Editors’ Introduction
The Long Decade: Economic Geography, Unbound
The millennial year 2000, when the Blackwell Companion to Economic Geography first appeared, marked a moment of assessment for the field. It had been some 50 years since a newly spatial scientific subdiscipline of economic geography, grounded in location theory, had embarked on what would be a long, transformative path, a transformation that has prompted the serial reinvigoration of the role of theory in Anglophone human geography. Writing in the Cambridge Journal of Economics, Allen Scott waxed ebullient:
The last half-century of economic geographical research has yielded an exceptional harvest of conceptual insights, methodological advances, empirical knowledge, effective contributions to policy making, and, not least, critical commentary. It is no small tribute to those who have toiled in the vineyard over the last 50 years to say that their efforts have cumulatively transformed economic geography from the small backwater of academia that it once was into the vibrant field of intellectual endeavour that it has now become, and with an impact that resonates increasingly far beyond the discipline of geography itself.
(Scott 2000a: 496–7)
Introducing the Companion, two of us were no less buoyant: “Economic geography … has long been an important forum for trying out new ideas. … There is a Chinese saying: May you live in interesting times. Our argument is that they are here now in economic geography” (Barnes and Sheppard 2000: 4–6).
2000 also marked the launch of The Journal of Economic Geography, intended as a forum for exchange between economists and geographers, as well as publication of The Oxford Handbook of Economic Geography, featuring parallel chapters by geographers and economists (Clark, Feldman, and Gertler 2000). The ensuing decade has seen publication of a series of edited collections, handbooks, readers, and the like dedicated to economic geography (for example, Barnes et al. 2003; Baldwin et al. 2005; Bagchi-Sen and Lawton Smith 2006; Coe, Kelly, and Yeung 2007; Fingleton 2007; MacKinnon and Cumbers 2007; Tickell et al. 2007; Combes, Mayer, and Thisse 2008; Brakman, Garretsen, and von Marrewijk 2009; Aoyama, Murphy, and Hanson 2010; Boschma and Martin 2010; Wood and Roberts 2010; Leyshon et al. 2011; Anderson 2012). The journals Economic Geography and The Journal of Economic Geography have happily trumpeted the statistic that they rank within the top 10 journals even in Economics, measured in terms of the ISI-Thompson “impact factor.” The decade ended with publication of the 2009 World Development Report: Reshaping Economic Geography (World Bank 2008). As Scott had anticipated, much indeed has happened in the world of economic geography, attracting the attention of academics, publishers, and policy-makers alike, both in and beyond the discipline.
Yet this recent trajectory has been more complex, and fractionated, than celebratory accounts might suggest. On the one hand, are tensions in the borderlands where the disciplines of geography and economics, as traditionally defined, overlap; borderlands policed by “minutemen” on both sides, discouraging interlopers. On the other hand, are differences within the field on the geographical side of this constructed borderland. Each of these differentiations poses particular challenges for economic geography: the former challenge the capacity of geographers to control what counts as economic geography beyond the discipline; the latter challenge the capacity of geographers to communicate constructively with one another. Already evident in 2000, these tensions subsequently deepened during the long decade.
The essays gathered in this Wiley-Blackwell Companion seek to respond to these tensions and differences, both making the case for a geographical approach to economic geography and provoking an engaged and critical pluralism that we believe is necessary for this subdiscipline to continue to prosper (Barnes and Sheppard 2010). Appropriately, in light of this recent history of turbulence, the present collection is not simply an updated version of the 2000 Companion. The rationale and organizational logic of that earlier volume represented a particular reading of this fast-moving field, very much reflecting its times, coming on the heels of the cultural turn in economic geography. The rationale and organization of this volume are quite different, mirroring changing times and a changing field. As a result, the present Companion should be read as a separate assessment of developments since 2000. Of course, we do not treat this as some economic-geographical year zero. Yet we are particularly concerned with developments in the ensuing long decade, drawing on the insights of contributors entering the field during this period, while positioning recent developments in the context of the wider arcs and spaces of contemporary economic geography. We have asked contributors to consider emergent issues and future prospects as well, in addition to looking back and taking stock.
In this introduction, we begin by summarizing emergent tensions between economics and geography, reviewing the merits of various strategies for (dis)engagement, and differences within and also commonalities across the economic geography project. Advocating constructive engagement across the variegations of the field, we then describe our strategy for organizing the book in this spirit. We discuss how the book is structured, how we selected both authors and topics, and how this volume promotes intra and interdisciplinary engagement, seeking to reinforce the vibrancy of economic geography.
Geography and Economics: Estranged Cousins?
