Conventional approaches to local economic development are failing to address deepening polarisation both within and between city regions across advanced capitalist economies. At the same time, austerity urbanism, particularly in the UK, presents challenges for urban authorities facing reduced budgets to meet increased demands on public services. Municipalities are beginning to experiment with creative responses to these crises, such as taking more interventionist and entrepreneurial roles in developing local economies, generating alternative sources of revenue or financialising existing assets. Rooted in a Polanyian perspective and building on the concepts of the entrepreneurial state and grounded city, we identify an embryonic alternative approach – what we call ‘entrepreneurial municipalism’ – as a policy pathway towards resolving enduring socioeconomic problems where neoliberal urban-entrepreneurial strategies have failed. We situate entrepreneurial municipalism as one strand in an assemblage of new municipalist interventions, between radical urban social movements and more neoliberal strategies such as financialised municipal entrepreneurialism. Drawing on original research on the Liverpool City Region, we explore how local authorities are working with social enterprises to harness place-based assets in ways which de-commodify land, labour and capital and re-embed markets back into society. Finally, we draw upon Polanyi as our guide to disentangle differences in approach amongst divergent forms of municipalist statecraft and to critically evaluate entrepreneurial municipalism as a possible trajectory towards the grounded city.

This paper offers conceptual development of diverse economies thinking in terms of its relationship to antagonism. Rather than seeing antagonism as unhelpfully fuelling capitalocentric thinking, closing down possibilities and restricting our ability to conceptualise how we might live well together, we argue it can usefully recognise and engage with problematic forms of power and domination. Building on calls for a closer engagement of community economies thinking with wider anti-capitalist praxis, the paper explores how social and solidarity economy (SSE) practices sometimes reproduce, sometimes challenge and build alternatives to the darker, constraining, entrenched and durable forms of power that attempt to shape, obstruct and obliterate -but fail to determine -attempts to create better worlds. The paper develops familiar conceptualisations of social enterprise, the social economy, and solidarity economies, before offering the novel concept of the antagonistic economy which, we argue, can be a site from which angry opposition to constraining power relations can generate a more productive politics of possibility. We develop our conception of the antagonistic economy with a discussion of taking back labour, through recovered factories, and taking back land, through community land trusts.

The article examines young people’s attitudes towards enterprise, comparing prosperous and deprived neighbourhoods and two UK cities. Corpus linguistics analysis identified multi-layered attitudes and variations in how place prosperity and city affect attitudes. High interest in enterprise was associated with weaker place attachment and reduced social embeddedness. Young adults from prosperous neighbourhoods delegitimised other’s enterprises; the ‘deprived’ sub-corpus included more fluid notions of enterprise legitimacy. Liverpool accounts contained stronger discursive threads around self-determination; Bradford accounts included greater problematising of entrepreneurship versus employment. An original Multipartite Model of Attitudes to Enterprise is presented consisting of four layers: attitudes to enterprise generally, attitudes legitimising particular forms of enterprise, attitudes to enterprise related to place and attitudes to enterprise related to self. The conclusion explains why policies and research need to be fine-grained and avoid uni-dimensional conceptualisations of attitudes to enterprise, or deterministic arguments relating entrepreneurship to specific types of places or backgrounds.

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<p>This article is concerned with how we theorize heterogeneous and multilevel contexts as they intersect in place, whilst prioritizing the role of entrepreneurial action in shaping context and driving change. We analyze an emerging stream of context research based upon varieties of capitalism institutional theory, drawing on theoretical developments from political economy and geography fields. This sheds light on how ‘varieties of entrepreneurship’ risks reproducing static and mechanistic studies, which instead of meeting the promise of diversifying contexts, sets nations on path dependent trajectories that sideline possibilities for entrepreneurial agency. We suggest Polanyian inspired variegated capitalism as providing potential for understanding the interrelated, multilayered, heterogeneous contexts of entrepreneurship. </p>