Economic restructuring

As cities experience a loss of manufacturing jobs and growth of services, sociologist Saskia Sassen affirms that a widening of the social hierarchy occurs where high-level, high-income, salaried professional jobs expands in the service industries alongside a greater incidence of low-wage, low-skilled jobs, usually filled by immigrants and minorities. A "missing middle" eventually develops in the wage structure. Several effects of this social polarization include the increasing concentration of poverty in large U.S. cities, the increasing concentration of black and Hispanic populations in large U.S. cities, and distinct social forms such as the underclass, informal economy, and entrepreneurial immigrant communities. Wages and unionization rates for manufacturing jobs also decline. One other qualitative dimension involves the feminization of the job supply as more and more women enter the labor force usually in the service sector. Both costs and benefits are associated with economic restructuring. Greater efficiency, job creation, gentrification, and enhanced national competitiveness are associated with social exclusion and inclusion. City youth are also affected such as in New York City. The declines in education, health care, and social services and the dearth of jobs for those with limited education and training along with the decay of public environments for outdoor play and recreation have all contributed to fewer autonomous outdoor play or "hanging out" places for young people. This in turn affects their gross motor development, cultural build-up, and identity construction. Children become prisoners of home relying on television and other outlets for companionship. Contemporary urban environments restricts the opportunities for children to forge and negotiate peer culture or acquire necessary social skills. Overall, their ecologies have eroded in recent years brought about by global restructuring. ==Institutional arrangements==

When the 1973 oil crisis affected the world capitalist economy, economic restructuring was used to remedy the situation by geographically redistributing production, consumption, and residences. City economies across the globe moved from goods-producing to service-producing outlets. Breakthroughs in transportation and communications made industrial capital much more mobile. Soon, producer services emerged as a fourth basic economic sector where routine low-wage service employment moved to low-cost sites and advanced corporate services centralized in cities. Altogether, these institutional arrangements buttressed by improved technology reflect the interconnectedness and internationalization of firms and economic processes. Consequently, capital, goods, and people rapidly flow across borders. Another shift in institutional arrangement involves public resources. As economic restructuring encourages high-technology service and knowledge-based economies, massive public de-investment results. Across many parts of the U.S. and the industrialized Western nations, steep declines in public outlays occur in housing, schools, social welfare, education, job training, job creation, child care, recreation, and open space. To remedy these cutbacks, privatization is installed as a suitable measure. Though it leads to some improvements in service production, privatization leads to less public accountability and greater unevenness in the distribution of resources. With this reform in privatizing public services, neoliberalism has become the ideological platform of economic restructuring. Free market economic theory has dismantled Keynesian and collectivists’ strategies and promoted the Reagan and Thatcher politics of the 1980s. Soon free trade, flexible labor, and capital flight are used from Washington D.C. to London to Moscow. Moreover, economic restructuring requires decentralization as states hand down power to local governments. Where the federal government focuses on mainly warfare-welfare concerns, local governments focus on productivity. Urban policy reflects this market-oriented shift from once supporting government functions to now endorsing businesses. ==Geographic impact==

Urban landscapes especially in the U.S. have significantly altered in response to economic restructuring. Cities such as Baltimore, Detroit, St. Louis and others face population losses which result in thousands of abandoned homes, unused buildings, and vacant lots, contributing to urban decay. Such transformations frustrate urban planning and revitalization, fostering deviance in the forms of drug-related activity and vagrancy. Older, compact, industrial U.S. cities have been rendered obsolete. Urban spaces become playgrounds for the urban gentry, wastelands for low-paid service workers, and denizens for the underground economy. In some areas, gentrification projects have caused displacement of poverty-stricken residents. Even housing markets respond to economic restructuring with decaying housing stocks, escalating housing prices, depleting tax base, changes in financing, and reduction in federal support for housing. Soon, spatial divisions among wealthy and poor households exacerbate. High-order services, an expanding sector in the industrialized world, become spatially concentrated in a relative small number of large metropolitan areas, particularly in suburban office agglomerations. ==Meaning==

In cultural terms, economic restructuring has been associated with postmodernity as its counterpart concerning flexible accumulation. Additionally, the term carries with it three core themes: historical, radical rupture into post-industrial economic order; priority of economic forces over social/political forces; and structure over agency where the process is independent of human will, as it takes place according to economic logic (Logan & Swanstrom 1990). In addition, economic restructuring demonstrates the increasing complex and human-capital intensive modern society in Western nations. ==See also==