Progress 11/20/13 to 09/30/14OutputsTarget Audience: The target audience are leaders of multiple diverse constituencies involved in regional governance processes in California, particularly in the Central and San Joaquin Valley. This regional leadership includes: business leaders and regional economic development actors; public sector leaders, including local, county and metropolitan planning organization elected official and professional staff; leaders of local labor unions and central labor councils; community, non-profit and faith-based social equity advocates and social service providers; and representatives from key philanthropic entities funding in the region. In addition, target audiences have included various constituencies involved in regional research, policy, or governance processes in other areas of the country, who might be interested in findings from this research. Specific presentations in the period under review include: 2014: "Shelved: How Wages and Working Conditions for California's Food Retail Workers Have Declined as the Industry has Thrived", invited panel speaker, Food & Labor: Forging a Truly Sustainable Food Policy Agenda for California in 2015, panel discussion, Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California Berkeley, October 1 "Knowing Together, Growing Together: Equity, Growth and Community in a Changing Economy", invited speaker, National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis, University of Maynooth, Ireland, September 15. "Epistemologies and Collaborative Methodologies" & "Engaged Careers and the Academy", invited workshop presenter and facilitator, Center for Collaborative Research for an Equitable California, UC Santa Cruz, August 21. "Organization of Economic Space and Social Justice", invited speaker, Rural Development Leadership Network, Davis, CA, June 4. "Regional Impacts of the Sacramento Region Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grant: Regional Opportunity Index", invited speaker, Sacramento Area Council of Government, May 16. "University + Public + Labor", invited moderator and panel speaker, conference on The Humanities and Changing Conceptions of Work, University of California Berkeley, May 9. "Labor and Health: Working Toward a Healthier Food Chain", invited panel speaker, Berkeley Food Institute Lecture Series, UC Berkeley, April 7. "Impacts of a Minimum Wage Increase on Prices and Employment", invited presentation to Davis Minimum Wage Coalition, March 15. 2013: "Just Growth: Inclusion and Prosperity in America's Metropolitan Regions", invited plenary speaker, SEIU Local 1000, Real Time Strategic Change Meeting (400 person audience), San Diego, CA, December 13 "Just Growth: Inclusion and Prosperity in America's Metropolitan Regions", invited speaker, United Food and Connercial Workers Unions, Western States Council, Executive Board meeting, Phoenix, AZ, December 11 "Just Growth or Just Growth?: Inclusion and Prosperity in America's Metropolitan Regions", invited plenary speaker, Fund For Our Economic Future, Northeast Ohio. Three plenary presentations in Cleveland and Akron, December 3. "Just Growth or Just Growth?: Inclusion and Prosperity in America's Metropolitan Regions", invited plenary speaker, Step Up Silicon Valley and Santa Clara University Economics Department, Santa Clara University, November 19. Changes/Problems: I have accepted a new faculty position at the University of California, Santa Cruz, starting April 1, 2015. I have resigned from my position at UC Davis as of March 31, 2015. While I will continue the research described in this project, my understanding is that I will be unable to continue it under an AES appointment at my new campus. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided? Professional development activities included the following presentations at a national conferences on elements of the research conducted in this project: "Whither Resilient Regions: Equity, Growth and Community in a Changing Economy", Panel Speaker, Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, Tampa, FL, April 9, 2014 How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest? I have given at least 12 presentations during this review period to specific audiences that are communities of interest, including: business leaders and regional economic development actors; public sector leaders, including local, county and metropolitan planning organization elected official and professional staff; leaders of local labor unions and central labor councils; community, non-profit and faith-based social equity advocates and social service providers; and representatives from key philanthropic entities funding in the region. The specific presentations are listed above in "Target Audience" section. We have also negotiated for the final book being published by University of California Press to be available free in its eBook form, as part of a new open access publishing initiative being developed by UC Press known as Luminos ( ). This will help significantly in ensuring the results are disseminated to those community and advocacy constituencies for whom the purchase price of the book may be a barrier. