International Place Branding Yearbook 2012

Managing Smart Growth and Sustainability

F. Go, R. Govers, F. Go, R. Govers

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780230279520
• eBook ISBN: 9781137282552
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

This third annual volume of the International Place Branding Yearbook looks at the case for applying brand and marketing strategies to the economic, social, political and cultural development of cities, towns and regions around the world to help them compete in the global, national and local markets. It focuses on sustainability and smart growth.

PART 1

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Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Sustainable Place Branding

CHAPTER 1

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Four Readings of Place and Brand Leadership

Chris Mabey and Tim Freeman

In a review of trends and conceptual models, Kavaratzis (2005) offers a reading of place branding as the application of marketing practices beyond physical goods and services, in the context of deindustrialization. Branding is conceived as a form of communication, in which brand identities mediate between the activities of brand owners and consumer perceptions. Considered as a form of place management, place branding is thus positioned as the attempt to alter the way that places are perceived by specific groups of people – to develop and disseminate a recognizable identity for a place in order to promote processes considered desirable, such as inward financial investment, tourism or the development of political capital (Kavaratzis and Ashworth 2005). These concerns inform Hankinson’s (2007) principles for destination brand management and Gnoth’s (2007) functional, experiential and symbolic dimensions of destination brands. While branding as place management might appeal to those charged with supporting regional growth and sustainability, the task is far from simple. Unlike product markets, notions of place exist in the minds of a wide variety of actors prior to attempts to brand them. Thus the branding of places – neighborhoods, cities, regions – as attractive and sustainable requires collaborative networking, entrepreneurship and innovation, knowledge sharing and cross-boundary learning. In short, the complexity and political dimensions of the task implies a need for leadership. While reconceptualizing “place” in this way has immediate consequences for the nature of leadership required, place leadership is itself a field which remains relatively under-theorized to date. Our intention in this chapter is to propose discourse as a fresh and theoretically informed way to explore the leadership of place branding. By offering four different “readings”, we begin to identify contested assumptions of what is required to lead effectively in complex, sometimes chaotic, policy environments, working across institutional, professional, territorial and community boundaries.

A MULTI-DISCOURSE APPROACH

In order to map out the theoretical assumptions underlying different approaches to the leadership and branding of place, we refer back to previous paradigms of social and organizational inquiry (Alvesson and Deetz 2000). These authors propose that two axes or sets of assumptions should guide such inquiries: those concerning social order and those concerning epistemology. With regard to social order, some researchers start from the premise of underlying consensus and therefore “both seek order and treat order production as the dominant feature of natural and social systems … through the highlighting of ordering principles, such existing orders are perpetuated” (ibid., p. 26). In contrast, research located toward the dissensus extreme of this axis considers conflict, tension, dilemma and struggle to be natural facets of the social world. As such, any semblance of order is to be treated with suspicion and as an indication that the full variety of human interests is in some way being suppressed. Often such research is motivated by the desire to emancipate, to reclaim conflict with a view to somehow altering the balance of power within a particular field or indeed within society more generally.

The second axis concerns epistemology, namely the nature of knowledge and how it is derived. At one extreme, researchers set out from a relatively fixed standpoint, with a priori assumptions and “either/or” thinking which prompts them to look for theoretically driven classifications and taxonomies. It is assumed that the phenomenon under investigation is frozen in time, has an identity that is separate/separable from the rest of the social world and, with appropriate research tools, can be accurately reported. In contrast, emergent epistemology highlights the unfolding nature of social phenomena rather than treating them as objectively fixed, analyzable and ultimately measurable. Because the object of study is continuously shaping and being shaped by situated practice, theorizing is associated with emergence and cyclical causality.

From these two axes four distinct perspectives or, more precisely, discourses can be derived: the functionalist, the interpretive, the dialogic and the critical. A discourse may be thought of as a connected set of statements, concepts, terms and expressions which constitutes a way of talking and writing about a particular issue. The idea of text (spoken or written) and other artifacts in a given space creating or constituting “reality” is a central tenet of a subjectivist thinking, since discourses may be viewed as “systems of thought which are contingent upon as well as inform material practices, which not only linguistically but also practically – through particular power techniques … produce particular forms of subjectivity” (ibid., p. 97). As a particular historical and social mode of engagement that shapes what is thinkable, knowable and doable in its disciplinary domain, the use of discourse offers a valuable analytic device for exploring the leadership and branding of place (see Figure 1.1).

