From Entrepreneurialism to Social Regulation: Nashville’s Business Elite and Local Education

The business elite in Nashville, Tennessee has recently increased its level of engagement in local educational policy by promoting the restructuring of the educational process and supporting funding level increases. Existing research on the political economy of local education includes Clarence Stone’s notion of “civic capacity,” which emphasizes the involvement of multiple local stakeholders in education reform, and Louis Mirón and Mickey Lauria’s work on how business-dominated “entrepreneurial coalitions” influence urban education. Building on that literature, this article takes a socio-spatial approach to the involvement of Nashville’s business elites in local education by investigating how cities are increasingly responsible for “social regulation” in the context of the geographic process of “rescaling.” Such rescaling has triggered a reorganization of Nashville’s business elite, which has mobilized internal political resources through collective coordination while institutionalizing its policy initiatives and engagement with education. Policies of the local business elite have emerged over time—from an emphasis on strict entrepreneurial policies to the incorporation of social concerns—in a complementary relationship with the national state.