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals? The research to data exploring mechanisms linking economic growth and social equity has raised some compelling but preliminary qualitative evidence (as well as some indirect quantitative evidence) that the diversity and dynamism of regional knowledge communities is an important process shaping equitable growth. The next step is to attempt to develop quantitative measures of the diversity and density of regional knowledge communities in the largest 200 metropolitan regions in the U.S., and then explore econometrically the relationship between these measures of 'epistemic communities' and equitable growth. The result would be both the development of new data on regional knowledge communities, and new theoretical insights on a potentially important dynamic of economic governance. This next step of the research will combine social network analysis and algorithmic textual analysis, to develop quantitative measures of the density and diversity of regional knowledge communities, using information available on public web-sites of significant institutions and organizations in the largest 200 metropolitan regions in the country. Since there is no way to reliably determine the geographic location of organizations based on an automated search of web-sites, the first step thus involves a labor-intensive process of developing a database of the contact information and web-sites of all major institutions and organizations in each metropolitan region, in the following categories (from the associated data-sources). • City and County governments (from the Census of Government) • Chambers of Commerce (U.S. Chamber of Commerce membership directory, and automated google-map search) • Foundations (from Council on Foundations) • Non-Profit Organizations (From the National Center for Charitable Statistics) • Central Labor Councils (from AFL-CIO) • Unions (from US Department of Labor Office of Labor-Management Standards) The specific number of organizations will vary by region, depending on the number of organizations in each category and the size thresholds and categories we determine for the non-profit organizations (which would number in the thousands if we included them all). We estimate developing a database of 2-300 sites for each of the 200 metropolitan regions, for a total database of 40-60,000 organizations. With the contact information for all these institutions and organizations, we will then identify the correct organizational web-site for each organization for which the web-site isn't already included in the organizational database, which is a substantial portion of the local governments, and all of the non-profits and unions from these data sources. We will then use two distinct web-crawler applications, building from the existing SocSciBot ( ): • The first will identify all intra-regional web links between the institutions and organizations in each region, enabling detailed social network analysis; • The second will download all text from these web-sites, enabling detailed algorithmic textual analysis. Each of these are briefly described here: Social Network Analysis: Our first step in the analysis will be to analyze the validity of the data for the 17 detailed regional case studies that we have conducted in our qualitative analysis. By examining the relationship between the web-based organizational linkages data with what we know from our detailed interview and case study data, we will be able to make an assessment of the ability of this web-based data to accurately reflect the types of inter-organizational communication that emerged from our in-depth interviews. Previous research over the past 10 years has shown such web-based linkage data to be a reasonably valid measure of social networks and organizational ties--despite the various weaknesses of the data--so we anticipate this to be true in our case as well. After the anticipated validation, we we will then conduct a full data collection exercise as well as analysis. One novel aspect of our data collection is that we will seek to development measures of both the density and diversity of intra-regional organizational ties - the first essentially measures whether many groups exist and are "on the same page" while the latter measures whether groups that differ by interest and constituency are connected. This is essentially the equivalent of bonding and bridging social networks familiar to those who study labor markets; as is known, bonding can lead to counter-productive "in-group" bias while bridging can lead to mutually beneficial outcomes. Some of our econometric work considering political variables and their impact on growth sustainability has suggested that distinguishing between these two sorts of social capital is key - and it is not frequently done in the literature. Algorithmic textual and content analysis: This method uses text as data, and develops automated methods for analyzing large sets of text. Our goal here is to identify the extent to which different types of organizations refer to similar issues (e.g. growth, equity), and the conceptual language they use in writing about those issues. Automatic analysis of text can help with the process of classifying texts (e.g. developing categories of texts and classifying documents into those categories) and developing quantitative measures of similarities and differences in the use of terms, conceptual categories, and ideological framing. We will be seeking additional funding for this portion of the research, which is substantially more complicated than the social network analysis, but we expect to make preliminary progress in this area in an initial grant. We will use these quantitative measures emerging from our social network analysis (and preliminary measures from the algorithmic textual analysis) and measure the extent to which they are correlated with the quantitative measures of social equity and economic growth (and growth sustainability) from 1980 to 2010 that we have developed in our previous work. The downside of our approach is that the network density measures will be from the end of the time period not before - and could themselves have been affected by the growth trajectory. There is no easy way around this issue and the research would set a baseline for future work, including seeing whether there are non-economic correlates with the current network measures in the current period that were collected in early periods (such as degree of metropolitan fragmentation by municipality, residential segregation, etc.). Expected outcomes: Overall, the outcomes from this research will include a substantial new dataset of intra-regional organizational linkages, and large texts associated with those different organizations. This will enable substantially more detailed analysis and measurement of the density and diversity of regional epistemic communities. These measures can, in turn, be