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Since the end of the 1970s, the restructuring of the economic landscape and the drive by governments throughout Europe to deregulate markets, reduce institutional rigidities, and flexibilise the movement of capital and labour, have confronted trade unions with the most serious challenges they have faced for more than half a century. According to many commentators, a process of decollectivisation and decentralisation of industrial relations is now firmly established. For example, Baglioni (1990) describes decentralisation as one of the dominant trends in contemporary European industrial relations. In his view ‘Decentralisation, all in all, is part of the general retreat of the labour movement. It is often a manifestation of the alteration of the power balance in favour of management, and it has created complicated problems for union strategy.’

A fast‐emerging theme in industrial relations research is that industrial relations systems in West European countries are undergoing decentralization, and that the most effective way for unions to meet this challenge is to “go local” themselves. Argues that the significance and implications of decentralization in industrial relations, and the scope and nature of union response, cannot be fully comprehended without according explicit attention to the different local contexts within which these processes are taking place. Uses developments in the British engineering sector to illustrate this argument. Firm‐based surveys and interviews with managers, local union officials and employer association representatives in two case study areas highlight the importance of local workplace cultures and institutional traditions in shaping the contemporary restructuring of industrial politics.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that neoinstitutional theory can provide insights into the conflicts between social ends and economic means within social enterprises (SEs). Tensions between these differing institutional logics may be seen as a manifestation of ambiguity and incoherence in an organizational field that is, despite many recent regulative and normative changes, still weakly institutionalized in the UK.

The research design adopts a qualitative approach and is based on semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 40 SE managers in four major UK cities.

Findings suggest that SE managers deal with the competing institutional logics of “the market” and “social care” in differing ways.

The case studies are derived from major UK cities where SEs are more likely to be dependent on state and quasi-public sector forms of support.

Policies attempting to imbue a more commercial and business-like approach with the institutional field of SE should recognize the tensions imposed by such a shift. These tensions are especially pronounced in SEs affected by changes to state funding regimes and publicly sponsored markets. In some situations, such market logic may be largely inappropriate.

Changing institutional logics within an organizational field such as SE requires a recognition of the complex interrelationships between that factors that create and sustain such a field, most notably legal (regulative), educational (normative) and attitudinal (cognitive) factors.

This is one of the few papers to explore the value of neoinstitutional theory in the context of SE.

This paper aims to examine the extent to which urban social enterprises (SEs) have diversified their funding sources and shifted towards loans and development finance in recent years. The paper seeks to consider the underlying reasons for a limited demand for loans by comparing two theoretical perspectives on SE development. The concept of “social bricolage” implies SEs do not seek conventional business loans or equity finance, because they survive in resource poor environments by improvising and re‐using redundant capital. A second evolutionary approach implies that SE financing will be dominated by a reliance on habits and practices learnt from the contexts in which social entrepreneurs have operated.

The paper is based on analysis of interviews with 40 SEs in four English cities.

The paper finds a limited degree of change and scant evidence of local decentralisation in social enterprises' financial contexts. It argues that both conceptual approaches offer important insights into the causes of the low level of demand for development finance by emphasising the importance of practical and improvised financial management. This is an adaptive response to uncertainty but is also a manifestation of SEs' inherited capabilities in public and charitable finance.

The research is based on a relatively small sample of social enterprises in central and deprived urban areas. The financial practices of social enterprises in other types of environment also require examination.

It is unrealistic to expect the majority of SEs to secure conventional loan finance, instead they require “softer” finance and intensive support from intermediaries.

The paper makes a novel empirical contribution by revealing social enterprises' views and recent experiences with funding. Its approach allows an intensive examination of key financial issues. It makes an original theoretical contribution by seeking to apply, develop, and evaluate two theoretical perspectives on the form and practices of social enterprises.

This paper attempts to examine which theory is best at explaining the geographic concentration in Java, an island in which most of the Indonesia’s large and medium manufacturing industries have located overwhelmingly. Our previous studies on Java have found that there was a stable – albeit increasing trend – and persistent geographic concentration in Java over the period 1976‐1995. Yet some critical questions exist: Why geographic concentration in Java persisted during this period? To what extent relevant theories and empirical literature can be used as an explicit test of competing theories on agglomeration forces? In answering those questions, we compare the three major grand theories of geographic concentration: Neo‐Classical Theory (NCT), New Trade Theory (NTT) and New Economic Geography (NEG). Using the regional specialization index as a measure of geographic concentration of manufacturing industry and pooling data over the period 1991‐002, our econometric analysis integrates the perspectives of industry, region (space) and time. We further explore the nature and dynamics of agglomeration forces underpinning the industrial agglomeration in Java by testing some key variables. Our econometric results rejected the NCT hypotheses and showed that the NTT and NEG can better explain the phenomena. It’s apparent that manufacturing firms in Java seek to locate in more populous and densely populated areas in order to enjoy both localization economies and urbanization economies, as shown by the significance of scale economies and income per capita. The former is associated with the size of a particular industry, while the latter reflects the size of a market in a particular urban area. More importantly, the results suggest that there is a synergy between thickness of market and agglomeration forces. The interplay of agglomeration economies is intensified by the imperfect competition of Java’s market structure. We find that Java’s market structure may restrict competition so that firms tend to concentrate geographically. Instead of providing some important recommendations for local and central governments and practical implications for investors and manufacturing firms, this paper gives empirical evidence with respect to path dependency hypothesis. The finding supports the NEG’s belief that history matters: older firms tend to enhance regional specialization.