Discourses are not intended to be theoretically watertight boxes and their permeability allows us to be more imaginative about the way they might flow into each other. Indeed, the central point of this chapter is that a more searching understanding of the leadership and branding of place requires consideration of multiple discourses, especially those that bring a more critical edge. We will now consider each of these four “readings” in turn.

FIGURE 1.1 Four discourses of leadership and place

A FUNCTIONALIST DISCOURSE OF LEADERSHIP, PLACE BRANDING AND PLACE LEADERSHIP

Leadership studies informed by a functionalist discourse are guided by a priori (fixed) propositions and assume that social consensus is both feasible and possible. We might characterize place as a specific location (organizational and/or territorial) with relatively stable boundaries and definable limits. Leaders are those who have the capability and reputation to identify performance gaps and galvanize collective action around specified economic imperatives. Leadership research has, until recently, tended to focus exclusively on the individual leader, whether this be their situational choices, traits and psychological make-up, behavioral repertoire, relationship to followers or transformational skills. One consequence of this is that approaches to leadership development have also been predominantly individualized and attribute-based in order to identify and select those leaders capable of delivering the required policy, program or outcomes.

Anholt (2005a) provides a functionalist summary of place branding practice as the distillation of the core “essence” of a place, through reinforcement of a coherent set of “truths”, to the advantage of the local community. From this perspective, place branding consists of uncovering and amplifying a pre-existing reality of place and making it available for wider consumption. Thus place branding may provide societal benefits in the form of emancipation and increased opportunities for individuals through the development of diverse markets in international tourism, the export of goods and services, or the location of corporate headquarters (Anholt, 2005b).

When applied specifically to the leadership of place, functionalist discourse highlights the changing context of leadership. This includes a shift from hierarchical professional silos to networked (Cooke and Morgan 1998) and cross-boundary working (Sullivan and Skelcher 2002). Secondly, it requires new leadership competencies/skills in partnership building across thematic, organizational, local and professional bodies (Gibney et al. 2009). Thirdly, it points to the need for leadership skills associated with collaborative learning (e.g. Powell 1990; Maskell 2002), with the aim of supporting and developing successful and sustainable collaborations.

AN INTERPRETIVE DISCOURSE OF LEADERSHIP, PLACE BRANDING AND PLACE LEADERSHIP

Whereas functionalists tend to regard knowledge as an objective commodity and leader capability as an individual asset, sometimes referred to as human or intellectual capital, interpretive discourse sees leadership more as a fluid consequence arising from, contributing to and shaped by social practices, thus emphasizing relational or social capital (Day 2001). Hence the term locale in Figure 1.1. For all their plurality, interpretive studies, like functionalist ones, remain largely consensus-oriented in the sense that they seek to portray a faithful picture of what is going on within a community, subregion or network, albeit from a particular, sectional, vantage point (e.g. residents as opposed to elected politicians, women as opposed to men, municipal government as opposed to grass-roots activists) with a strong emphasis on the language deployed by each respective grouping.

An interpretive reading of place branding emphasizes the extent to which brands exist as networks of associations in the minds of disparate target audiences (e.g. tourists, businesses and residents/workers) and is open to the likelihood that brand associations vary widely between these groups. Similarly, groups may themselves be further segmented, for example between current and potential new residents where industrial decline necessitates an influx of workers to service new creative industries. Potential conflicts and synergies between the needs of each of these groups pose challenges and necessitate the need for a careful balancing of requirements.

