Car Wars: Global Automakers, Entrepreneurial Governance, and the Elision of Labor Öffentlichkeit
Cowart, Oliver Ambrose Braselman (2017)
Published
Abstract
Since the global crisis of the 1970s-80s and the onset of the neoliberal globalization project a major shift has taken place in the U.S. automotive production that has followed the restrictive labor climate of the Southeastern U.S. As foreign producers entered the country, states and local governments became entrepreneurial in attempting to lure in automotive plants. This research is concerned with two central questions: 1) is this competition among states for industrial investment new, or just the same kind of state support for capital we have seen in the past? and 2) Are there deeper changes occurring in the relations between capital, the state, and labor? I conducted a comparative case study of 21 automotive assembly plants that located in or near the Southeastern United States since 1980, focusing on the complexities of the process of recruitment and the power relations within it. I conducted extensive secondary research and interviewed 18 experts on both the private and public side of development.
My findings show that there were important changes in industrial recruitment efforts that began in the mid 1980s, as the people involved become more professionalized in recruitment efforts, the process of recruitment became more rationalized, and the government incentives packages grew to encompass fixed-capital and other up-front costs. Furthermore, the rationalization of the recruitment and site selection process created a field of expert knowledge shared among professionalizing government development officials and firms specializing in industrial site selection. This overlapping field of knowledge is firmly situated in the perspective of businesses, obscuring the public-private distinction in a one-sided way. I argue the development of this professional field has affected the practice of governance itself, as these localities come to adopt a "partnership" approach to entrepreneurial governance in which they behave as a business. As localities interpellate the imperatives of global neoliberalism, local governments are partly reshaping themselves according to ideology of market orthodoxy. This has the ultimate effect of both reorienting the locality towards facilitating global capital accumulation, while also eroding the political legitimacy of labor as a political actor vis-Ã -vis capital and the state.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction 1
The Question 5
The Complexity 7
Research Overview 11
Outline of this Study 12
Chapter 2: Theorizing Local Development Strategies 17
Location in the Literature 18
Approaches to Studying Development Strategies 20
Theories of Capitalist Accumulation and Change 23
Theorizing Context 25
The Globalization Project 30
Entrepreneurial Governance 36
Research Design 38
Case Selection 41
Research Methods: Secondary 42
Research Methods: Primary 43
Chapter 3: Context and Cases 47
United States Industrial Policy (such as it is) 47
The South 52
The Cases 57
Chapter 4: Patterns in the Industry - Patterns in Location 66
Understanding Automotive Assembly Plant Locations 66
The Rise of Japanese Competition 68
Locational Theories 71
U.S. Transplant Locational Decisions Part I 74
U.S. Transplant Locational Decisions Part II 89
Into the 2000s 94
Cases Omitted 99
A Few Generalizations 103
Chapter 5:
The Industrial Recruitment of Automotive Assembly Plants in the
South 106
Who Recruits? 107
Public Agencies and Authorities 107
Private and Other Actors Involved 111
Incentives Packages 114
The Process of Industrial Recruitment 124
Changes & Developments in Industrial Recruitment 134
A Race to the Bottom? 148
Coda 156
Conclusions 160
Chapter 6: The Business of Partnerships 163
Introduction: Partnerships 163
1. The Customer Service Experience (CSE) 167
2.1 Place as Product I 172
2.2 Place as Product II 176
2.3 Place as Product III 179
3. Government as Businessperson 182
Entrepreneurial Governance 186
Conclusions 196
Chapter 7: The Political and Economic in Partnership 199
The Class Project 201
Effects on Local Policy 211
The Elision of Labor 216
Public or Private? 221
Conclusions 230
Chapter 8: Something Like a Few Conclusions 233
Losing on Local Deals? 236
Where Does Partnership Go from Here? 240
Alternatives to Partnership 251
Cracks in the Foundation, Cracks in the Façade 257
Limitations and a last few words 261
Bibliography 265
Appendix 1: Sample of Interview Prompts 281
List of Tables and Figures
Table 3.1 All Automotive Assembly Plants In Eastern US in Neoliberal Era 58
Table 3.2 Greenfield Plant Locations and Incentives Detail 60
Figure 4.1 Map of Greenfield Plant Locations 81
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