Product Description
by Miriam Plavin-Masterman (Author)
Recent scholarship on institutional entrepreneurship highlights the kinship between for-profit entrepreneurship and the equally transformative innovation and initiative of entrepreneurs in the non-profit, community, and policy-activist fields. This expanded exploration of entrepreneurial potential has become important in the creative destruction-or, more accurately, "creative reclamation"-of abandoned or under-used industrial relics and urban space. This book explores case studies in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, where community groups have deployed or are attempting to deploy symbolism and narrative to re-purpose abandoned urban infrastructure into urban public spaces. The author combines interviews, document analysis, site visits, and census tract data to determine how Friends of the Park organizations successfully navigate institutional settings to create public spaces and manage the discourse around these proposed spaces. In-depth descriptions are an essential component of the process. If a certain kind of unsuccessful discourse theme (or successful one) exhibits itself in a large portion of the potential population, it will likely show in this small sample; if the discourse exhibits itself in a very small portion, it very unlikely that it will show. Small samples, in other words, are a wide-mesh net, convenient for catching the big themes.
Author Biography
Miriam Plavin-Masterman is an assistant professor in Worcester State University's business administration and economics department. She received a BSc in industrial/labor relations from Cornell University, an MBA from Dartmouth College, and an MA and PhD in sociology from Brown University. She studies how entrepreneurs reclaim abandoned spaces to make cities more livable. More specifically, she examines the discourse practices entrepreneurs engage in that help them sustain their projects over the long time periods in which they occur (often 10 years or more). In doing so, her research contributes to a better understanding of how these projects come to be, what impacts they have on the cities they are in, and other, later projects trying to emulate their success.