Leaders, or more likely, leadership informed by interpretive discourse play close attention to the cultural and symbolic in articulations of “place” – the narratives, myths and stories that are told and their use to evoke a shared sense of place. Similarly, distributed leadership provides an important resource for interpretive leadership of place in its orientation toward constructing a shared vision across networks lacking in hierarchical structural authority. On this reading, the “who”, “what” and “how” of leadership is recast and conceptualized as a distributed and interdependent set of practices enacted by all rather than specific traits possessed by figureheads at the apex of a hierarchy (Gronn 2002). Embedded in social interaction, leadership is presented as a collective activity occurring in and through collaborative relationships (Spillane et al. 2001), centered on mutual learning, understanding and positive action and requiring the facilitation of reflection and the co-creation of ideas (Lambert 2003). The hierarchical assumption of leadership embodied in a single person at the apex of a unitary organization gives way, to be replaced by an acceptance of the importance of change agency behaviors from a broad range of collaborators, co-creating a shared vision toward which they work.

A DIALOGIC DISCOURSE OF LEADERSHIP, PLACE BRANDING AND PLACE LEADERSHIP

In common with the interpretive discourse, dialogic discourse rejects any separation of the knowing subject (e.g. the leader) and the known object (e.g. leadership capability). In contrast to functionalism’s ontology of being, this might be characterized as subscribing to an ontology of becoming. Within a dialogic reading, instead of seeing individuals or social groupings as entities, organizational and individual identities are seen as constituted by ongoing human interaction. Individuals and their worlds are continuously in process. Through institutionalizing interaction in cultures and discourses, we constantly create (or constitute) a sense of who we are, of what we are doing and of where we are going, in which individuals and organizations are constantly in a process of becoming (Watson 2005, p. 223). From this we might extrapolate that there is no single and static leader of place, as such; rather there is a multi-actor process of place-making – brought about through relating and talking to a series of locums. Similarly, there is no leadership as such within this ontology, there is only leading – again accomplished through negotiation, consultation and ascription. Furthermore, the dialogic discourse rejects any notion of singular, objective and universally applicable truths. Indeed it views any attempt to produce or privilege such truths (even socially constructed ones, as in the constructivist discourse) as serving dominant interests, inherently open to challenge and ripe for deconstruction. Thus Grint (2000) rejects leadership as a concrete natural phenomenon, his constitutive theory of leadership arguing instead for the socially constructed and contested nature of a multiplicity of accounts of leader, follower and context. As leadership is constructed within the confines of particular social institutions it cannot exist independently of a given context and is attributed by others; leaders are those who enact the behaviors and messages required by those able to confer leadership status. Neither leader nor context may be unambiguously known since all judgments informed by particular assumptions are subject to counter-claim.

From a dialogic perspective, place branding is presented as a site for the generative construction of difference; “places” here are a discontinuous assemblage of people, ideas and material “things”, the meaning of each of which is developed and reiterated continuously in networks of understanding (Mayes 2008). A leadership of place informed by dialogic discourse focuses on the instability of articulations of “place” and the performative nature of both “place” and “leadership”. Underpinned by a performative theory of truth, in which the naming of a term brings about the existence of that which is named, Ford and Harding (2004) provide a dialogic reading of Lefebvre’s critical analysis of space and place. They argue that “space” is not simply that which is there before it is filled, but is instead a production – the result of social practices – and a conceptual triad is developed to capture the physical, mental and social elements of the production of space. These constitute spatial practice which concerns the production and reproduction of space, representations of space which are images tied to the signs and codes of dominant knowledge within a society, and representational spaces which are directly lived, making symbolic use of physical objects. On this reading, places are characterized as articulated moments in networks of understandings:

Individuals invest in place through their labour and the discursive construction of affective loyalties, investments that are imbricated with politics, political economy and all manner of (mis)representations arising from the fantasy of the psyche. (Ford and Harding 2004, p. 818)

A CRITICAL DISCOURSE OF LEADERSHIP, PLACE BRANDING AND PLACE LEADERSHIP

The critical discourse may be described as dualist in the sense that it tends to represent the world in terms of analytically distinct divisions, such as truth and falsity, oppressor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• About the Book
• Notes On the Contributors
• Organization Of The Book
• Introduction
• Part 1 Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Sustainable Place Branding
• Part 2 Chapters on Particular Cases
• Part 3 Chapters on Particular Place Brand Themes
• Conclusion
• Index