We’re recruiting 20 new Professors at the University of Greenwich and one of the posts that have been advertised today is for a Professor who will work closely with us in EDReC. The post is for a Professor in Workforce and Economic Development Policy. The advert is below and you can read the new story about how the University’s ambitious new investment in research here.
Professor of Workforce and Economic Development Policy
Location: To be confirmed
Salary: £57,587 to £68,093 per annum inclusive
Contract Type: Permanent
Closing Date: Friday 15 June 2012
Interview Date: See advert
Reference: 81
The University of Greenwich is looking to appoint a professor to conduct world-class research on economic development and regeneration, with particular attention to issues of work and employment. It is envisaged that this research will enable the Business School to play an active role in public debate on these issues, as it does on many others. The successful applicant will have a strong track record in publishing, attracting research income, supervising PhD students, teaching on postgraduate programmes and working with key stakeholders. Applications from across the social sciences are welcome, particularly from economics, employment relations, geography, political science, social policy, and sociology.
The professor will be situated within the Business School and jointly affiliated with the Work and Employment Research Unit (WERU) and the Economic Development Resource Centre (EDReC). WERU carries out research on issues as wide-ranging as compensation, labour market policy, leadership, trade union renewal, and whistleblowing, much of it international and comparative in scope. EDReC promotes exchange of academic and front-line expertise in local economic development, enterprise, urban regeneration, planning, and community development. The professor will draw on the research infrastructure of WERU and the Business School and the external networks and practitioner expertise of EDReC.
The professor will occupy a senior leadership role within the School and will develop the School’s research profile in areas related to workforce and economic development policy. He or she will continue to develop research and support other research active staff, through mentoring and/or collaboration. In addition, he or she will provide input to the School’s portfolio of taught and research postgraduate programmes based in the Human Resources and Organisational Behaviour department.
For further information please contact the Dean of the School of Business, Jon Sibson on 0208 331 9032, or j.sibson@gre.ac.uk.
Interviews will be held on 27th and 28th June
Further details:
We aim to be an equal opportunities employer and welcome applications from all sections of the community.
EDReC’s Director, James Kennell, will be contributing to this event at the end of May in Manchester.
A Sporting Chance: the legacies of mega-events for post-industrial British cities
23rd and 24th May 2012
Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC), University of Manchester
Comparing the city of Manchester, ten years after it hosted the Commonwealth Games, with London – host to the Olympic Games in 2012, this two day workshop invites critical inter-disciplinary discussion and evaluation of the legacies of sporting mega-events for post-industrial British cities.
The workshop is funded by the new Urban Experiments research theme at CRESC and brings together twelve academics whose research is concerned, in various ways, with exploring the socio-economic, political and material transformations brought about by post-industrialisation and/or sporting mega events billed as catalysts for urban regeneration.
Speakers include:
Mike Raco, Professor of Urban and Regional Governance, The Bartlett School of Planning, UCL, London.
Dr Adam Brown, Director and founder member of Substance research cooperative, Manchester
Professor John Gold, Department of History, Philosophy and Religion – Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Oxford Brookes University.
Professor John Horne, Professor of Sport and Sociology, University of Central Lancashire
Dr Larissa Davies, Senior Research Fellow Sport Industry Research Centre Sheffield Hallam University
Dr. Andrew Smith, School of Architecture and the Built Environment, University of Westminster
James Kennell, Director Economic Development Resource Centre, University of Greenwich Business School.
Camilla Lewis, PhD candidate, Social Anthropology, University of Manchester
Beth Carley, PhD candidate, Cathy Marsh Centre for Survey and Social Research, University of Manchester
Gillian Evans, RCUK Research Fellow, CRESC, University of Manchester
Allan Cochrane, Professor of Urban Studies, Social Sciences, Open University
For more information and to reserve a place contact K.D.ho@open.ac.uk
Below you can view the presentations given by Jess Steele and John P Houghton at our event last night. More than fifty delegates came along, from a wide range of backgrounds in the private, public and third sectors and our presenters’ talks prompted some (at times!) quite heated discussions about the nature of regeneration, the links between community action and economic development and the future role of government in regeneration. A more full report with photos will be posted on here shortly, but in the meantime you can see the presentations below:
This free event is hosted by the Economic Development Resource Centre and speakers will provoke and stimulate debate in an audience from the public, private and third sectors.
