Chapter 25
Economic Geographies of Race and Ethnicity: Explorations in Continuity and Change
Economic geography’s theoretical engagement with questions of race and ethnicity closely reflects its evolution as a subdiscipline as a whole. Economic geography has shifted from the construction of quantitative spatial models aimed at faithfully representing “reality” to an embrace of multitheoretical frameworks amalgamating ideas outside the discipline. As it has done so, it has come to understand how social constructions of race and ethnicity influence the allocation of economic resources, as well as the consequences of such allocations.
I begin with the old economic geography, a study of naturalized and categorical racial and ethnic groupings and their relation to spatial patterns of production, consumption, and resource circulation. This discussion is followed, though, with what economic geography might be, and possibly now is, a study of the social constructions of race and ethnicity and their effects on how bodies produce, consume, and circulate wealth. Here I also reflect on the relational turn in economic geography. That “turn” has opened to scrutiny the social constructions that underlie “racial” and “ethnic” categories. Such a development offers economic geographers a new means to explore how value is derived from a corporeality marked by racial and ethnic ideologies and discourses. By examining the economic spaces, flows, and relations that racial and ethnic ideologies and discourses produce, and the racialized and ethnicized bodies that reproduce, resist, and transform them, I intend to offer a set of critical perspectives that stem from feminist and critical race geographies being brought into conversation with economic geography.
I start my retrospective review with the relationship between race, ethnicity, and economic geography in the period following World War II. It was a period when economic geography’s engagement with race and ethnicity reflected dominant discourses rooted in both positivist and biological determinist theoretical frameworks.
Imperial Projects, Economic Geography, and Questions of Race
Economic geography before the 1950s, like much of the discipline, focused primarily on classifying and describing the unique spatial patterns that emerged from the social and economic relationships within particular regions. It evolved from an earlier period when economic geography was intimately tied to the imperial project, that is, “the techniques and mechanics of the management of Empire” (Harvey 1974: 20). Studies that considered questions of race or ethnicity largely did so as part of a meticulous stock-taking of the factors affecting the relationship between imperial powers and their “Others.” For example, Raymond Christ’s “Static and Emerging Cultural Landscapes on the Islands of St. Kitts and Nevis, B.W.I.” (Christ 1949) perfectly illustrates how economic geography incorporated questions of race and ethnicity during this period. Christ’s article, published in Economic Geography, was a careful inventory of the relationship between economy and society in making the economic and cultural landscape of these two islands. While primarily a study of the differences between the two, and the roles that geology, climate, history, and plantation production and trade played in their development, the article also incorporated an examination of the population differentiated by race. But that differentiation hardly digressed from nineteenth-century discourses that claimed that every human belonged to a “race,” or was a product of several “races,” with the biological characteristics of each “race” then determining a range of psychological and social capacities. Race was assumed to be a biological trait and the racial groups described were simply one of the many features of the landscape under description. The role that racism played in the inequalities described on the landscape was never a point of investigation. Race and ethnicity were only ascriptions rather than indicators of the social relations and hierarchies at work within colonial and imperial systems. In fact, even though the term “racism” was analytically recognized from the 1930s to denote the inappropriate correlation of racial differences with human traits and capacities (Bonnett 2000), few of the articles produced by economic geographers before the 1960s addressed questions of racism.
Racism, Race Relations, and Economic Geography’s Epistemological Revolutions
The 1960s gave rise to important transformations in approaches to race. These transformations were animated by the 1965 United Nations General Assembly adoption of the International Convention Against All Forms of Racial Discrimination (United Nations 1965) and later, in 1967, by UNESCO’s examination and subsequent rejection of scientific claims that linked mental aptitude, temperament, or social habits to race (UNESCO 1967). Scholars in both Europe and North America at this time increasingly turned their attention to the social relations that racial categories produced. The focus on race relations opened the door to increasing scholarship on the relationship between racism, prejudice, discrimination, and power. While the term race relations was first used as early as 1911 to describe the relationship between biologically defined races, its meaning significantly changed by the 1960s and 1970s. Scholars such as John Rex (1970) and Michael Banton (1967) used the term to examine how racial attitudes produced racially structured social outcomes.
