Re-imagining Enterprising Activities in the Liverpool City-region: A Shift from a Syndicalist Past to an Entrepreneurial Future

Liverpool city-region is a place that has undergone major transformation. In recent years a number of prestige initiatives have been attracted to the city, and alongside physical regeneration this has led to a significant increase in tourism and consumer spending. The city-region has been an economically distressed place in which its population has suffered from social and economic decline and tagged as ‘militant’ and even work-shy. Yet even in a rejuvenated Liverpool there are many different entrepreneurial narratives. One is the pursuit of (often desperate) survival strategies by inner urban communities and their engagement in economic activities that may be read simultaneously as resistance or enterprising. Here is an epitome of the relationship between entrepreneur and worker or entrepreneur as worker, in a dynamic form that provides an understanding wider than the traditional notion of enterprise as heroic or utopian. The proposition here will challenge existing theories of entrepreneurship by arguing that the syndicalist character of the Liverpool city-region is an important contributory factor that while shaped in the past, has provided a rationale for engagement in enterprising activities today. This is leading to a different rationale to engage in enterprising activity not simply founded on profit maximization but in the way resistance is created to structures that often overwhelm both places and the entrepreneurs in them. This paper considers the interrelationships between entrepreneurship and the Liverpool city-region economy and how the future of its enterprise may be cast