Within the mainstream, broadly neoclassical, tradition that has come to dominate Anglophone (and thereby implicitly global) economics, geography has been the locus of significantly increased interest, particularly since 2000. Reinvigorated by Paul Krugman (1991; 1995), whose 2008 Nobel Medal in economics marked disciplinary recognition of the significance of geography to economic theory, economists have turned to ask how geography shapes such phenomena as the location of economic activities, agglomeration, industrial districts, patents and innovation, urbanization, neighborhood effects, regional growth and economic convergence, trade, transportation, foreign direct investment, corporate behavior and supply chains, market potential, and trajectories of capitalist global development (Henderson and Thisse 2004; Brakman et al. 2009). Following the suggestion of one of its longest-standing and more thoughtful protagonists, Jacques-François Thisse, we dub this body of scholarship “geographical economics” to recognize its embeddedness within the mainstream canon of economics. This has become an active and creative body of research within economics, challenging some of the field’s long-established precepts. Broadly speaking, geography has been incorporated in one of two ways. The dominant perspective, catalyzed by Krugman but invented by August Lösch (1954 (1940)), and central already to 1960s location theory, is to begin with a flat geography (Lösch’s isotropic plain) and theorize how economic patterns emerge. Krugman (1993) has dubbed this morphogenetic approach “second nature.” Less influential within economics, but more so in public debate, is a focus on “first nature”; that is, how the biophysical environment creates an uneven playing field that prevents capitalism from eliminating poverty (Gallup, Sachs, and Mellinger 1999; Hausmann 2001; Sachs, Mellinger, and Gallup 2001).
Theoretical treatises have been complemented by ever more empirical work, both contemporary and historical, testing the predictions of such theories. Rooted in the mainstream tradition, this research nevertheless challenges some of its established principles. More than one equilibrium is possible, implying the possibility of path dependence (Krugman 1996). The “spatial impossibility theorem” concludes that neoclassical perfect competitive equilibria cannot exist in a capitalist space economy (Ottaviano and Thisse 2004). Free international trade and investment may enhance international inequality (Darity and Davis 2005).
The vast majority of card-carrying geographers have looked askance at geographical economics. The strong orthodoxy, bordering on autism according to some accounts (see Alcorn and Solarz 2006; Peck forthcoming a), enforced within mainstream economics and reproduced in so much of geographical economics, starkly contrasts with economic geographers’ tolerance, even celebration, of the anti-canonical culture of human geography.1 This is reinforced by geographers’ concern with geographical economists’ unwillingness to read, let alone engage with, contemporary scholarship. If the work of geographers is acknowledged at all, it is often assigned the sous-chef role of empirical analysis, the hewers of facts and drawers of numbers (cf. Overman 2004).
This skepticism reflects the strangeness, to most geographers, of the sociospatial ontology of mainstream geographical economics. In philosophy, ontology concerns the nature of existence and how we categorize it, and the relation of such categories to one another. A sociospatial ontology comprises presumptions that practitioners of a research program share about society, space, and their interrelation (Plummer and Sheppard 2006). The ontology of geographical economics is rooted in two over-riding principles: microfoundations (economic geographical patterns are the result of the self-interested actions of informed individuals) and equilibrium (observed patterns tendentially approximate a market-clearing equilibrium, in which firms’ profits are minimized). The spatiality of this ontology similarly consists of two aspects. First, geography – space, communications costs, the biophysical environment – is presumed to be an external causal factor: “Geography is as exogenous a determinant as an economist can ever hope to get” (Rodrik, Subramanian, and Trebbi 2004: 134). Second, spatiality is thought of in territorial terms: bodies, cities, regions, and nations are treated as autonomous objects of analysis whose attributes shape their economic activities. Whether the scale is that of the individual body, the region or the nation-state, each such object is presumed to have approximately equal economic power, underwriting egalitarian market outcomes. Linking the scales, microfoundations implies that causal power must operate from the bottom – the rational individual – upward to more macro-scales. Territorialism thus eliminates relationality and neglects unequal power relations, conceptualizing countries as subject to identical laws, only weakly conditional on contextual differences arising from place-based characteristics, and aligning them onto a teleological trajectory of capitalist development (Peck 2005; Plummer and Sheppard 2006; Sheppard 2011a). Finally, with the economy presumed to approximate general economic equilibrium, or to follow an equilibrium trajectory, time is both separated from space and collapsed to a predetermined line; the economy is self-regulating with no room for history.
This sociospatial ontology is at odds with those dominant in Anglophone economic geography and illustrated below. This has fostered considerable debate among geographers around how to respond to a burgeoning geographical economics – particularly given the considerable power of mainstream economics to set the terms of academic and public debate. The question is whether and how geographers can navigate their own variegated approaches to economic geography, as they are called by the Sirens of mainstream Economics. Some advocate that geographers ignore geographical economics entirely, putting wax in our ears like Odysseus’s sailors (Amin and Thrift 2000; Peck forthcoming a). As they pertinently and importantly note, there are many heterodox traditions within economics (in its Marxian, post-Keynesian, feminist, ecological, and institutional stripes, not to mention economic sociology, economic history, and economic anthropology) whose sensibilities are far closer to those of economic geographers, opening the possibility of fertile borderlands where richer, and more even-handed, exchanges are more likely. Others seek to take on geographical economics on its own terms, making the case that economic geography produces equally cogent counter-narratives (Sheppard and Barnes 1990; Martin 1998; Plummer and Sheppard 2006; Martin and Sunley 2007, Sheppard forthcoming 2011b). Picking through the mathematical theoretical language of the mainstream, they show that this language can be equally generative of heterodox, geographical theories. Others, again, seek common ground between economic geography and geographical economics – borderlands where consensus becomes possible and where geographers can enrich geographical economics (Farole, Rodriguez-Pose, and Storper 2010; Garretsen and Martin 2010; Rodriguez-Pose 2011; Storper 2011).