Recognizing that race relations were politically and socially constituted rather than biologically, by the 1960s some scholars, particularly in the United Kingdom, began to utilize the term ethnicity rather than race, drawing attention to the importance of cultural differences. But in the United States the focus on ethnicity rather than race was resolutely opposed by activists like Stokely Carmicheal (Carmichael and Hamilton 1967) who believed that the term ethnicity depoliticized the experiences of people of African descent. Instead, he focused on racism to emphasize that attitudes, institutions, and beliefs about superiority structured decisions and policies, and which in turn subordinated and controlled particular racial groups.
The shift towards the study of race relations and racism in the 1960s corresponded with a period of great transformation in economic geographical research. The quantitative revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, with its distinctive set of presuppositions about the construction of the social world and a commitment to revealing “truths” by mathematical and statistical models, shaped the questions that economic geographers asked. Influenced by neoclassical economics, early studies sought to identify geometric laws governing economic activity by examining spatial patterns. Using mathematical modeling techniques, economic geographers related the behavior of rational, utility-maximizing individuals to the formation of spatial markets and regional economies. In this context, a small number of economic geographers began to examine the social, political, and spatial effects of racism and ethnic discrimination, primarily within housing and labor markets. Many of these emerging studies drew heavily upon the methodologies used by neoclassical economists like Ann Krueger (1963) and Gary Becker (1971), both of whom studied the economic consequences of racial discrimination in labor markets. But economic geographers were also influenced by opportunities for greater policy relevance. As Brian Berry (1970: 21) noted in an article entitled “The Geography of the United States in the Year 2000”:
There are increasing demands that research in geography should respond to the needs of public policy. It is therefore essential to attempt to monitor geographical change, to identify its essential properties, and to understand the geographies that are most likely to emerge in the future with and without public intervention.
Adams’ 1972 examination of the race riots that swept across the United States during the 1960s is demonstrative of the move by economic geographers to use quantitative methods to explore the relationship between racial discrimination and civil unrest, as well as to offer policy prescriptions (Adams 1972; Brown 1972; Craig 1972; Davies and Fowler 1972; Deskins 1972; Morrill and Donaldson 1972). Seeking to determine which cities and black neighborhoods were more likely to experience riots, and which ones were not, Adams developed a set of 15 riot variables to describe 166 major disturbances that occurred between 1965 and July 31, 1968 across 37 mid-western cities. The variables, which ranged from the number of law officers and civilians killed to levels of non-white concentration, were used to develop a series of regression analyses and isopleth maps. Based on his analysis, Adams argued that uncoordinated programs of tight money, urban renewal, and highway construction had produced disastrous impacts on the parts of the city subject to excessive residential segregation. He concluded that individuals should have the freedom to live where they wanted, and that the state should play an active facilitating role by providing appropriate public housing both within the inner city and in the suburbs.
While Adams was one of the earliest economic geographers to study explicitly the spatial inequalities of racism, the racial politics that lay behind these uneven patterns remained unexplored in his work and were largely relegated to the less politically explosive sphere of ethnic or cultural difference. Specifically, Adams suggested that urban riots were primarily the result of the failure of urban authorities to understand the distinct cultural preferences of racial groups, rather than the response to the unequal and unjust exercise of power embedded in everyday forms of racism that African Americans experienced:
People from different ethnic origins need spaces of different kinds. There are those who like to touch and those who do not. There are those who like to be auditorially involved with everyone else and those who depend on architectural barriers to screen them from the world
(Adams 1972: 39).
Deskins (1967) similarly employed quantitative methods to examine the travel patterns of racial minorities. Influenced by Burgess’s model of urban structure, he used centrographic techniques to examine the impact of race on residence and journey to work in Detroit. Like Adams, Deskins took an anti-racist position, concluding that residential segregation and poor transportation availability within black neighborhoods played a significant role in the long commuting patterns that black people in Detroit endured. But his analysis neither ventured to explore the politics of race at work behind these relationships, nor the relationship between racism and the economic processes shaping the structure of the city itself. In fact, Deskins was pessimistic about the role that geographers could play in challenging the racial politics of Detroit, and instead he stressed that the distinct “cultural” differences of these racialized groups could be accommodated within Detroit’s racist economic system:
It is more realistic to expect that little will be done to alter Detroit’s residential segregation. However, planners can partially eliminate the additional burden exerted on Negro workers due to excessively long work trips by specifically considering Negro needs when designing future mass transportation systems.
