Bob Jessop

Born in 1946 and emeritus professor of sociology at Lancaster University, Jessop is the most influential state theorist in the contemporary Marxist tradition. From Poulantzas and Gramsci he developed the strategic-relational approach: the state is neither a thing nor a subject but a social relation, an uneven terrain that favours some strategies and actors over others and is reorganised in each crisis. State Theory (1990) fixed that framework.

The Future of the Capitalist State (2002) described the shift from the Keynesian national welfare state to the Schumpeterian workfare regime, competitive and innovation-oriented, in which cities and regions become units of economic competition. That analysis, together with his work on scales and governance, is the basis on which Neil Brenner built New State Spaces and on which urban entrepreneurialism is understood: the city competes because the state has set it to compete.

He has also written on cultural political economy, with Ngai-Ling Sum, and on the crises of financial capitalism. He is reproached for dense prose and a theory hard to apply; his influence on critical urban geography and governance studies is enormous, because he gives the word state a content urban studies usually take for granted.

Jessop also coined two terms urban geography uses daily. The hollowing out of the state describes how the national state loses powers upwards, to international institutions, and downwards, to regions and cities, while remaining the decisive actor. And metagovernance, the governance of governance, names the role it keeps: setting the rules of the game in which cities, firms and associations negotiate, which explains why decentralisation does not always mean more local autonomy.