The 2009 edition of the World Development Report: Reshaping Economic Geography (World Bank 2008) brought these tensions to a head, with the highest-profile global economic policy institution endorsing the importance of geography in terms redolent of geographical economics while ignoring contemporary economic geography. Geographers found themselves in a dilemma: the world was (finally) attending to their concerns but in ways that most geographers found alienating. Long-standing debates in the subdiscipline about how economic geography can be policy relevant were answered positively, but geographers did not like the answer (Peck and Sheppard 2010). Indeed, the very search for best practices or at least overarching policy principles demanded by practicing policymakers – as exemplified by WDR 2009’s “three D’s” and “three I’s” – is itself in tension with many economic geographers’ views on policy.2 Some conclude that context matters to such an extent as to call into question the utility of any best practices or overarching principles. Others examine policy as a forcing factor of socioeconomic change (Peck and Theodore 2010) or are skeptical that capitalism can or should be reformed at all (Harvey 2010; Swyngedouw 2010). The collateral consequences of economic geography’s (mis)encounter with global power, in the form of the nexus of geographical economics and the World Bank, continue to play out. It is difficult to predict the outcome(s), though it seems likely that the World Development Report 2009 will mark a significant milestone for the field, possibly even a crossroads.
Unruly Discipline: The Reach and Grasp of Economic Geography
The scholarly community of economic geographers can be distinguished not only by its differences with mainstream economists, but also by its own restless variegation. This was evident already in the 2000 Companion. By that time, the momentum that critical economic geography had gained by articulating a radical Marxian critique of location theory (and capitalism) into its own form of political-economic geography, had been challenged from within by, inter alia, a cultural turn, feminist and post-structural approaches, and Gibson-Graham’s arguments for a community economies perspective. Economic geography is a continually shifting field of study, and the list of its approaches and turns continually lengthens. Two, in particular, gained traction in recent years: a relational turn and postcolonial economic geography.
In relational economic geography, as Henry Yeung writes, “economic geographers tend to place their analytical focus on the complex nexus of relations among actors and structures that effect dynamic changes in the spatial organization of economic activities” (see also Bathelt and Gl
ckler 2003; Yeung 2005: 37). The relational turn thus lays particular stress on networks as a spatial concept. Indeed, the networks framework has had a transformative impact on economic geography, both as an ontology and as a methodology. It should be noted, however, that the kind of relational thinking that signals, for example, the mutual interdependence of regional development processes has a much longer lineage, stretching back at least as far as Marxian work on unequal exchange and uneven development.
Postcolonial economic geography represents a yet more recent current (Pollard et al. 2009; Pollard, McEwan, and Hughes 2011), one that has been an emergent feature of economic-geographical practice for some time now. In the spirit of postcolonial theory, its proponents challenge economic geographers to reconsider what has been a de facto focus on the economic geographies of Europe, North America, and to a lesser extent Europe’s other former white settler colonies: Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. They argue, importantly, that this has been both an empirical and a theoretical bias, rooted in the sociospatial positionality of Anglophone economic geographers, that fails to learn from differently situated perspectives on, and experiences of, globalizing capitalism (cf. Werner this volume).
Decentering a “northern” perspective has become as vital as it is, in retrospect, obvious. Economic geography is particularly exciting at present because global economic geographies are being turned inside out. The shift of economic dynamism to parts of Asia not only needs to be understood in its own right, as US geo-economic hegemony falters, but is concatenating elsewhere. African countries are becoming enfolded into the Chinese sphere of influence, shifting their minerals exports eastward (Carmody 2011). Wealthy Asian and Middle Eastern countries, from Saudi Arabia to China, are purchasing vast tracts of land in impoverished parts of Latin America, Asia, and Africa to grow food for their domestic populations. Even the Third Italy, hailed a decade ago as the model for reinvigorated industrial agglomerations in the west after the crisis of Fordism, is affected. For example, the Italian city of Prato, former poster child for the Third Italy, has become a center of low cost Chinese sweatshop clothing production taking advantage of the cachet of the “Made in Italy” label. As the world changes, so must our ways of making sense of it.
