Bloomberg's New York: Class and Governance in the Luxury City

Notes

281 notes introduction 1. This phrase is of course a play on the construction common to the titles of ceo biographies; for an example, see Slater 1999. 2. Scholars have addressed the articulation of neoliberalism with other processes, including environmental sustainability (Heynen et al. 2007), professionalization (Bondi and Laurie 2005), the construction of gender (di Leonardo 2006; Kingfisher 2002b; Morgen and Gonzales 2008; Wright 2006), racial or ethnic struggles (Dávila 2004; Gregory 1998; Maskovsky 2001), post-9/11 securitization (Ruben and Maskovsky 2008), and modernization (Wilson 2008b). 3. These include business trainers (Ong 2006), penal policy professionals (Wacquant 1999), and other elites (Harper 1998; Ho 2005; Larner and Butler 2007; Miyazaki 2007a, Miyazaki 2007b; Ong 2006; Peck 2005; Phelps, Power, and Wanjiru 2007; Riles 2004; Schwegler 2008; Shore and Nugent 2003; Strathern 2000; Ward 2003, 2004, 2007a; Zaloom 2006). 4. For various works outlining these critiques of class see Clark and Lipset 2001; Gibson-Graham, Resnick, and Wolff 2001; Joyce 1995; Laclau and Mouffe 2001; and Wood 1986. 5. To clarify my use of a related term, I will use “elite” to refer to the cross-class group formed by those who occupy powerful roles in economic, cultural, and political institutions. 6. The literature on intersectionality is too large to cite exhaustively. For some key works, see Andersen and Hill Collins 2007; Boellstorff 2007; Brodkin 2000; di Leonardo 1984; Hartigan 1999; McCall 2001; Mullings 1997; and Williams 1989. 7. This vein of scholarship also includes work showing how class, whiteness, and regional or urban identities are linked in mutually constitutive ways (Adams and Gorton; Durrenberger and Doukas 2008; Hartigan 1999); how spatial practices like home ownership and neighborhood “improvement” express class divisions among African Americans and other racial and ethnic minorities (Gregory 1998, 1999; Pattillo 1999; Taylor 2002b; Williams 1988); and how exclusionary spatial practices, such as the residences in gated communities or efforts at suburban secession, are linked to the formation of class and race differences (Davis 1992, 151–264; Low 2003). 8. The definition, coherence, and even the existence of a “new middle class” of professionals and managers have been the subject of a great deal of debate in the social 282 • notes to introduction sciences. For some key works advancing the concept, see Aronowitz 1979; Bruce-Biggs 1979; Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich 1971; Gouldner 1979; Mills 2002; Poulantzas 1978; and Wright 1985. See Smith 1996, 93–98, and Bell 1980 for critiques coming from very different theoretical perspectives. Much of the theoretical work on the new middle class conflates cultural attitudes, occupation, income, and status, a result of a multiplicity of understandings of class. Nonetheless, there are still theoretical and empirical reasons to believe that the twentieth century, and especially its second half, saw the growth of a relatively privileged stratum of salaried workers mediating between the capitalist class and the working class, whose labor involved either cultural or intellectual production or the management of the labor of others (Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich 1971; Wright 1985). This class is neither internally homogenous nor sharply distinct from other classes, nor is it constituted in isolation from other forms of identity and consciousness. My position is that the pmc concept serves a useful analytic purpose, allowing us to identify a social grouping, which, while diverse, complex, and difficult to define with theoretical and empirical precision, has nevertheless clearly become a marked and important presence in contemporary social life—and in particular, in contemporary urban life. 9. See Brenner 1997, 1999, 2001; Cox 1997; Herod and Wright 2002; Marston 2000; Sheppard and McMaster 2004; Smith 1992, 2000, 2008 [1984]; and Swyngedouw 1997. 10. See Friedmann 1995; Friedmann and Wolff 1982; Hannerz 1996, 127–139; Sassen 2001 [1991]; and Smith 2000. 11. For some examples of such work, see Beaverstock 2002, 2005; and Willis, Yeoh and Fakhri 2002. 12. For works that explicate and employ the notion of an urban imaginary, see Brash 2006a; Cinar and Bender 2007; di Leonardo 2006; Greenberg 2000; Huyssen 2008; King 2007, 1; Leitner, Peck, and Sheppard 2007b; LiPuma and Koelble 2005; Ruben 2001; Rutheiser 1996; Taylor 2002a; and Zukin et al. 1998. 13. A second such area was education reform, as Mayor Bloomberg, like many business leaders in the city, was concerned that the city’s educational system was failing to prepare students for “the demands of the 21st century, knowledge-based economy” (2004b). 14. To be clear, what I mean by political here is not what the term is usually taken to mean in popular...