional development theory with comparative politics, this article examines a previously unconsidered contributing factor: the interaction of globalisationâ€TMs rising inter-regional disparities with majoritarian electoral systems. Majoritarian…
The rise and fall of urban economies: Lessons from San Francisco and Los Angeles
The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies is destined to become a classic in economic geography and beyond. Building on the analysis of urban development that Michael Storper advanced in Keys to the City (2013), Storper and his coauthors, Thomas Kemeny, Naji Makarem and Taner Osman, ask here why economic growth in the San Francisco region has outpaced development in greater Los Angeles. They argue convincingly that regional economic growth depends on …
Social entrepreneurship as field encroachment: How a Neoliberal Social Movement Constructed a New Field
In explaining the emergence of new strategic action fields, in which social movements' and organizations' logic, rules and strategies are forged, inter-field dynamics remain under-explored. The case of Social Enterprise and Entrepreneurship (SEE) shows how new fields can emerge through field encroachment, whereby shifts among overlapping fields create structural opportunities for the ascendency of new fields, which may adapt logics borrowed from …
Electoral Systems, Regional Resentment and the Surprising Success of Anglo-American Populism
As populist movements, partly fuelled by voters in excluded regions, drive national electoral backlashes to globalisation, why have their only outright successes come in the USA and UK? Synthesising urban/regional development theory with comparative politics, this article examines a previously unconsidered contributing factor: the interaction of globalisationâ€TMs rising inter-regional disparities with majoritarian electoral systems. Majoritarian…
Conceptualizing U.S. Community Economic Development: Evidence from New York City
Building from the “Progressive Cities” era toolkit, advocates of community economic development (CED) today deploy a wide range of new and well-established strategies. How can planners make theoretical and practical sense of these varying tactics? Using New York as a case and sociological strategic action field theory as a framing device, we find evidence of three distinct CED logics: exactive/concessionary, localist, and transformative/democrati…
Cooperative enterprise at scale: Comparative Capitalisms and the Political Economy of Ownership
Under what conditions do cooperatively owned enterprises scale to stand alongside investor-owned firms? This article measures and attempts to explain large cooperatives' variable prevalence across high-income capitalist democracies. Controlling for other known social, economic and geographic factors, statistical models confirm that state-mediated institutional arrangements, as operationalized through two comparative capitalism frameworks (Varieti…
Another organization is possible: New directions in research on alternative enterprise
Interest in alternative enterprises is again high, yielding a wave of popular experimentation with alternative organizational models, and new scholarship. From an organizational studies perspective, what have we learned about alternative enterprises since the last prior round of such experimentation in the 1970s, and what questions remain unanswered? Reflecting historical research legacies, scholarship often remains focused on micro‐aspects of in…
All roads lead to Rome?” Performance evaluation across different types of community land trusts based on a large-scale survey
Community land trusts (CLTs) seek to keep homes and other urban spaces permanently affordable and community controlled. As their number across the United States has increased, different iterations of the CLT model seem to have proliferated in practice, stoking scholarly debate as to their varying outcomes and benefits. There has, however, been little attempt to empirically measure the relationship between this institutional diversity and outcomes…
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit: The Publicly Owned Variety of Community Land Trust
Contrasting cases in Toronto, New York, and Vancouver, we identify benefits and drawbacks associated with the publicly owned variety of community land trust, which we call a public land trust (PLT). Public ownership can obviate the need to finance a land sale, and enable sustained access to ongoing technical assistance and professional expertise, thereby reducing burdens on community capacity. While a degree of community control can also be maint…
Multiple entrepreneurial ecosystems? Worker cooperative development in Toronto and Montréal
The emergence in practice of worker cooperative ecosystems, which draws on the entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs) concept, has been largely ignored in academic research. Contrasting worker cooperative development efforts in Toronto with Montréal, we affirm there are multiple and multiscalar EEs in each region, including both a dominant capitalist and a worker cooperative EE. Productive enterprises like worker cooperatives, operating with a differen…
The rise and fall of urban economies: Lessons from San Francisco and Los Angeles
The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies is destined to become a classic in economic geography and beyond. Building on the analysis of urban development that Michael Storper advanced in Keys to the City (2013), Storper and his coauthors, Thomas Kemeny, Naji Makarem and Taner Osman, ask here why economic growth in the San Francisco region has outpaced development in greater Los Angeles. They argue convincingly that regional economic growth depends on …
Electoral Systems, Regional Resentment and the Surprising Success of Anglo-American Populism
As populist movements, partly fuelled by voters in excluded regions, drive national electoral backlashes to globalisation, why have their only outright successes come in the USA and UK? Synthesising urban/regional development theory with comparative politics, this article examines a previously unconsidered contributing factor: the interaction of globalisationâ€TMs rising inter-regional disparities with majoritarian electoral systems. Majoritarian…
Social entrepreneurship as field encroachment: How a Neoliberal Social Movement Constructed a New Field
In explaining the emergence of new strategic action fields, in which social movements' and organizations' logic, rules and strategies are forged, inter-field dynamics remain under-explored. The case of Social Enterprise and Entrepreneurship (SEE) shows how new fields can emerge through field encroachment, whereby shifts among overlapping fields create structural opportunities for the ascendency of new fields, which may adapt logics borrowed from …