(Deskins 1967: 93)
Marxist, Feminist, and Critical Race Challenges
The limits to economic geography’s engagement with race or ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s reflected both the theoretical limits of race relations theories (Back and Solomos 2000) and the political limitations of purely quantitative approaches (Harvey 1974). As challenges from Marxist, feminist, and critical race scholars revealed throughout the 1980s and 1990s, without a recognition of the socially constructed nature of race and ethnicity, and of the role that racism played in the making of unequal economic relations, questions of race and ethnicity within economic geography were doomed to remain largely apolitical and implicitly conservative.
The influence of Marxist theories from the mid-1970s onwards transformed how economic geographers engaged questions of race and ethnicity. Sharing Harvey’s concerns that geography’s quantitative revolution lent itself to “serving the ruling class of the corporate state,” and reproducing the racism and ethnocentricism that historically defined earlier geographical scholarship (Harvey 1974), economic geographers from the second half of the 1970s began to utilize political economy frameworks to examine spatial patterns of racial and ethnic inequality across a range of scales and across a range of spaces (Leach 1974; Morgan 1980; Kantor and Nystuen 1982; Hall 1983; J.P. Jones 1987; Kirby 1976).
A useful example is Kodras’s (1997) study. Countering the conservative view that individuals alone were the cause of their own deprivation, and that the incidence of poverty was attributable to the characteristics of the place in which it occurred, Kodras (1997) drew attention to the role that racism and gender discrimination played in the creation of the spatial map of poverty in the United States. She developed case studies drawn from the experiences of racial and ethnic groups in the United States as diverse as African Americans in Detroit, Native Americans in North Dakota, and white working class women in Silicon Valley, in order to illustrate the different causal processes, modes of resistance or accommodation, and poverty experiences that emerged as a result of the restructuring of markets and the changing role of the state at a variety of geographic scales. McLafferty and Preston (1992) similarly employed a political economy approach to examine the combined effects of gender discrimination and racism on labor market segmentation and spatial access to employment and transportation in the United States. They found that while racialized women had poorer spatial access to jobs than white women, they typically had better spatial access to employment than racialized men. They also found that although levels of spatial mismatch were highest for African American women, their segmentation within service jobs in the city made them less vulnerable to the deindustrialization and suburbanization of manufacturing jobs. This, however, was not the case for Latina women whose concentration in the poorest paying segments of largely manufacturing labor markets made them highly vulnerable to job losses in this sector. By identifying the effects of racism in the labor and housing markets on access to employment, McLafferty and Preston linked the exclusions and vulnerabilities experienced by racialized groups during moments of economic restructuring to the structural inequalities that racism produced within economic space.
Political economy approaches with their foci on causal mechanisms, have helped to draw attention to the effects of racism and ethnic discrimination on economic landscapes. But although questions of race and ethnicity were never absent from these political economy approaches, they were rarely central to them either. Race and ethnicity remained relatively unexplored categories, subordinate to the economic processes at work in the production of uneven economic landscapes. Thus, while economic geographers have utilized political economy approaches to examine how inequalities in patterns of investment, divisions of labor, or the value of commodity chains, affect different racial and ethnic groups, few have explicitly interrogated the discursive and material practices and processes by which social constructions of race and ethnicity structure and transform economic relations.