Beyond such attempts to redefine the discipline as a whole, there has also been constant reinvention within its always moving and often overlapping subfields. Here, in anticipation of the organization of Section 2 of this book, composed of chapters both capturing various states of the art and anticipating new frontiers of scholarly innovation, we assemble these developments into three subthemes: accumulation and value, regulation and governance, and embodiment and identity. None of these is hermetically sealed, of course, and one reflection of economic geography’s restless spirit is that new theoretical connections and methodological hybrids are being developed all the time – enough to frustrate any attempt at delimitation. This said, there are some central tendencies, recurrent concerns, and shared terrains of debate that mark out these zones of practice. We begin with the first of these, accumulation and value.
Accumulation and Value
With the turn to Marxian political economy in the 1970s, questions of commodity production, capital-labor relations, value and capital accumulation moved to the center of economic geographic research. Location theory, concerned with cost-minimizing or revenue-maximizing locational choices, had neglected the question of commodity production inside the firm (Massey 1973). As in neoclassical economics, the focus was on exchange – supply, demand, and market prices. Furthermore, profits were assumed to be minimal, vitiating the possibility of capital accumulation and growth, and labor was reduced to cost considerations. Marxian geographers, in contrast, focused on the relation between labor value and price, with how value varied geographically and with inter-capitalist competition and struggles between labor and capital – tracing their implications for profits (and accumulation) and technological change (Harvey 1975; Scott 1980; Harvey 1982; Walker 1985; Sheppard and Barnes 1990). They examined how the production period – the length of time between when a capitalist advances capital to initiate production and when the revenues made from selling the product are returned to the producer for capital accumulation – affected profit rates. They noted how space can undermine efforts to maximize profits on invested capital: the geographically extensive nature of the economy complicates the challenge of bringing commodities to market and making good on expected profits. They examined how capitalists’ locational choices reflected attempts to evade high labor costs, to disorganize labor politically, or to play off one locality against another, conceptualizing and measuring shifts on the social and spatial division of labor (Massey 1984; Sayer and Walker 1992).
As European and North American economies were destabilized and reorganized by the crises of Fordism in the 1970s, economic geographers turned their attention to understanding decline and regional economic restructuring (Bluestone and Harrison 1982; Massey and Meegan 1982; Clark, Gertler, and Whiteman 1986; Peck 2002). Research took up the question of multiplant corporations and how they enhance profitability and accumulation, and lower labor costs, as a result of their high geographical mobility and flexibility by comparison with workers and communities (Scott and Storper 1986). Moving into the 1980s, as Fordist mass production and unionized labor declined in Europe and North America in favor of flexible specialization and flexibilized labor, economic geographers probed how new computer-assisted technologies, increasingly differentiated and sophisticated consumers, and diminished union power drove investment away from traditional industrial regions, toward new industrial districts such as the Third Italy (Piore and Sabel 1986; Scott 1988; Amin 1989; Florida 1996). Turning their focus from regional decline to localized growth, geographers teased out how new industries emerged in new places and the reinforcing role of local relational assets, trust, cultural norms, and entrepreneurial governance practices (Storper and Walker 1989; Leitner 1990; Storper 1997). There was much talk of local buzz and tacit knowledge as keys to the success of such districts, which along with a range of other endogenous assets seemed to be propelling the dynamic growth of a new generation of emblematic regions.
Economic geographers also took up questions of labor after Fordism. Shifting global divisions of labor in the wake of Fordism received increasing attention (Fröbel, Heinrichs, and Kreye 1980; Peet 1987). At the subnational scale, others studied shifting labor norms and the spatiality of labor markets (McDowell 1991; Peck 1996). Beyond this, Andrew Herod (1998; 2001) sparked a revolution of sorts focusing on what he dubbed labor geographies: the agency of labor as a counter-pole to the capitalist control of space. This research asked how labor organizing and strategies, stretching beyond the local scale, can be active in shaping global geographies of production, overturning some of the analytical foundations and stylized facts of “capital-centric” economic geography (Wills 1996; Peck forthcoming b). Paralleling the rise of labor geography, but with somewhat different roots, questions of gender and identity have drawn increasing attention. This has included pioneering work on the gendering of labor and employment, and the ways in which gendered subjectivities shape not only capital-labor relations but also conceptions of work and the subjectivity of workers (Cravey 1998; McDowell 2003; Wright 2006).
Seeking to understand the wholesale changes from the 1970s to the 1980s, economic geographers studying accumulation and value turned their attention to questions of regulation and governance. Adapting regulation theory for geographical purposes, they sought to make sense of how regimes of accumulation (assemblages of technologies, product mixes, and labor relations) and modes of regulation (systems of governance and social norms) stabilize into persistent combinations that vary over space and periodically change. We take up this theme in more detail below.