both tested to find long-term correlates and to see the potential impact on economic growth and sustainability. We expect this research will contribute to our theoretical and empirical understanding of the regional governance processes that contribute to equitable growth. ImpactsWhat was accomplished under these goals? The overall purpose of this project is to investigate processes of diverse knowledge construction in California's regions, and strengthen our understanding of the processes that link social equity and economic growth at a regional scale in the state. There are three specific goals of the project: • To develop a clearer understanding of patterns of social equity and regional economic growth throughout the state, through quantitative documentation in all of California's metropolitan regions. • To analyze innovative processes of regional knowledge sharing and social equity organizing across diverse constituencies in the state. • To identify and support opportunities for strengthening diverse regional epistemic communities that link social equity and economic growth. In the past year, my focus has been on developing a deeper understanding of the role of diverse and dynamic epistemic communities in shaping patterns of regional equity and regional growth. This has resulted in four major publications being accepted for publication. These include: • A paper published in the journal Urban Studies, examining factors associated with the length of growth spells in metropolitan regions in the U.S., including 19 regions in California. We found that growth duration is positively related to a number of factors one might expect, including lower levels of reliance on manufacturing and a higher proportion of the population with middle education levels. However, we also find that the length of growth spells is strongly related to lower levels of metropolitan income inequality and to measures of social and spatial segregation, suggesting that more equitable and more integrated regions are better able to sustain growth. • A paper published in the Journal of Urban Affairs, providing an in-depth exploration of three case studies that have been able to either sustain growth and equity over time, and/or that responded to external shocks in a way that suggests resilience. While these specific case studies were outside of California (Salt Lake City, Oklahoma City, and San Antonio), the lessons seem applicable in other places, and indeed in the first submission of the paper we included Silicon Valley as one of the case studies. We argued that there are different pathways to growth and equity in each case but that all of them can be characterized as having relatively strong and diverse regional knowledge arenas where data is shared and common understandings developed across diverse constituencies. While the sample is limited, the role of a diverse and dynamic epistemic community does seem to be exactly the sort of mechanism that might keep fates common and regions resilient. • A paper accepted in the Journal of Planning Education and Research, exploring the role of conflict and collaboration in shaping patterns of growth and equity, contrasting the case of Fresno and San Antonio, and exploring when conflict yields new alliances and when it produced stalement. We argued that one particularly important factor was a commitment to 'principled conflict', in which conflict includes a commitment to the idea that struggles should be waged with integrity and that it is possible to directly address real conflicts in goals, objectives, and values with opposing actors in a way that also recognizes the need to sustain long-term relationships, despite the parties' differences. • A full book manuscript accepted at the University of California Press. The book argues that even as income inequality and political polorization has been occurring on a national level, a new set of realities is becoming clear in America's metropolitan regions: first, that inequity is, in fact, bad for economic growth; second, that bringing together the concerns of equity and growth requires concerted local action; and, third, that the fundamental building block for doing this is the creation of diverse and dynamic epistemic (or knowledge) communities. The book includes both quantitative analysis of the largest 192 regions in the country (including 19 in California) and in-depth case studies of 11 regions (including 3 in California), to make this case. PublicationsType:Book ChaptersStatus:PublishedYear Published:2014Citation:Benner, Chris and Manuel Pastor, 2014 Knowing Together, Growing Together: Epistemic Communities and Equitable Growth in Conway, Maureen and Robert Giloth, eds, Connecting People to Work: Workforce Intermediaries and Sector Strategies (New York: American Assembly)
Type:Book ChaptersStatus:Awaiting PublicationYear Published:2015Citation:Manuel Pastor and Chris Benner (2015) Fostering an Inclusive Metropolis: Equity, Growth and Community in Wachter, Susan and Lei Ding, Building Shared Prosperity in Americas Communities (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press)
Type:Journal ArticlesStatus:AcceptedYear Published:2015Citation:Benner, Chris and Manuel Pastor (2015) "Brother, Can You Spare Some Time? Sustaining Prosperity and Social Inclusion in Americas Metropolitan Regions Urban Studies [Volume and Number TBD]
Type:Journal ArticlesStatus:AcceptedYear Published:2015Citation:Benner, Chris and Manuel Pastor (2015) Whither Resilient Regions: Equity, Growth and Community, Journal of Urban Affairs [Volume and Number TBD]
Type:Journal ArticlesStatus:AcceptedYear Published:2015Citation:Collaboration, Conflict and Community Building at the Regional Scale: Implications for Advocacy Planning, Journal of Planning Education and Research, [Volume and Number TBD]
Type:BooksStatus:AcceptedYear Published:2015Citation:Benner, Chris and Manuel Pastor (2015) Knowing Together, Growing Together: Linking Equity, Growth and Community (Berkeley: UC Press)
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