A number of recent contributions, however, indicate an increasing interest in interrogating how social constructions of race and ethnicity operate within regulated economic spaces (Bauder 2003; 2008; Walton-Roberts 2009). Focusing on the way that the regulation of educational and professional credentials excludes many skilled foreign trained immigrants from high status occupations in Canada, Bauder (2003) notes that skilled immigrant workers are often ascribed racial and ethnic identities that are associated with different embodied competences. Comparing the employment experiences of immigrants from the former Yugoslavia and South Asia in Canada, he argues that while both groups were de-skilled by discriminatory regulatory institutional requirements like “Canadian Experience,” informants from the former Yugoslavia were more likely to have their credentials informally recognized by employers than South Asians. Walton-Roberts (2009) makes similar observations in her study of the influence that Indian immigrant ethnic affiliation has on trade between India and Canada. She argues that the failure to incorporate Indian entrepreneurs and professional immigrants into Canadian jobs commensurate with their skill is a potential barrier to enhancing Canadian trade with India because of the loss of cross cultural business knowledge that labor market exclusion entails. The focus on the social constructions of race and ethnicity at work in the production of these two types of economic spaces represents an important advance in the study of race and ethnicity within economic geography. Yet, because the authors do not explicitly explore how embodied attributes like race or ethnicity produce particular types of economic space these studies remain limited in their ability to provide “vivid, complex and embodied accounts of lives and livelihoods” (Pollard et al. 2009:138) within them.
In a critical commentary on economic geography’s engagement with postcolonial theory, Pollard et al. (2009) have recently argued that the subdiscipline’s indifference to difference is attributed in part to its reluctance to deal with non-traditional economic practices and spaces. Situating this tendency in the subdiscipline’s ongoing and latent Eurocentricism, they argue: “… what is remarkable is that so much economic geography continues to presume that ‘the economy’ can and should be theorised solely from the perspective of the formal spaces of western economies” (137). Like Pollard et al., I believe that this reluctance speaks to a deeper and more fundamental question about the range and scope of methodologies and philosophies that can be incorporated into economic geography without compromising its traditional epistemological boundaries based on the study of the role of place and space in the production and expansion of wealth. And while the answer to this question lies beyond the scope of this essay, it remains pertinent to the theoretical debates that I think economic geography should embrace if it is to move beyond the essentialisms that continue to haunt all invocations of ethnic and racial categories.
In that light, I will turn to recent advances in feminist and critical race theory that I believe provide new opportunities for economic geographers in exploring the role of social constructions of race and ethnicity in economic geographical relations. Drawing on my own research, I argue that greater attention to the materiality of the body reveals the force of social constructions of race and ethnicity on economic relations and in doing so destabilizes the ontological status of both categories.
Feminist and Critical Race Incursions in Economic Geography
Feminist geography has already proposed extending the scope of research in economic geography by problematizing the social and geographical constructions at work in making the category “the economy” (Gibson-Graham 1996). Such an extension among other things reveals the centrality of unpaid work and spaces of social reproduction to the functioning of the economy (Katz 2004; Mitchell 2004). I believe, however, it is feminist theory’s opening up of space for discussions of the body that offers a major opportunity for understanding how social constructions of race and ethnicity structure economic processes and relationships. Particularly in relation to work and employment, feminist geographers have demonstrated that the body serves as a social category determining the value attributed to labor (McDowell 2009). Far from merely a unit of labor power differentiated only by level of skill and geographic location, feminist geographers have shown that the socially constructed meanings of gender, race, ethnicity, and class attaching to bodies play a significant role in the value ascribed to individual workers.
Feminist geographers argue that gender influences how men and women gain access to work and their respective levels of remuneration. They have shown how forms of work associated with women are routinely considered to be less significant than work associated with men, and consequently, subject to lower pay rates (Wright 2006; Cravey 1998). The low value attached to feminized forms of work is attributed to the fact that many of the associated female work skills (manual dexterity, attention to detail, empathy) are linked to unpaid forms of social reproductive work traditionally practiced by women. Hence, even when these skills are demanded within labor markets, they continue to attract low wages because of this association (Benería 2003; Fernández-Kelly 2005). To the extent that tasks such as those requiring fine motor skills or long hours of concentration are considered to be “natural,” feminists contend that they will continue to be devalued and geared towards women and other feminized groups.