Gradually, the geographical focus on territorial production clusters of firms has been called into question. The argument has increasingly been made that such clusters are also shaped by larger scale phenomena: corporate investment strategies, non-local buzz, and inter-locational competition. Cluster research came to be complemented by scholarship emphasizing globalization, commodity and value chains, and global production networks (see Coe et al. 2004). Neoliberal globalization was argued to be associated with glocalization, whereby both localities and supranational institutions become more influential scales of economic activity (and regulation), by contrast to the national scale. Whereas some researchers studied global production strategies, others turned to firms. Evolutionary economic geography emerged as an influential area of research. Taking advantage of access to new firm-scale datasets, for example in US Census data centers, and building on neo-Darwinian models of competition developed in evolutionary economics (Hodgson 2002), these researchers seek to understand the co-evolution of firms, technologies, and regional economies (Essletzbichler and Rigby 2007; Boschma and Martin 2010).
Markets have become an active area of research – in ways that are quite different from location theory’s focus on how markets function. Drawing on social studies of science, institutionalism, actor-network theory, performativity, and the closely related interest in more-than-human geographies (how agency is distributed across humans and non-human actants, through the emergent networks connecting them), geographers ask how markets are made. Instead of asking which theories can make sense of markets, geographers and others ask how markets perform, and thereby make plausible, certain theories of market organization and functioning (Callon 1998; Barnes 2008; Mackenzie, Muniesa, and Siu 2008; Berndt and Boeckler 2009). These questions increasingly intersect with those that have been posed by institutional political economists, concerning the nature and consequences of “market rule” (Brenner, Peck, and Theodore 2010), and by governmentality theorists problematizing new forms of market-oriented subjectivity (Larner this volume).
Geographies of money, finance, and financialization now also receive considerable attention – reflecting their increased centrality to contemporary capitalism in general (Pike and Pollard 2010; Clark 2004; Pollard and Samers 2007; French, Leyshon, and Wainwright forthcoming). This has to do with how monetary value, in its various manifestations, accumulates in certain places and flows across space, the varied ways in which financial value is produced, and value itself (for example how much is a subprime mortgage worth). Last, but certainly not least in terms of the passion and interest generated among economic geographers, has been the flourishing of research on community and diverse economies. This scholarship highlights those areas of the economy (both social and spatial) where non-capitalist logics drive processes of production, exchange, consumption, redistribution, and growth, demonstrating that such “non-capitalist” economies coexist with capitalism, even in the latter’s heartlands (Gibson-Graham 2006).
Regulation and Governance
If there is one thread that connects the various projects of contemporary economic geography, through all its twists and turns – from regulationism to feminism, political ecology to innovation studies, labor geography to production networks, post-structuralism to evolutionism – it would be a recurrent concern with institutions, governance, regulation, social construction, and ultimately politics. By the same token, there is widespread skepticism concerning mainstream claims to the effect that “the economy” resembles a singular, self-regulating machine – an autonomous sphere independently governed by a logic of its own – that can be represented as an almost empty universe, moved only by the supposedly primal, utilitarian urges of optimizing subjects. This is not to say, of course, that what might be incautiously labeled the “extra-economic” is handled in the same way, or afforded the same explanatory-cum-methodological weight, across all of these endeavors, but it is to call attention to the broadly shared understanding, across much of the field, that “the economy” is, in various and evolving ways, socially infused, socially inflected, or socially constituted (see Amin and Thrift 1995; Gibson-Graham 1996; Gertler 2010).
As a result, what might loosely be called the governance question has been in play for some considerable time now, for economic geographers of many stripes, and quite persistently since the 1980s. There is not – and arguably never could be – a unifying and singular answer to the governance question. In fact, it might even be said that while economic geographers are united in their concern with governance, they are divided in their response to it. The question of governance consequently represents not so much a locus of concern (or consensus) in its own right, more a point of departure (implicitly or explicitly) for proliferating explorations of, inter alia, situated economic subjectivities, the policy and practice of economic development, “instituted” economic relations, modes of social regulation, cultural-economic formations, the restructuring of governance systems, the normative bases for community economies, and political-economic struggles and conflicts. In as far as economies are rarely, if ever, seen to be self-governed, in any of this work, the governance question is ever present.
The heterogeneity of work in the realm of the economic geographies of regulation and governance, in terms of its ontological roots, preferred epistemologies, and prioritized objects of study, is such that the identification of common patterns and trajectories is inevitably difficult, not to say contestable. However, one proposition that does appear to hold is that there has been a gradual (if uneven and incomplete) unwinding of the old knot of region-centric concerns with deindustrializing and (later) flexibilizing areas of the global North, and the immediate socioinstitutional fallout of the crisis of Atlantic Fordism (see Massey 1984; Scott and Storper 1986), coupled with an increasing concern with phenomena like global production networks and commodity-chain governance; transnational processes of neoliberalization; and extra-local networking across communities of practice and alternative economies (see Yeung and Lin 2003; Hughes, Wrigley, and Buttle 2008; Murphy 2008; Stenning et al. 2010). In turn, this more recent work has been associated with a range of energizing encounters with fields like critical development studies, evolutionary economics, postcolonial theory, economic sociology and anthropology, and science studies, enriching received understandings of regulation, governance, and indeed “economy.”