This topic is presented by two keynote speakers:
• Jess Steele, Director of Innovation at Locality
• John P Houghton, Principal Consultant, Shared Intelligence
As the UK struggles towards economic growth, its towns, cities and neighbourhoods are grappling with the difficult issues of how to develop and regenerate in times of austerity and change.
Recent approaches and tried and tested methods are not working any more – this free event unpicks this problem and explores innovative, dynamic methods of bottom up economic development and regeneration.
Who can attend: This event will present innovative thinking and practical solutions that will be of interest to individuals and organisations in the field of local government, economic development, urban regeneration, and community development.
When: Thursday 27 October 2011, 5.30 – 7pm
Where: Hamilton House, room HH103, University of Greenwich, 15 Park Vista, London, UK, SE10 9LZ
Fee: Free for all
Useful links
Venue:
This conference is being held at Hamilton House, which comprises an elegant Georgian building overlooking the Royal Greenwich Park. The building enjoys a quiet location at Park Vista street on the east side of Greenwich Town Centre, close to the National Maritime Museum. Hamilton House is only a short distance away from the University of Greenwich Maritime Campus.
The campus is based on a World Heritage Site on the banks of the river Thames. The university’s largest campus is centred on three baroque buildings designed by Sir Christopher Wren at the end of the 17th century.
“More breathtaking than the Versailles of Louis XIV” is how The Independent newspaper described it.
The Borough of Greenwich is steeped in history. East meets West on the Meridian Line, which divides the hemispheres and marks longitude zero. The line runs through the courtyard of the 17th century Royal Observatory and indicates the spot from which Greenwich Mean Time is calculated.
For further information contact:
Business School Events team
Telephone: +44 (0) 20 8331 9083
Fax: +44 (0) 20 8331 9583
E-mail: businessevents@gre.ac.uk
Graham Symon and James Kennell will be giving a paper called “Configurations of localism: does the new localism create the conditions for sustainable growth?” next Friday, 2nd September at the 15th Annual Dilemmas International Research conference in London. You can view the full programme and register here. The abstract for their paper is below:
We have just held our first EDReC public event, in the newly opened Hamilton House at the University of Greenwich. The event featured a talk by David Boyle, fellow at the New Economics Foundation. James Kennell, Director of EDReC, opened the event with a brief introduction to our work and talked about how this will be developed over the coming few months:
Delegates recieved a copy of EDReC’s first report, on transformational localism. You can download an electronic copy by clicking on the image below:
David’s presentation explored radical aproaches to local economic development, drawing on his own research and the work of the New Economics Foundation:
After the presentations, there was a lively discussion session with questions for David and James from representatives of local authorities, economic development specialists, manufacturing experts, developers of web-based technologies, health and communitiy development researchers and academics. The discussion focussed on practical solutions to the challenges of localism in economic development and took in banking reform and local investment, the role of new technologies in localism, alternative currencies, local food production, local government, procurement and the role of manufacturing in the econmic recoverty.
The next Economic Development Resource Centre Event will be on Thursday 27th October and will explore the role of asset transfer and local authority assets in economic deveopment. Details to follow here and on our twitter feed. If you would like to be added to the EDReC mailing list to be kep informed about future events, please contact us.
Graham Symon and James Kennell have had an abstract accepted for a paper that they will present at the Future Cities 2011 conference, being held in London on 15th & 16th December this year. The paper builds on an idea that came from some work on localism we were doing earlier in the year in the Economic Development Resource Centre, in which we suggested that an economic insurgency was one potential outcome of a radical localism in economic development. The full abstract is below: 
How low can it go? The devolution of economic development and the possibility of economic insurgency This presentation provides a critique of the UK Government’s policies and plans for devolving economic development processes from the regional to the local and neighbourhood levels. Drawing on economic development theory and experiences from Europe, Latin America, the United States and Japan, radical approaches to economic development are reviewed that suggest possibilities for innovative approaches to the problems of economic development in the cities of the UK. International examples show that alternative models are available for growing the economies of our cities and towns that have the character of a challenging, bottom-up insurgency – a stark contrast to the conservative models of growth being offered by the new Local Enterprise Partnerships and Government departments[1]. In an economic insurgency, traditional, hierarchical institutions and frameworks come under attack from below as new economies take shape and start to re-shape places from within. Following the financial crisis of 2008, Western governments have struggled to develop consistently successful responses to stimulating sustainable growth in post-crash economies[2]. In the UK, the Government’s ‘local growth’ white paper appeared to promote a return to pre-crash methods of top-down economic development with an increased role for the private sector, despite the rhetorical references to a ‘new localism’[3] and economic ideas of subsidiarity and sustainability.[4]However, despite these contradictions, recent Government espousals have the potential to create an environment in which more radical approaches to economic development are becoming possible. This presentation argues that an economic insurgency is a necessary next step in local economic development in the UK.