Scholars have extended this analysis of embodiment and gender discrimination to questions of racism by exploring how naturalized assumptions about the competence, cultural threat, or intelligence of racialized and ethnically differentiated “Others,” become embedded in routine practices that are exclusionary and discriminatory (Essed 2002). In geography, this has given rise to a number of studies that explore how constructions of race, racism, and ethnicity operate as organizing concepts that structure and control space (Bonnett 2000; Kobayashi and Peake 1994; McKittrick and Woods 2007; Saldanha 2006; Mahtani 2002; Jackson 1987). While very few studies in economic geography have engaged this burgeoning literature, I believe that there is much to be gained from examining how the materiality of the racialized body shapes economic interactions.
Recognizing the importance of embodiment to the way that labor produced by particular bodies is valued, produced, and performed, McDowell (2009:14) states that: “… characteristics such as skin colour, weight or height, accent and stance map onto gender to produce a finely graded set of evaluations that position workers as more or less suitable to perform different types of work and different sets of tasks.” Perhaps nowhere is this more overtly delineated than in the sexual labor market where gender, skin color, hair texture, and the size and shape of the body and its component parts, play a significant role in the value placed on individual workers. For example, in my own research on the rise and expansion of sex tourism in Jamaica (Mullings 1999; Mullings 2001), I found that as the economy liberalized, the bodies of Caribbean men and women became increasingly commodified by relatively affluent tourists from the global North whose demands for the sexual labor of local men and women were intricately bound to the racial and gender constructions associated with their bodies. As the tourism industry across the region became flexible and segmented to cater to a variety of tourism experiences, so too did this largely underground sector, relying on the embodied characteristics of its populations to differentiate each country’s sex tourism product. Thus on islands with predominantly black populations of African descent, such as Jamaica and Barbados, increasing numbers of working-class men were able to generate incomes by providing services to white heterosexual women, primarily from Europe; while on islands with predominantly Latino populations such as Cuba and the Dominican Republic, fair skinned women dominate the segment of the market catering to white heterosexual males from Europe and North America.
Constructions of race and ethnicity, however, do not entirely structure the value placed on embodied labor. Also important is the way that individual workers perform socially constructed identities. That is, as Veninga puts it, “how bodies do race” (Veninga 2009: 107). Judith Butler (1993) argues that subjects are continually produced and reproduced through performances that reflect dominant social constructions of gender, race, and sexuality. Regulated through technologies of surveillance, discipline, and self-regulation, the norms associated with a particular cultural regime act as frameworks within which individuals “perform” particular subjectivities. Drawing on the work of Butler, geographers have focused on how workplaces function as sites of embodied performance in the service of capital (Crang 1994; A. Jones 1998; McDowell 2009; McDowell, Batnitzky, and Dyer, 2007; Mullings 2001; Mullings 2005). In relation to spaces of work, scholars have argued that performances of deference, docility, aggression, or care can be crucial to the way that individual bodies are recruited, assessed, or advanced within work systems. Particularly in service occupations, where a consumer’s decision to purchase is dependent on their trust in the service provider’s ability to provide a certain type of service, the importance of bodily performance cannot be overstated.
For individual workers, their ability to negotiate the economic constraints imposed by the racialized or ethnically differentiated expectations of consumers often depends upon how they “perform” race and ethnicity. For example, in my research on sex work in the Caribbean I found that to successfully sell sexual labor to tourists, a person must engage in a particular type of performance, conforming as closely as possible to preexisting stereotypes. Across the Caribbean, these performances vary with the predominant market niche that exists. Men and women in the Caribbean must understand and embrace what it means to be a Beach Boy, Jinetera, Rent a Dread, or Dominicana to perform the role profitably (Mullings 2001).
In blue-collar and pink-collar labor markets, particularly where there is a high degree of competition, failure to perform an appropriate racial or ethnic identity can present serious obstacles to an individual’s ability to secure or maintain employment. Thus, in a recent study of the production and use of migrant bodies in London’s hospitality industry, McDowell, Batnitzky, and Dyer (2007), found that because of the racial and ethnic stereotypes attached to their bodies, Indian employees were subject to sets of assumptions and expectations by their co-workers, employers and guests that reinforced existing associations between Indianness and servility, and consequently constrained their opportunities for recruitment and advancement.
