Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 1
·
May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
127
In this sense, the Bay of Kotor has entrepreneurial potential, conditional to the
development of institutional and organizational incentives for innovation, whereby
entrepreneurship can be equated with investment; that is, obtaining capital to be invested in
existing enterprises or in the establishment of new businesses (Knox 1995). Beyond these
cultural and political tensions, it would be reasonable to say that in a number of cases
‘entrepreneurs must have known that they were dealing with corrupt rulers, bureaucratic
buck-passing and legal wrangling that brings out much that can go wrong in the relationship
between bureaucracy and politics in contemporary democratic society ’ (Pardo 2009: 105). In
other words, lack of sanction from state institutions produces new political connections and
networks that act as mechanisms for the ‘legal’ adaptation of new settlements and of the
settlers involved in the reproduction of the local social and economic life. For example, a law
passed in the early 1990s forbids the sale of land to foreigners, with the exception of
completed residential or commercial buildings. Bearing in mind such legislation, new
entrepreneurs started businesses in association with local investors (citizens of the state) who
were interested in buying or selling land. The issue of land transactions has changed with the
‘explosion of the real-estate market’ in Montenegro in 2001, when a new law granted
foreigners who are legal owners of firms or land the same access to the land market as
enjoyed by the citizens of the state. This raises issues of legal and political responsibility,
particularly in relation to the way in which the actions of those who rule and make laws
affects the situation on the ground.
The significance of people’s actions brings out an atmosphere of urban regime,
making particularly useful urban anthropological research in an attempt to understand the
connections between entrepreneurship, the local context and the politics of business. Proving
to be a useful tool for investigating two leading groups — that is, the members of local
government and the owners of private businesses — the empirical research addresses the
development of an efficient system of city government which became part of an effective
partnership between private and public areas. These changes have opened up new directions
in making of public polices an instrument of power in shaping the urban market; but they
have also proved to be a mechanism for promoting efficiency and effectiveness. In this line,
these policies can be seen as political phenomena (see Shore and Wright 1997) and modern
forms of governance in contemporary society.
In the light of
contested political spaces, urban anthropology today highlights a
dynamic field of competition (for ‘symbolic capital’; see Bourdieu 1977) between local
