Economy

Critical Essays in Human Geography

Ron Martin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351159180
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Economic geographers have always argued that space is key to understanding the economy, that the processes of economic growth and development do not occur uniformly across geographic space, but rather differ in degree and form as between different nations, regions, cities and localities, with major implications for the geographies of wealth and welfare. This was true in the industrial phase of global capitalism, and is no less true in the contemporary era of post-industrial, knowledge-driven global capitalism. Indeed, the marked changes occurring in the structure and operation of the economy, in the sources of wealth creation, in the organisation of the firm, in the nature of work, in the boundaries between market and state, and in the regulation of the socio-economy, have stimulated an unprecedented wave of theoretical, conceptual and empirical enquiry by economic geographers. Even economists, who traditionally have viewed the economy in non-spatial terms, as existing on the head of the proverbial pin, are increasingly recognising the importance of space, place and location to understanding economic growth, technological innovation, competitiveness and globalisation. This collection of previously published work, though containing but a fraction of the huge explosion in research and publication that has occurred over the past two decades, seeks to convey a sense of this exciting phase in the intellectual development of the discipline and its importance in grasping the spatialities of contemporary economic life.

Part I
Conceptual Developments in Economic Geography

[1]
A perspective of economic geography

Allen J. Scott^*

Abstract

The paper opens with a statement on the social embeddedness of know ledge. The disciplinary situation and practices of economic geographers are reviewed in the light of this statement. The rise of a new geographical economics is noted, and its main thrust is summarized in terms of a description of the core model as formulated by Krugman. The geographers’ reception of the new geographical economics is described, and some key aspects of this reception are assessed. I then subject the core model itself to critical evaluation. Its claims about pecuniary externalities in the context of Chamberlinian competition provide a number of useful insights. However, I argue that the model is deficient overall in the manner in which it tackles the central problem of agglomeration. The discussion then moves on to consideration of the recent interest shown by many economic geographers in issues of culture. After a brief exposition of what this means for economic geography, I offer the verdict that this shift of emphasis has much to recommend it, but that in some of its more extreme versions it is strongly susceptible to the temptations of philosophical idealism and political voluntarism. In the final part of the paper, I attempt to pinpoint some of the major tasks ahead for economic geography in the phase of post-‘late capitalism’. I suggest, in particular, that a new cognitive map of capitalist society as a whole is urgently needed, and I offer some brief remarks about how its basic specifications might be identified.

Keywords: conceptual bases of economic geography, cultural turn, geographical economics, methodology, philosophy of geography

JEL classifications: R10, Z19

1. In search of perspective

In this paper, I attempt to evaluate a number of prominent claims put forward in recent years by both geographers and economists about the methods and scope of economic geography. Much of the paper revolves around two main lines of critical appraisal. First, I seek to the strong and weak points of geographical economics as it has been formulated by Paul Krugman and his co-workers (though I also acknowledge that geographical economics is now moving well beyond this initial point of departure). Second, I provide a critique of the version of economic geography that is currently being worked out by a number of geographers under the rubric of the cultural turn, and here I place special emphasis on what I take to be its peculiar obsession with evacuating the economic content from economic geography. On the basis of these arguments, I then make a brief effort to identify a viable agenda for economic geography based on an assessment of the central problems and predicaments of contemporary capitalism. This assessment leads me to the conclusion that the best bet for economic geographers today is to work out a new political economy of spatial development based on a full recognition of two main sets of circumstances: first, that the hard core of the capitalist economy remains focuscd on the dynamics of accumulation; second, that this hard core is irrevocably intertwined with complex socio-cultural forces, but also that it cannot be reduced to these same forces. In order to ground the line of argument that now ensues, we need at the outset to establish a few elementary principles about the production and evaluation of basic knowledge claims.

A large recent body of work in the theory of knowledge and social epistcmology has made us increasingly accustomed to the notion that research, reflection, and writing arc not so much pathways into the transcendental, as they are concrete social phenomena, forever rooted in the immanence of daily life. By the same token, knowledge is in practice a shifting patchwork of unstable, contested, and historically-contingent ideas shot through from beginning to end with human interests and apologetic meaning (Barnes, 1974; Rorty, 1979; Latour, 1991; Shapin, 1998). Mannheim (1952), an early exponent of the sociology of knowledge, expressed something of the same sentiments in the proposition that the problems of science in the end are mediated outcomes of the problems of social existence.

