ABSTRACT
The principal forms, functions, and policy mechanisms of local and regional economic strategy in advanced western capitalist societies have undergone major changes during the last two decades. The distinctive feature of 'competition states' and 'entrepreneurial cities' is their self-image as being proactive in promoting the competitiveness of their respective economic spaces. This chapter emphasises the constitutive role of discourse in all lived social relations. The rise of the entrepreneurial city or region in the geo-economic space of Atlantic Fordism clearly depends on quite specific narrative accounts of the crisis of its post-war mode of economic growth and its social mode of economic regulation. The Soviet communist collapse and the end of the Cold War are said to have replaced the struggle between capitalism and communism as competing world systems by struggles between competing versions of capitalism. The issue of variant forms of capitalism is returning to haunt the neo-liberal approach to regional and local economic development in Britain.
