Regional Development Agencies in Europe by Henrik Halkier; Mike Danson; Charlotte DamborgReview by: Kevin ThomasArea, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Mar., 1999), pp. 94-95Published by: The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20003961 .

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94 Book reviews

catalogue and classified adverts. Tacchi's chapter on the immaterial, yet space-filling, qualities of radio, on its uses and socialities in mediating, and indeed mixing, private and public realms, is a nice piece, raising issues of differential use and the particular qualities of the radio form, too often missed in geographical analyses of media. Clarke's work on the different reasons for using catalogues and classified adverts provides another well-founded study of the sort of knowledges and competences required in shopping. Some of it was indeed strikingly resonant with this reader. Chevalier's comparison of French relationships with kitchens and English attitudes to gardens is more problem atic. I was not entirely convinced by the evidence from

what seemed a rather pre-selective reading of media, coupled with field material that illustrated interesting ways of shaping domestic space but hardly bore the weight of the thesis. The final section of the book, on global connec tions, offers three fascinating papers: Miller on cola in

Trinidad, Rausing on Western goods in Estonia and Johnson on consumption and identity in the Philippines. Miller's elegant and powerful account of cola in Trinidad has appeared in other books, but it remains an important critique of how Coke gets used rather too glibly as both symbol of and evidence for a homogenizing Westerniz ation of cultures through commodities. For anyone who thinks geographies of consumption means saying that

Coke sells America as a myth and ideal, it should be salutary reading. Rausing provides further evidence of the ambivalence of Western commodities by exploring the dynamics of the adoption, refusal and misconnections provided through goods supplied by charitable aid schemes run from Sweden to 'help' post-Soviet Estonia. Likewise, Johnson's discussion of the Philippines focuses on how material goods are used and valued in different circumstances-working to unpack the traditional versus modern distinction-but this is perhaps a little too ambitious, trying to integrate the effect of international migration and religious and taste dynamics within the Philippines. The middle section of the book works least well: Pellegram focus on office paperwork, Jarman on Orange Order banners and Fiden-Croft on Trinidadian Calypso. The last, most straightforwardly, deals with the public sphere, looking at how music is taken up by and takes up political issues, though the sophisticated analysis of the music is not really matched in the analysis of the political sphere. The attention to the specific form, though, is welcome and thoroughly worked. Jarman's analysis of

Orange Order banners left almost the opposite taste, that the politics had rather been lost in attention to material artefact. It offers a detailed account of the banners' evolu tion and design, but, curiously for work associated with consumption studies, it seemed to shy away from their use. Finally, Pellegram's study of office work seems less clearly associated with the public sphere-apart from being a government office, which adds little specifically to the account. I liked the idea of taking seriously the paper in

paperwork, reminding me of the Latourian adage always to

follow the object. But I was left thinking that the piece could have been strengthened by an explicit engagement with that actor-network literature and its study of centres of calculation and inscription devices.

To a geographical audience, then, the book probably does not really function as a coherent collection, but I have no hesitation in recommending it as a useful set of papers.

Many chapters are fascinating in their own rights, and as a collection of consumption studies pieces, they are well worth the price. I have no doubt they will interest staff and students working in that area.

Mike Crang University of Durham

Regional Development Agencies in Europe edited by Henrik Halkier, Mike Danson and Charlotte Damborg London: Jessica Kingsley, 1998, 373 pp, ?25.00 paperback ISBN 1 85302 602 6

This volume, based on Regional Studies Association conference papers, is one of a series aimed at promoting the concept of and debate into regional development. The editors, concerned to apply some discipline to the study of regional development agencies (RDAs)-a concept that has proved notoriously difficult to pin down-start by outlining a model of RDAs against which to measure the practice in a number of case-study European countries. Their model development body is: semi-autonomous of sponsoring political bodies; supports mainly indigenous firms by means of 'soft' policy instruments (eg advice and training); and acts via a broad range of policy instruments,

which the RDA 'integrates'. They do not define what they mean by region, which gives the case-study chapter authors plenty of spatial scope, and their specification of develop ment and agency is sufficiently broad to cover most even tualities.

The case-study chapters approach their task in a variety of ways: some stick grimly to the task of testing particular agencies, or sets of agencies, against the model; some provide historical accounts of how RDAs developed into their present form; some attempt an evaluation of RDA effectiveness without much reference to the model; and some adopt a mixture of these approaches. It is customary for reviewers to lament the lack of editorial discipline in cases like this, but I have to admit to welcoming the contributing authors' waywardness. The chapters that do not stick to the brief are, by and large, the most interesting ones. This is not to decry the editors' attempts at order, but the parameters set seem to be too prosaic. It is also a tall

order both to provide enough political and institutional contextual material to explain, say, to non-Hungarians, where their RDAs sit in the wider scheme of things, and to describe and analyse an empirical agency classification process within a short chapter. The intention was clearly to

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Book reviews 95

try to cut to the essence of RDAs and to economize on lengthy preamble. But, as so many of the case studies show, in RDAs, context can be (nearly) everything.

