Making sense of variety in place leadership: the case of England’s smart cities

Making sense of variety in place leadership: the case of England’s smart cities. Regional Studies. There is rising interest in cities becoming ‘smart’ knowledge-oriented economies by prioritizing more digitally enabled modes of production and service delivery. Whilst the prevalence of these new organizational forms is well understood, the way that leadership agency is exercised (i.e., the actors involved and their modalities of action) is not. Drawing on new empirical data and sense-making methodology, the paper reveals discursive patterns in how public agencies, private firms and communities ‘see’ and ‘do’ leadership within these place-based contexts, and concludes that success in exploiting the social and spatial dynamics of ‘smart’ development lies in understanding actors’ assumptions about commercial and social gain.