Title: Teaching Case: Can Smithtown Make ‘Something Out of Nothing’?
Abstract:Smithtown, MO is based on an actual town in Missouri, but names and details have been anonymized. This version of the case is posted without its detailed endnotes, so the town cannot be identified (th...Smithtown, MO is based on an actual town in Missouri, but names and details have been anonymized. This version of the case is posted without its detailed endnotes, so the town cannot be identified (the footnoted version with endnotes can be distributed after the in-class discussion). This case sets out Smithtown’s situation circa 1965, and that situation is bleak. America is shifting to a service economy; manufacturing and agriculture are shrinking on a relative (and in some cases, absolute) basis. Summarized simplistically, Smithtown is a low educational attainment community in what is shifting to become a high educational attainment economy. For our purposes, we assume the town is evaluating a move towards creating a visitor-based economy (VBE) (e.g., tourism, sports, gambling, themed festivals, etc.). Its only real assets are: A small local tourism industry, a location within driving distance of several larger cities, as well as cheap land and cheap labor. So, can Smithtown pull itself up by its bootstraps to create a vibrant VBE sector? And if so, what might it look like? (For purposes of the class discussion, we ignore other potential non-VBE strategies.) Or, alternatively, is the town destined to tread water and/or decline, as so many smaller American towns have done? In the in-class discussion, we will reveal what really happened and look at Smithtown today.Read More
Publication Year: 2020
Publication Date: 2020-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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