If the original pluralization of economy might have been a statement of aspiration as much as achievement (Lee and Wills 1997), post-millennial economic geographies have been much more inclined to venture beyond the cocoon of Atlantic-Fordist capitalism, both geographically and analytically. At the same time, they have contributed to extending the reach and vision of economic geography beyond the formal economy and the sphere of wage labor, beyond the manufacturing enterprise (and “its” region), and beyond the (nation) state. The regulationist moment of the late 1980s and early 1990s (Storper and Scott 1992; Tickell and Peck 1992) might be considered to be a prelude to this phase of increasing pluralization, the more macro concerns of regulationism having in some cases prefigured more granulated examinations of institutional regimes and practices, while representing a foil against which alternative conceptions of governance or governmentality have been developed. As a result, the governance question has become ever more polyvocal, rather than one posed for the most part in the shadow of the Keynesian-welfare state and in the context of north Atlantic economies. Correspondingly, insofar as neoliberalization has defined the prevailing pattern of regulatory transformation and governance restructuring in recent decades (Brenner, Peck, and Theodore 2010; MacKinnon this volume), this is no longer traced exclusively through emergent institutional fixes in Western Europe and North America but also through a range of other (re)formative locations, including Latin America and Eastern Europe, as well as to dialogic and relational connections of transnational reach and scope (England and Ward 2007; Leitner, Peck, and Sheppard 2007; Peck 2010).
Embodiment and Identity
For much of Scott’s “Great half century” of economic geography, questions about embodiment and identity would have been met by incredulity, and perhaps even more likely, with blank incomprehension and bafflement. Location theorists dealt with disembodied rational agents, mere “pallid skeleton[s]” to use the location theorist William Alonso’s (1964: 1) description. In effect, location theorists conceived actors without bodies. Actors were defined not by their corporeality but by their logical properties such as consistency of choice, well-ordered preference functions, omnipotence, and infallible and instantaneous calculative decision-making. This led Georgescu-Roegen (1971: 343) to remark that such actors are concerned with “only [the] jigsaw puzzle of fitting given means to given ends, which requires a computer not an agent.”
The political economy tradition that increasingly took over from location theory in economic geography from the late 1970s possessed the potential to make bodies and identity central. Marx’s writings, especially in the first volume of Capital around his discussions of nineteenth-century working conditions drawn from the reports of English factory inspectors, were full of accounts of workers’ bodies and the hellish physical contortions, pummeling and abuse they endured in the capitalist work place, what the English nineteenth-century poet William Blake appropriately labeled “Satanic Mills.” Through Marx’s notion of ideology there is also the beginning of a theory about how subjects are constituted and thus the social identities they bear and carry around. But neither of these threads was followed in the early manifestations of political economy in economic geography, particularly in David Harvey’s (1982; 1989) works. His writings were seminal, remaining foundational, but as brilliant as they were (and they were brilliant) they virtually ignored both bodies and identity. Paramount for Harvey was the movement of capital and the conditions of its reproduction. Labor – working bodies – was an afterthought if it was a thought at all (Katz 1986). Harvey reduced labor to the initials LP (Labor Power) in his borrowing of Marx’s acronymic scheme of capitalist expanded reproduction. What counted was the abstract generalized spatial logic of capital, not the bodily peculiarities of “Mr Moneybags,” nor those of the working class, their skin color or their gender, and even less, who people thought they were (their identity). There is more than a little irony in the fact that the project of labor geography, mentioned earlier, arose as a reaction not only to bloodless location theories but also to one-sided, overly capital-centric, and sometimes actorless theories of political economy.
As early as the late 1970s, however, there had been stirrings of change coming primarily from feminism and occurring both within political economy (for example, around the domestic labor debate) and outside that tradition (for example, in work on differential travel times for women compared to men). This scholarship showed that the body was of enormous import. It was indissolubly linked to a set of social practices, norms, values, expectations, and institutions that defined identity, shaped who you were, what you could do, the job you did, the life chances that might realistically be available. You could never get rid of your body and its entailments. It was with you for life.
Doreen Massey’s (1984) Spatial Divisions of Labour was one of the first works to make clear in economic geography the crucial consequences of gendered bodies – in her case in a study of South Wales during a period of industrial change during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Bodies and identity, she showed, entered into the very marrow of accumulation and value. They shaped the spatial division of labor in South Wales, along with its very character as a place, as the region was variously undone, redone, and done up.
By the 1990s feminist theory increasingly shaded into various forms of post-structuralism that similarly emphasized the body and identity. Massey (1994) moved explicitly in that direction, and along the way, in a well-known exchange, criticized Harvey for failing to recognize the difference that gendered bodies made in theorizing the capitalist space economy (Massey 1991; Harvey 1992). The 1990s became the decade for a set of classic economic geographical studies (Massey, Quintas, and Wield 1992; Hanson and Pratt 1995; Gibson-Graham 1996; McDowell 1997), often carried out by women, which indisputably demonstrated both theoretically and empirically that gendered bodies and female identity mattered. They could not be separated from the economic, but were utterly entangled within it.