Postmodernists, of course, have picked up on ideas like these to proclaim the radical relativism of knowledge and the dangers of ‘totalization’ (cf. Dear, 2000), though the first of these claims carries the point much too far in my opinion, and the second turns out on closer examination to be largely a case of mistaken identity. I accept that knowledge is socially constructed and not foundational, but not that it is purely self-referential, for although knowledge is never a precise mirror of reality, it does not follow—given any kind of belief that some sort of external reality actually exists-—that one mirror is as good as another (Sayer, 2000). The aversion to so-called totalization among many geographers today seems to translate for the most part, in a more neutral vocabulary, into the entirely sensible principle that theories of social reality should not claim for themselves wider explanatory powers than they in fact possess. However, the principle strikes me as pernicious to the degree that it is then used to insinuate that small and unassuming concepts are meaningful and legitimate whereas large and ambitious concepts are necessarily irrational. This in turn has an unfortunately chilling effect on high-risk conceptual and theoretical speculation.

These brief remarks set the stage for the various strategies of assessment of economic geography that arc adopted in what follows. We want to be able to account for the shifting substantive emphases and internal divisions of the field in a way that is systematically attentive to external contextual conditions, but which does not invoke these conditions as mechanical determinants. We must, in particular, be alert to the social and institutional frameworks that encourage or block the development of ideas in certain directions, as well as to the professional interests that drive choices about research commitments. Moreover, since science is (either consciously or unselfconsciously) a vehicle for the promotion of social agendas, we need to examine the wider ideological and political implications of any knowledge claims. A basic question in this regard is: whose interests do they ultimately serve, and in what ways? The simple posing of this question implies already that the form of appraisal that follows entails a degree of partisan engagement (Haraway, 1991; Yeung, 2003), though in a way, I hope (given my preceding critical comments on relativism), that maintains a controlled relationship to an underlying notion of coherence and plausibility. Last but by no means least, then, we must certainly pay close attention to the logical integrity, the scope of reference, the correspondence between ideas and data, and so forth, of the various versions of economic geography that arc on offer.

2. Economic geographers at work

2.1. Geography and the disciplinary division of labor

Geographers long ago gave up trying to legislate in a priori terms the shape and form of their discipline. In any case, from what has gone before, we cannot understand geography, or any other science for that matter, in relation to some ideal normative vision of disciplinary order. Geography as a whole owes its current standing as a distinctive university discipline as much to the inertia of academic and professional institutions as it does to any epistemological imperative. The geographer’s stock-in-trade, nowadays, is usually claimed to revolve in various ways around questions of space and spatial relations. This claim provides a reassuring professional anchor of sorts, but is in practice open to appropriation by virtually any social science, given that space is intrinsically constitutive of all social life. In fact, geographers and other social scientists regularly encounter one another at points that lie deep inside each other’s proclaimed fields of inquiry, and this circumstance reveals another of modern geography’s peculiarities, namely its extreme intellectual hybridity. It is perhaps because of this hybridity that geography is so susceptible to rapidly shifting intellectual currents and polemical debate, but also—and this is surely one of its strengths—an unusual responsiveness to the burning practical issues of the day.

2.2. The wayward course of economic geography in the last half-century

Economic geography reproduces these features of geography as a whole in microcosm. On the one side, it is greatly influenced by issues of social and political theory. On the other side, given its substantive emphases, it has particularly strong areas of overlap with economics and business studies. At any given moment in time, it nevertheless functions as a more or less distinctive intellectual and professional community that brings unique synthetic perspectives to the tension-filled terrain(s) of investigation that it seeks to conquer. At the same time, economic geography has been greatly susceptible to periodic shifts of course over the last several decades, often in surprising ways, and equally often with the same dramatis personae, as it were, appearing and re-appearing in different costumes in different acts of the play.