[1] Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (2010)
Local Growth,London: HMSO
[2] Florida, R. (2010)
The Great Reset: how new ways of living and working drive post-crash prosperity, New York: Harper Collins
[3] Bentley, G., Bailley, D. & Shutt, J. (2010)
From RDAs to LEPs: A New Localism? Case Examples of West Midlands and Yorkshire in Local Economy, Vol. 25, No.7, pp. 535-537
[4] Schumacher, E.F. (1973/1993)
Small is beautiful: a study of economics as if people mattered,London: Vintage
The Economic Development Resource Centre at the University of Greenwich invites you to a free event featuring David Boyle from the New Economics Foundation
Thursday 23 June · 17:30 – 19:30, Hamilton House, Greenwich Campus
David Boyle, a Fellow at the New Economics Foundation (nef) and the editor of Radical Economics, is speaking at the University of Greenwich on Thursday 23rd June. David’s talk will explore ways to develop sustainable local economies; David will also reflect on the projects he has been involved in that seek to promote human-scale local economic development.
David Boyle, New Economics Foundation
This event will allow you to hear about innovative approaches to economic development, to discuss practical responses to the localism agenda and to share your experiences with delegates from the private, public and third sectors.
David has worked at nef since 1987, writing and editing a number of books, developing new projects, launching the timebanking movement and most recently carrying out research on localism and the future of public services. His books include The New Economics (with Andrew Simms), Authenticity, The Money Changers, Funny Money and The Tyranny of Numbers. David’s recent reports for nef include Localism: unravelling the supplicant state and Co-production: a manifesto for growing the core economy.
During the event, there will be opportunities to hear about the work of the Economic Development Resource Centre and to get a free copy of our new report on Localism in the Thames Gateway. Attendees will also be able to participate in a panel discussion session. After the event there will be a drinks reception with time for networking and conversation with other delegates.
This is the first public event hosted by the University’s new Economic Development Resource Centre, which has been formed in the business school to explore new thinking in economic development and regeneration.
This event is free, but booking is essential and places are limited. Please email businessevents@gre.ac.uk to reserve your place.
Noha Nasser exploring a case study of sustainable place making from the Netherlands
Last week, James Kennell and Noha Nasser gave a presentation at the Thames Gateway London Partnership’s ‘Financing the future’ seminar.
James Kennell presenting a critical view on US enterprise zones
The talk that James and Noha gave was about the implications of the contemporary innovations in regeneration and development financing that are being discussed currently, and the relationship between these and sustainability within the eventual projects that they enable.
In particular, the sustainability of enterprise zones was explored, as well as new models of Public-Private-Community Partnerships (PPCPs). You can view the presentation below:
Our partners at the Thames Gateway London Partnership are producing the final event in their Seminar series this month. Dr Noha Nasser from the University of Greenwich’s Urban Rennaisance Institute will be speaking at the event, presenting some research that she’s been developing with the Economic Development Resource Centre.
Tony Travers, Director of LSE London, will be the keynote speaker at TGLP’s seminar on Financing the Future of the Thames Gateway on Monday 21 March 2011 (9.00am to 12.45pm)
Few would dispute the huge potential of the Thames Gateway and its importance for London and the wider UK economy. This seminar will explore how investment and growth may be delivered and the economic promise of the region realised through new investment models.
The seminar is free to attend and supported by the LDA. If you are interested in receiving further details, please contact TGLP at events@thames-gateway.org.uk or call 020 7673 4734.
This seminar will explore:
* Tensions around double devolution and financial flexibilities for local authorities.
* The future of PFI in an age of austerity: can PFI offer value for money and if not what could replace it?
* How do we achieve a potential £21bn increase in GVA without central government investment?
* What new financial models do private sector consultants propose?
* What other fiscal breaks or incentives could the London Thames Gateway offer?
Other confirmed speakers include Dr Noha Nasser, Director, Urban Renaissance Institute at University of Greenwich and representatives from Deloitte and PWC.
Invited speakers include: Sir Simon Milton, Deputy Mayor of London, CIPFA; Goldman Sachs; 3i; new economics foundation and UKTI.
Check here for further updates:
http://www.thames-gateway.org.uk/?p=1244
