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Roberta Garner 26 Learning from Chicago Who built the seven gates of Thebes? The books list the names of kings. Was it kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone? ——Bertolt Brecht, A Worker Reads History, p. 109 A NEW ACCUMULATION regime is transforming industrial cities. In this volume, we are not developing a one-size-fits-all “New Chicago paradigm,” but opening a conversation about change in industrial cities, the causes of similaritiesanddifferencesintheeffectofthenewaccu mulation regime, and the ways in which actors contest and negotiate responses to converging forces. SECTION I: WHAT HAPPENED? A NEW ACCUMULATION REGIME, 1960–2005 The five converging forces that organize this volume are part of an underlying process of social change, the onset of a new accumulation regime within capitalism, a trend that follows three major phases in capitalism: nineteenthcentury industrial capitalism, the period of instability during the early twentieth century, and the “long boom” of the post-World War II years. The new phase is variously characterized by termssuchaspostmodern,neo-liberal,postindustrial , flexible capitalism, globalization, and the information society, depending on whether economic , political, cultural, or technological elements of the overall transformation are highlighted .Theshiftbecameevidentbythe1970s— certainly by the 1980s—with increased transnational flows of capital and people, government withdrawal from welfare and regulatory functions , decreasing unionization and labor organization , a resurgent emphasis on ethnic and religious identity, the appearance of new information technologies, the disintegration of large firms into global webs, and the upward redistribution of wealth in many developed societies following the post-World War II period of leveling . All countries and cities are affected by these processes, but in different ways depending on globalregion,pasthistory,andtheactionsof individuals and organizations (Beauregard 1989). This cluster of changes is almost certainly more than a short-term fluctuation and it may herald a transformation of the magnitude of the Industrial Revolution. The technological basis of the transformation contributes to the irreversibility of the changes, and political forces make it unlikely that there will be a return to the post-WorldWarIIwelfarestatesintheiroriginal form. The authors of Chapter 1 argue that this transformation is creating a totally new form, a hyper-industrial mode of production and technology , and this may indeed turn out to be the case in historical perspective. In an accumulation regime shift, major interrelated changes occur in technology, state– economy relationships, forms of enterprise, capital–labor relations, and global structures of power. Each change in turn triggers further changes in technology, the role of the state, capital–laborrelations,theglobalpoliticaleconomy ,andformsofenterprise,thuscreatingacascade of changes that are unlikely to be reversed. The totality of system change remains within 306 Roberta Garner that larger entity called “industrial capitalism,” defined by a market economy and private ownership of productive enterprises. In the “postindustrial ” era, industrial technology means the penetration of machinery into all areas of life, including intellectual production and information processing (Mandel 1999). Both structure and agency are present in the transformation. On the agency or instrumentalist side, political decisions are made and implemented by powerful elites. In the instrumental perspective, emphasis is on employer choice to introduce new technologies and move production to low-wage and nonunion locations, as well as pressure from finance capital to deregulate controls on transnational capital flows. The Thatcher and Reagan administrations made key decisions to privatize enterprises, deregulate markets, and reduce social-service spending. Alternatively, from the structural perspective, these choices of employers and governments were conditioned responses to fundamental contradictions that became apparent in the post–World War II accumulation regime. The model of the welfare state and national economic development encountered a decline in profitability when workers increased their share of the economic pie. The choice to initiate the neo-liberal model was determined by this underlying structural problem. Both elites and ordinary citizens of cities and metropolitan areas experience the new accumulation regime as an external, irreversible, structural force, but hope it can be managed at the local level. The tension between apparently determined macro-level forces associated with the new accumulation regime and a limited but openrangeofpossibilitiesatthemicrolevelgives the new Chicago an unpredictable, ambiguous character. The effect of the new accumulation regime, although not a zero-sum game, produces unequaloutcomes .Actorsareconstrainedbystructuresformedinthepast .Thesestructuresarenot identical in all locales affected by current trends and forces; therefore, these multiple microdiversities , together with the local, ongoing interests of agents, make change different, uneven, and unequal at the local level. Actors respond to what they perceive as trends creating new structuresthatconstrainfurtheractionormakeitless effective in coping with the flow of events. SECTION II: THE PAST...

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