The period of the 1950s and 1960s was especially important as a formative moment in the emergence of economic geography as a self-assertive subdiscipline within geography as a whole. This was a period of great intellectual and professional struggle in geography between traditionalists and reformers, with the latter seeking to push geography out of its perceived idiographic torpor and—on the basis of quantitative methodologies and formal modeling—into a more forthright engagement with theoretical ideas (Gould, 1979). Economic geographers were in the vanguard of this movement, and they were able to push their agendas vigorously, partly because of their strategic affiliation with a then-powerful regional science, partly because the questions they were posing about the spatial organization of the economy were of central concern to much policy making in the capitalism of the era, with its central mass-production industries and its activist forms of social regulation as manifest in Keynesian economic policy and the apparatus of the welfare state (Benko, 1998; Scott, 2000).

This early moment of efflorescence was succeeded by a sharp turn toward political economy as the crises of the early 1970s mounted in intensity, and as the general critique of capitalism became increasingly vociferous in academic circles. This was a period in which geographers developed a deep concern about the spatial manifestations of economic crisis generally, as reflected in a spate of papers and books on topics of regional decline, job loss, regional inequalities, poverty, and so on (Carney et al., 1980; Bluestone and Harrison 1982; Massey and Meegan, 1982). It was also a period in which much of economic geographers’ portrayal of basic social realities was cast cither openly and frankly in Marxian terms or in variously marxisant versions. The first stirrings of a vigorous feminist encounter with economic geography also began to take shape at this time.

As the initial intimations of the so-called new economy made their appearance in the early 1980s, and as the crisis years of the 1970s receded, economic geography started to go through another of its periodic sea changes. A doubly-faceted dynamic of economic and geographic transformation was now beginning to push geographers toward a reformulated sense of spatial dynamics. On the one hand, new’ spatial foci of economic growth were springing up in hitherto peripheral or quasi-peripheral regions in the more economically-advanced countries, with neo-artisanal communities in the Third Italy and high-technology industrial districts in the US Sunbelt doing heavy duty as early exemplars of this trend (Scott, 1986; Becattini, 1987). In this connection, geographers’ interests converged intently on the theoretical and empirical analysis of spatial agglomeration. On the other hand, a great intensification of the international division of labor was rapidly occurring, especially under the aegis of the multinational corporation (Fröbel et al., 1980). In this connection, the main issues increasingly crystallized around globalization and its expression in international commodity chains, cross-border corporate linkages, capital flow’s, foreign branch plant formation, and so on (e.g., Dicken, 1992; Johnston et al., 1995; Taylor et al., 2002). The themes of agglomeration and international economic integration more or less continue to dominate the field today, though many detailed changes of emphasis have occurred as research has progressed. Indeed, of late years, these two themes have tended increasingly to converge together around the notion of the local and the global as two interrelated scales of analysis within a process of economic and political rescaling generally (Swyngedouw, 1997).

These thematic developments represent only a thumb-nail sketch of the recent intellectual history of economic geography. We must recognize that there have been many additional twists and turns within this history, both of empirical emphasis and of theoretical debate. As it stands, however, this account now serves as a general point of entry into a detailed examination of some of the major conceptual tensions that run through the field today, including a number of claims, which if they can be sustained, presage some quite unexpected new directions of development.

2.3. Turbulence and challenge

Economic geography, then, has been marked over its post-War history by a great susceptibility to turbulence. A notable recent sign of this tendency is the various ‘turns’ that the field is said to have taken or to be about to take. A cursory count reveals an empirical turn (Smith, 1987), an interpretative turn (Imrie et al., 1996), a normative turn (Sayer and Storper, 1997), a cultural turn (Crang. 1997). a policy turn (Martin, 2001), and a relational turn (Boggs and Rantisi, 2003), among others.

In some instances, the proclamation of these turns has been no mor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• PART I CONCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENTS IN ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY
• PART II THE LOCALIZATION OF GLOBAL ECONOMIC SPACE
• PART III FIRMS, WORKERS AND PLACES
• PART IV CULTURE, TECHNOLOGY AND THE GEOGRAPHIES OF KNOWLEDGE
• PART V REGULATING ECONOMIC SPACES
• Name Index