Managing the Unmanageable: Stakeholder Involvement in Creating and Managing Places and Their Brands

This discussion is driven by my disillusionment with current stakeholder theory and extant research on place branding, especially the treatment in both areas of matters relating to the manner in which locations, images and perceptions of them, and place brands are generated, (re)shaped, governed and challenged internally and externally. Through this analysis and the empirical research programme spanning a decade that it reports, I seek to bring the two lines of academic thought together in order to make sense of and theorize the difficulties with which processes of creation and recreation of high-technology locations, their images and brands are fraught, by involving and coordinating internal and external stakeholder constituencies with a stake in such place branding initiatives. The empirical research reported here demonstrates the potential for considering entrepreneurship, institutional and cultural entrepreneurship in particular, as a solution to seemingly intractable difficulties in managing multiple and frequently unmanageable stakeholder constituencies in such processes. As suggested in later sections in this chapter, such an approach may rest upon the ‘intellectual prowess’ and ‘persuasive capabilities’ of key individuals and institutions — acting as cultural entrepreneurs and collective cultural entrepreneurs — best positioned to mediate entrepreneurial and local resources for purposes of place creation and management, successful place image generation and effective place branding.