Transgressive embodied performances of race and ethnicity in certain work environments, however, may have an opposite effect, of opening up rather than closing-down opportunities for advancement. This was certainly the case in Jamaica during the 1990s when increasing numbers of middle-class black women began to occupy managerial positions in the banking industry traditionally reserved for men primarily from white elite families (Mullings 2005). Challenging Jamaica’s cultural regime that constructed white middle class men as more competent and capable of generating and keeping capital safe, women demonstrated their ability to work long hours, to compete aggressively in capital markets, yet remain empathetic and incorruptible in workplace performances that transgressed all of the traditional racial and gender stereotypes. Yet, the extent to which the career mobility of individual women was hindered or helped by their complicity in, or resistance to, the dominant constructions of race, ethnicity, class, or gender in Jamaica could not be ascertained by simply observing the embodied workplace performances in which they were engaged. This is because the bodies and identities of each of the managers interviewed were entangled within relations of power and oppression that could not be understood from a single subject position. To understand how constructions of race and ethnicity influenced access to, and mobility within, labor markets, a theory that recognized the complex relationship between identities and power was needed.
Intersectionality approaches developed by critical race theorists (Crenshaw 1991; Hill Collins 1990; McCall 2005; Valentine 2007) offer the theoretical complexity needed to understand the exchanges between hierarchical and mutually reinforcing social and cultural categories of oppression, and unique and place-specific forms of domination. Intersectionality arose out of a critique of gender-based and race-based research that failed to account for lived experiences at points where multiple forms of subordination intersected. As McCall (2005: 1780) argues, it was not possible “to understand a black woman’s experience from previous studies of gender combined with previous studies of race because the former focused on white women and the latter on black men. Something new was needed because of the distinct and frequently conflicting dynamics that shaped the lived experience of subjects in these social locations.” Intersectional approaches therefore seek to do more than demonstrate the multiple forms of oppression that individuals experience. They seek also to demonstrate the vulnerabilities produced when oppressions are mutually constitutive.
Patricia Hill Collins (1990), a leading proponent, states that intersectionality operates within matrices of domination composed of historical and socially specific, mutually constituted, and interlocking systems of oppression. Those systems are organized and legitimated through disciplinary (institutions of governance), hegemonic (knowledge production), and interpersonal domains of power. Understanding how these domains of power structure economic spaces, such as labor markets, board rooms, firms, or trade councils, makes it possible to explore the rules and conventions of racist and ethnically exclusionary economic and business practices, and to formulate strategies that are most likely to disrupt them.
Relational Geographies, Network Approaches, and New Possibilities for Race and Ethnicity
Although contributions from feminist and critical race theorists have brought new questions, methodologies, spaces, and scales of inquiry to geography, these approaches have generally remained marginal to the way that much research in economic geography is framed. Yet it is clear, particularly in current debates on the merits of relational approaches to economic geography, that there is much to be gained from examining the relationship between racialized and ethnically differentiated bodies, social rules, and conventions, and place-specific economic practices and routines. As economic geographers adopt relational approaches to make sense of new forms of economic coordination emerging within contemporary capitalist economies (Yeung 2005; Boggs and Rantisi 2003; Ettlinger 2001; Sunley 2008), they are increasingly oriented towards spaces where economic actors interact in the conduct of business (Murphy 2006; Yeung 1998). These spaces, be they board rooms, golf courses, the Internet, or factory floors, and the encounters that take place within them, have rarely been explored within frameworks that acknowledge embodiment and the role that racial and ethnic constructions play in regulating the actions of economic actors.
Economic geographers argue that in an increasingly integrated and liberalized global economy the sectors and firms that are most competitive are those that establish long-term, reciprocal relationships that are “informal, face-to-face, collaborative, and cooperative and are characterized by the exchange of knowledge and high degrees of mutual trust” (Sunley 2008: 4). While some scholars have focused on the role that relational assets such as local conventions or inter-organizational networks play in the production of regional advantage (Storper 1997; Storper 1998; Maskell and Malmberg 1999), others have focused more closely on the micro-scale relationships between economic actors and, in particular, the role that network formation plays in the conduct of business (Murphy 2006; Yeung 1998). Focusing on these network approaches, I show that these studies are enriched by engagement with critical race and feminist theories.