The last 10 years have represented a continuation and extension of those lines of investigation established during the 1990s. It is increasingly recognized that bodies and identity not only split along the singular fault-line of gender but along many other lines of social difference too. Ethnicity is an obvious one, and a significant theme in many chapters in this volume (e.g. Mullins, Kelly, and Silvey this volume). This is the carry-over of the feminist and post-structural sensibility focused on the body and identity. By rejecting any notion of a single, one-fits-all body and identity, the post-structural feminist approach demands exploration of the full panoply of different forms of social difference that make a difference. In a globalized integrated geographical economy characterized by staggeringly complex flows and interactions of people, ideas, and things, difference is now everywhere. The world is so very variegated, and marked indelibly on our bodies and on the souls of our identity. No longer can it be said that economic geography lacks a pulse.
More than Variegation: The Projects of Economic Geography
At times, particularly around questions of ontology, epistemology, and method, Anglophone economic geography’s variegation has escalated into high-profile polarized disagreements, as well as lower profile grumbling. We have earlier characterized this in terms of a dissipating, centrifugal dynamic, or as a form of fragmented pluralism (Foster et al. 2007; Barnes and Sheppard 2010). Nevertheless, we maintain, these variegations can be seen as disagreements within what remains a broadly shared economic geography project, whose commonalities are worth reviewing. First, economic geographers of all stripes continue to ask how capitalist economic processes reproduce and recreate sociospatial inequalities in livelihood possibilities (Sheppard 2006a). Second, there are questions about how geography “matters” to the globalizing spatial dynamics of economic processes and relations, variously dominated by or (semi) detached from capitalist logics. Third, there are questions about how economic, political, cultural, subjectification and biophysical processes articulate and intersect with one another. Fourth, there are questions about “non-capitalist” economic processes: How is capitalism, as a way of organizing the space-economy contested, and what viable alternatives are possible?
Like it or not, Anglophone economic geography remains a post-Marxist subdiscipline, haunted by Marx (cf. Derrida 1994). David Harvey remains a profoundly influential figure: anyone seeking to take economic geography in a new and different direction still feels compelled to rationalize their position relative to his, either to declare affinities to, or distance themselves from, Harvey and Marxism (cf. Deutsche 1991; Yeung 2005; Amin and Thrift 2007). Somewhat ironically, perhaps, at the same time Harvey himself has come to perform a larger role, as a public intellectual whose views on the contemporary, crisis-ridden trajectories of globalizing capital are frequently sought and whose contributions frequently attract comment, even in the financial press. In the context of these wider discursive and ideological fields, the bulk of economic geographers retain some significant lines of agreement with Harvey, notwithstanding their philosophical and epistemological divisions and disagreements. They concur that capitalism is conflictual and unstable, that it is incapable of solving its own internal problems, and that it remains productive of the very sociospatial inequalities that its proponents believe it can overcome (at least in principle). There is also a shared skepticism of equilibrium, methodological individualism and microfoundations, quantitative theorization and analysis (unfortunately), and the separability of the economy from other social and ecological spheres (particularly any attempt, economistically, to reduce the latter pair to the former). In this respect, the center of gravity in economic geography is still more radical – in a Marxisant or post-Marxisant manner – than many of its subdisciplinary cousins, like economic anthropology or economic sociology.
The differences with orthodox economics, in particular, remain quite stark. In contrast to the essentially Cartesian sociospatial ontology of mainstream geographical economics (in which, as noted above, individuals and territories are treated as hermetically sealed objects of analysis, and space–time is exogenous), economic geographers conclude that the spatialities of economy are produced/constructed rather than exogenous. The same applies to the relationship between the economy and the more-than-human world – commonly labeled “nature” (cf. Castree 2005; Sheppard 2011a). At the same time, these produced geographies themselves shape spatial economic trajectories. This conceptualization of a co-constitutive relationship between the economy and geography, whether the latter is defined in terms of spatial relations or nature-society relations, is shared with critical sociospatial theory more generally. Yet it does not follow, as some claim, that geography is little more than an epiphenomenon because it has no independent causal power. Rather, the economy and geography are mutually constitutive of one another (dubbed the sociospatial dialectic by Soja 1980), with geographers particularly well-equipped to tease out these complexities. Over the past two decades, there has been a tendency to focus successively on particular spatialities. A decade ago, the focus was on territory and place – on industrial districts, economic clusters and understanding regional economic prosperity or stagnation in the face of globalizing capitalism (Storper 1997; Scott 2000b). In the early 2000s, attention turned to theories of geographical scale and the rescaling associated with the turn to neoliberal globalization and away from Fordism – the “hollowing out” of the nation-state (Jessop 1994; Swyngedouw 1997; Brenner 2004). Then came networks, a hallmark of the relational turn with its particular concern with how networks stretch the economy in geographically non-intuitive ways across geographical space (Henderson et al. 2002; Coe et al. 2004). More recent spatial metaphors include sociospatial positionality, and mobility – although neither has yet penetrated the center of economic geographical discourse (Urry 2003; Cresswell 2006; Sheppard 2006b).
