| Summary: | Regeneration is a ubiquitous feature of the contemporary British state. Research, despite devoting much time to exploration of outcomes and effects, so far has neglected the mechanisms of the process itself. This thesis addresses this by charting developments in two marginal English coalfields over a period of 25 years. The coalfields provide a convenient site for the investigation of regeneration as they offer multiple critical sites and exhibit in particularly acute forms the effects of changing relationships between the central and the local state and thus exemplify the wider relationships between the state, the market and the locality. The choice of the coalfields in North West Leicestershire and East Kent as case studies was informed by their position in the coal mining industry at the beginning of the period of its major restructuring, the then recent evaluation on the recovery of the coalfields (Beatty et al., 2005) and their location in relation to national "identity" projects (e.g. the National Forest). The thesis employs the extended case method as outlined by Burawoy. On the basis of extensive archive research of local government documentation, semi-structured interviews with policy makers and civil society actors and a 6-month observation period in the Kent coalfield an understanding of regeneration as a multi-dimensional social process is delineated. Through the use of Bourdieu's notion of the field and different forms of capital (1984, 1986) the thesis offers an examination of regeneration as a sequence of contests in the economic, social and symbolic repositioning of localities in the social space. The combination of Bourdieu's and Burawoy's concepts allows exploring the systematicity of the regeneration process through the lens of place. It thus provides a framework for the analysis the spatially and temporally contingent outcomes of (1) processes of legitimisation, (2) the production of specific sets of social relations and (3) the operation of symbolic power in the context of different regeneration regimes.
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