Saxenian’s study of high-tech entrepreneurs from India, China, and Taiwan in Silicon Valley, highlights the importance of ethnic networks in the globalization of the high-technology industry, and in particular, the expansion of the outsourcing industry (Saxenian 2006). She found that in the face of exclusion from established businesses and social structures, and with limited opportunities for career advancement, these groups relied upon local, social, and professional networks to mobilize information, know-how skills and capital (Saxenian 2000). Saxenian argued that shared ethnic identities were important for forging ties not only among immigrant professionals in Silicon Valley but also with others in the home country.
Ethnicity in this study was viewed as an identity that naturally gave rise to shared cultural affinities and trust, allowing foreign born professionals to develop a common response to forces hostile to their ethnic communities. But it can neither be assumed that ethnic networks are comprised mainly of marginalized groups, nor taken for granted that shared ethnic identities automatically produce ethnic solidarities. For as Alcoff (1999) observes, felt connection to visibly similar others need not necessarily produce empathetic identification. Differences based on embodied characteristics such as class, gender, and race may diminish levels of trust or cooperation among individuals from the same ethnic group, while network formation might serve to concentrate economic power in the hands of a few elites. Untangling how the various domains of power within which racialized and ethnically differentiated individuals are placed influences the economic relationships and networks they form, offers an exciting opportunity to extend economic geography’s engagement with questions of race and ethnicity beyond the study of work and employment.
Scholars who study networks argue that they emerge among people and in places where existing social institutions facilitate interconnections among actors that enhance learning and innovation. Within networks, trust is an important relational asset because it “influences the quality or strength of particular associations in a network but also the network’s spatial extensiveness and openness to new participants and ideas” (Murphy 2006: 440). This point was demonstrated by Murphy’s study of network formation among managers and entrepreneurs in Tanzania’s manufacturing sector where he found that the social behavior of entrepreneurs was not primarily driven by their quest to minimize transaction costs, but rather by their desire to forge networks of trust.
But as a number of economic geographers, including Murphy, have observed, the network processes involved in building trust cannot be easily extricated from those used to maintain power among economic actors (Murphy 2006; Sunley 2008; Yeung 2005). They recognize that rather than a source of learning and innovation, networks may become spaces of deepening inequality where more powerful members control and command the behavior of less powerful ones. Exploring how power is exercised within economic networks offers important insights into the production of racism and ethnic discrimination in economic spaces as diverse as global supply chains and trade negotiations. As Essed (2002: 204) argues, structural forms of racism are the product of everyday racisms that exist in “the continuous, often unconscious, exercise of power predicated in taking for granted the privileging of whiteness … the universality of Western criteria of human progress, and the primacy of European (derived) cultures.”
How do racist and ethnically discriminatory ideologies affect the circulation of information and resources within economic networks? How do racialized or ethnically differentiated groups challenge the exercise of power within networks that reproduce racial and ethnic inequalities? What role does performance play in these challenges? These are important questions that economic geographers should pursue because by exposing how racism and ethnic discrimination is routinely created and reproduced through everyday economic practices, the link between networks and the unequal institutional structures within which they are embedded becomes explicit.
Sunley (2008) recently argued that the attention paid to process, flux, and flow in relational approaches obscures the importance of understanding causal models of economic processes. He argued that without causal mechanisms and models, it is impossible to distinguish relations that are purely incidental and contingent from those that are consequential and causal. I believe that relational approaches are not doomed to overlook causality. As this chapter on race and ethnicity in economic geography demonstrates, feminist and critical race theorists provide important causal frameworks for understanding the social meanings attached to particular material bodies, and how these meanings shift and change with social interactions at different times and in different spaces. When combined with relational approaches, these theories have the capacity to explain how recurring micro-scale and quotidian economic exchanges produce macro-scale structures of economic inequality.
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