An exciting new look at an old problem: the meaning of the city. This book offers the specialist and the general reader insight into the latest approaches to urban studies. In addition to a comprehensive Introduction, the editors provide an exciting array of essays, covering specific urban areas and more general theory concerning the development, management and use of the modern European city.

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The aim of this book is to extend the definition of management. "Management" is not an occupation of a small group of people formally denoted as managers: social life is subject to management all the time, at all places. This awareness is important to management scholars who, in order to understand management, need to understand culture, space and language, but equally to culture scholars who need to abandon the illusion that culture takes place in a niche safely protected from the issues of accounting, planning and controlling.
The book is intended in the first place for researchers and Ph.D. students in public administration and management, urban sociology, cultural geography, urban planning and political sciences.
In this context, we would like to specifically address those traits of the book that make it special and that represent our ambitions as the editors:
• It is a European book, in the sense that it addresses a variety of managerial and cultural practices across our continent, without making mechanical comparisons based on categories invented by researchers for the sole purpose of their study. Its ambition is to render the richness of local discourses, and at the same time provoking curiosity in "other people's" local discourses;
• It is a transdisciplinary book, which aims to combat the parochialism of disciplinary education that makes students illiterate in all but one genre of social science literature.
Barbara Czarniawska holds a Skandia Chair in Management at Gothenburg Research Institute, School of Economics and Commercial Law, Göteborg University, Sweden. Rolf Solli is professor of Management and head of Gothenburg Research Institute, School of Economics and Commercial Law, Göteborg University.