Conceptualizing U.S. Community Economic Development: Evidence from New York City
Building from the “Progressive Cities” era toolkit, advocates of community economic development (CED) today deploy a wide range of new and well-established strategies. How can planners make theoretical and practical sense of these varying tactics? Using New York as a case and sociological strategic action field theory as a framing device, we find evidence of three distinct CED logics: exactive/concessionary, localist, and transformative/democrati…
Another organization is possible: New directions in research on alternative enterprise
Interest in alternative enterprises is again high, yielding a wave of popular experimentation with alternative organizational models, and new scholarship. From an organizational studies perspective, what have we learned about alternative enterprises since the last prior round of such experimentation in the 1970s, and what questions remain unanswered? Reflecting historical research legacies, scholarship often remains focused on micro‐aspects of in…
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit: The Publicly Owned Variety of Community Land Trust
Contrasting cases in Toronto, New York, and Vancouver, we identify benefits and drawbacks associated with the publicly owned variety of community land trust, which we call a public land trust (PLT). Public ownership can obviate the need to finance a land sale, and enable sustained access to ongoing technical assistance and professional expertise, thereby reducing burdens on community capacity. While a degree of community control can also be maint…
Cooperative enterprise at scale: Comparative Capitalisms and the Political Economy of Ownership
Under what conditions do cooperatively owned enterprises scale to stand alongside investor-owned firms? This article measures and attempts to explain large cooperatives' variable prevalence across high-income capitalist democracies. Controlling for other known social, economic and geographic factors, statistical models confirm that state-mediated institutional arrangements, as operationalized through two comparative capitalism frameworks (Varieti…
Multiple entrepreneurial ecosystems? Worker cooperative development in Toronto and Montréal
The emergence in practice of worker cooperative ecosystems, which draws on the entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs) concept, has been largely ignored in academic research. Contrasting worker cooperative development efforts in Toronto with Montréal, we affirm there are multiple and multiscalar EEs in each region, including both a dominant capitalist and a worker cooperative EE. Productive enterprises like worker cooperatives, operating with a differen…
Resident-Owned Resilience: Can Cooperative Land Ownership Enable Transformative Climate Adaptation for Manufactured Housing Communities
Residents of manufactured housing communities (MHCs) are disproportionately vulnerable to both hazards and displacement. The cooperative ownership model of resident-owned communities (ROCs) pioneered by ROC USA helps MHC residents resist displacement, but little research assesses how cooperative tenure impacts hazard vulnerability. To fill this gap, we conduct a spatial analysis of 234 ROC USA sites; analyze the co-op conversion process; and inte…
Why Do Planners Overlook Manufactured Housing and Resident-Owned Communities as Sources of Affordable Housing and Climate Transformation
More Americans live in manufactured housing than in public and federally subsidized rental housing combined. Of the nearly 40,000 U.S. manufactured housing communities (MHCs), more than 1,000 are resident-owned communities (ROCs), a form of cooperative ownership. Yet planning research continues to neglect MHCs and ROCs, raising questions of classism and cultural bias. We address five common biases against MHCs and argue ROCs in particular deserve…
All roads lead to Rome?” Performance evaluation across different types of community land trusts based on a large-scale survey
Community land trusts (CLTs) seek to keep homes and other urban spaces permanently affordable and community controlled. As their number across the United States has increased, different iterations of the CLT model seem to have proliferated in practice, stoking scholarly debate as to their varying outcomes and benefits. There has, however, been little attempt to empirically measure the relationship between this institutional diversity and outcomes…
Understanding Differences Between Technocratic and Transformative Community Land Trusts: A Case of Divergent Coupling
Community land trusts (CLTs) secure permanently affordable housing and enable community control over urban space. Some CLTs, however, have been criticized for being “technocratic” instead of “transformative.” If some CLTs are systematically more transformative than others, how do the logics and practices they claim to prioritize differ or converge, and to what consequence? Analyzing matched-pair cases of North American CLTs, “transformative” CLTs…
Just transition, double bind or both? Climate change action by North American community land trusts
Can socially or community-owned enterprise models systematically enable equitable climate action, as has been previously suggested by case study research? To empirically measure and test this proposition, we systematically surveyed all North American community land trusts (CLTs), which primarily serve lower-income households. We found that a majority of CLTs engage in climate action, with mitigation efforts more prevalent than adaptation efforts.…
Response to Borowiak, Safri, Pavlovskaya, and Healy’s Review of Co-operative Enterprise in Comparative Perspective: Exceptionally Un-American
A Global Organization Based on the Structure of a Social Movement: A Model to Solve Social Problems at Scale
Is it possible to build a global organization based on the model of a social movement? We analyze Project ECHO (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes), an entity with over 4 million participants in 193 countries, which claims to have operated with a social movement-like structure for over two decades. In so doing, it has achieved significant scale in addressing an entrenched social problem: the lack of specialized healthcare and social serv…
Economics (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · Business (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Politics (5 works) · Cooperative Studies and Economics (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (4 works) · Computer Science (3 works)