Soft spaces and soft outcomes: Experiences from City Strategy on local partnership working and measures of success

ADAM, Duncan and Green, Anne E (2016) Soft spaces and soft outcomes: Experiences from City Strategy on local partnership working and measures of success. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 48 (8). pp. 1514-1531. ISSN 0308-518X

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This article uses the concepts of ‘soft spaces’ and ‘soft outcomes’ previously developed in relation to the study of local economic development and planning and applies them to the related, but not identical, field of localised welfare-to-work initiatives. The specific example of the City Strategy initiative in Great Britain provides evidence of these concepts in action. This initiative foregrounded the importance of local partnership working whereby various stakeholders joined together to operate in soft space to achieve commonly agreed goals. The article considers how local partnerships operate in soft space and the appropriate measures of success to be used when assessing the efficacy of their interventions. It is argued that both ‘soft outcomes’ and ‘hard outcomes’ can be used to understand success; but that assessment of soft spaces only in terms of ‘hard outcomes’ is far from comprehensive

Item Type:	Article
Faculty:	School of Business, Leadership and Economics > Business, Management and Marketing
Depositing User:	Library STORE team
Date Deposited:	06 Apr 2020 15:19
Last Modified:	24 Feb 2023 13:59
URI:	https://eprints.staffs.ac.uk/id/eprint/6293

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