It is also difficult to say much about what the RDAs actually do in any detail within the confines of each chapter, but some interesting patterns do emerge, in par ticular the great similarity between programmes and agency structures in different countries. There are clearly some organizing principles at work here, together with the not so-hidden hand of the European Union. The EU has encour aged the adoption of partnership-driven semi-autonomous agencies, through the EU structural funds within EU 'objec tive 2' regions, and, in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), through various support measures such as PHARE. A fairly homogeneous pattern of agencies and initiatives is the unsurprising result, with any innovation and variation seem ingly dependent on the availability of additional resources and political will. Another source of innovation, noted in the Scandinavian comparison, was the entrepreneurial flair needed by officials to exploit the public-sector funding regimes effectively. This raises, in turn, the issue of demo cratic accountability of these arm's-length local coalitions, with some chapters noting the paradoxical demand for flexible and innovative modes of agency operation along side the parallel demand for often-lumbering democratic structures. A widespread recent development in RDAs has been a reduction in their resources, reflecting cuts in public spending across the European spectrum. RDAs everywhere are being required to achieve more with less, in the same way as hospitals and universities. It comes as a shock to hear in Bellini's chapter that the ERVET agency in Emilia Romagna was widely perceived in its region as a drain on

the taxpayer, and had been restructured to save money. This is interesting, because, as industrial district enthusiasts-such as Morgan, who contributes a chapter on the Welsh Development Agency-know, the network of 'untraded interdependencies' amongst the SMEs of Emilia-Romagna, supported by ERVET, was a key com ponent of the 'third Italy' model that now underpins so much of the rationale behind the operation and public funding of European RDAs.

The book is most useful to those looking for national overviews of RDA activities, and for comparisons between regions, and there is plenty of case-study material here for teaching on undergraduate courses. Sleegers' chapter on the Netherlands, Houthaeve's on Flanders, Hughes' on UK rural development agencies, and Morgan's on the Welsh

DA all stand out for me, along with Bellini on ERVET and the

two evaluations of policy in Northern Ireland by Finnegan and Hart et al. There is useful coverage of RDAs in Spain,

the Czech Republic, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Hungary and Scotland, and the editors' concluding chapter also represents a useful summary on the state of the art of

RDAs in Europe. This volume amounts less to an affirmation of the value of such agencies in the supposedly emerging 'Europe of the regions' than as a useful antidote to some of the dubious hype that has been uttered. The English RDAs

that emerge in April 1999 represent the next milestone in European RDA evolution; this book has provided some interesting questions with which to start interrogating them.

Kevin Thomas Leeds Metropolitan University

Rethinking the Region by John Allen, Doreen Massey and Allan Cochrane, with Julie Charlesworth, Gill Court, Nick Henry and Phil Sarre London: Routledge, 1998, x+159 pp, ?47.50 hardback, ?15.99 paperback ISBN 0 415 16821 X hardback, ISBN 0 415 16822 8

paperback

The central thesis of this book is that 'traditional' ways of viewing regions are inadequate to the task of understand ing the processes at work within real regions. Provocatively asking 'Where is the south east?' (the use of lowercase letters is deliberate), Rethinking the Region suggests that the answer depends on what social and economic questions are being asked. Maps of the region look very different depending on the key variable being drawn, such as average or high earnings (with some variation between women and men), house prices, consumption patterns, employment type, government spending, connections with the global economy and so on. For this reason, and because conventional boundaries drawn up by govern ment (which are 'social constructions, put there for specific purposes and within particular sets of power relations' (54)) often serve to obscure the degree of interconnections within and between regions, a notion of geography resting on Standard Planning Regions (or, indeed, other adminis trative boundaries) should be rejected. Furthermore, as the book stresses, the use of standard regions as a crude spatial

template runs the danger of suggesting internal homogene ity rather than heterogeneity, although this does require some unsophistication or complicity on the part of the reader (few people with a basic knowledge of the geogra phy of the UK are likely to believe that economic or social conditions and processes in, for example, Liverpool are the same as in Chester, even if they do get aggregated into the same Standard Planning Region). Instead, the authors attempt to 'rethink the region': both in an abstract sense and in a more concrete operationalization. In this reformu lation, the region may be thought of as being similar to a doily, with connecting links and holes-both of which constitute the whole. Looking at the growth and decline, success and failure within a region are vitally important to understanding the processes that create the region.

Having argued that regions should not be thought of as statistically or administratively convenient constructs, the authors draw upon a set of research projects carried out by separate teams, initially all based at the Open University (these were led by the three main authors, as well as Linda

McDowell and Chris Hamnett). Here, it is argued that the particular national and local growth models (note that the

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