This tendency to lurch faddishly from one spatiality to another during the past decade, also in human geography more generally, has been criticized by those arguing that many spatialities matter, and are likely co-implicated with one another, depending on the situation under study (Massey 2005; Peck and Theodore 2007; Jessop, Brenner, and Jones 2008; Leitner, Sheppard, and Sziarto 2008). This only reinforces the broader point of agreement – that geography qua spatialities matter, no matter which forms may be salient in particular contexts. Internalizing the production of spatiality into economic geographical analysis in turn reinforces the argument that capitalism cannot be reduced to rational choice microfoundations; agency and sociospatial structure are co-constitutive, capitalism is rife with conflict and instability, creating uneven geographical development (Harvey 1982; Barnes and Sheppard 1992; Plummer and Sheppard 2006).
Beyond this, the cultural turn (Barnes 1995), combined with feminist and post-prefixed approaches to economic geography, has been productive of the broad consensus that economic and non-economic aspects of the social world (identity, politics, culture, etc.) are co-implicated, in ways that are neither reducible to, nor necessarily dominated by, the economy. This contrasts with econo-centric tendencies in economics, culture-centric tendencies in anthropology, etc. creating space for the fascinating conversations across disciplinary lines highlighted in Section 3 of this book – what might be thought of as an unbounding of the subdiscipline of economic geography. Economic processes must be considered in relation to the biophysical, cultural, and social processes with which they co-evolve (the formation of soils, water, and other “natural resources,” gender, social class, race, subject, and identity formation, etc.). Any of these can be a legitimate starting point for economic geographical analysis, as long as research engages with questions of economy at some point or other.
Finally, following from the above, broadly critical of capitalism’s capacity to bring the good life to all, economic geographers recognize that the economic imperatives of any society (i.e. production of a surplus, transforming “nature” into objects of use, exchanging such products, distributing the surplus among participants, setting aside surplus for accumulation and/or reproduction, improving technical know-how, and waste creation and disposal) can be organized in a variety of ways. This is not simply a question of rehearsing how “traditional” or “flawed” non-capitalist economic systems have been replaced as we progress toward capitalism. In this view, while capitalism may be hegemonic it is neither inherently superior to alternatives nor the only form of space-economy worthy of serious consideration. Indeed, as the literature on diverse economies stresses, such alternatives are not only to be found long ago and far away, but coexist with variegated forms of capitalism, even within its contemporary heartlands (Gibson-Graham 1996; Lee and Wills 1997; Gibson-Graham 2006). While the emphasis in much of this work has been on non-capitalist economies, we would argue that these contestations do not exist outside capitalism but usually articulate with it (Wolpe 1980; Leitner et al. 2007). One way of recognizing the co-constitutive nature of the relationship between varieties of capitalism and other economic logics, without presuming a priori that either is necessarily dominant, would be to frame this as a focus on more-than-capitalist economies.
Our purpose in delineating these commonalities is neither to suppress nor to devalue the variegated nature of economic geography. Disagreements about what these relationships mean, how they should be theorized and the appropriateness of particular methodologies will, and should, persist. Rather, we wish to stress that commonalities, even at this level of abstraction, provide the basis for mutually productive critical exchange across these variegations, with the potential to enrich understandings within subfields engaged in such exchange, even when consensus is neither possible nor desirable (cf. Longino 2002).
[E]conomic geography can and should engage more actively across its manifold paradigms and fashions (thereby becoming an exemplar for the wider discipline). Such engagement is necessary to avoid not only monism (as in economics), but also a fragmented pluralism of ships passing in the night. Engaged pluralism can be compatible with the values and epistemological commitments of science studies and feminist philosophy of science, but trading zones satisfying the norms of engaged pluralism do not just happen. Inclusive trading zones need to be actively established.
(Barnes and Sheppard 2010: 207–8).
Situated Economic Geographies: Organizing The Wiley-Blackwell Companion
A key to moving toward the engaged and critical pluralism that we think can strengthen economic geography in future decades is to recognize the situated nature of economic geographic scholarship (indeed, of scholarship more generally). As scholars, we each face the challenge of translating between the issues and approaches that move us deeply – our passions within the field – and the rigor (performed in variegated ways) necessary to produce good scholarship. This is the challenge of finding ways to convince others that what we are passionate about should also be of interest to them, whether or not they share our particular motivations. Elsewhere, we sought to problematize this with respect to questions of method and practice (Tickell et al. 2007). A central goal as we have planned and organized this book has been to highlight the situated nature of all economic geographical scholarship. It is impossible, of course, to represent exhaustively the scope of all those trajectories and interpretations constituting the field, even within the confines of the Anglophone literature. We thus issued invitations to contributors who vary in terms of their areas of scholarship and approaches taken within the field, in terms of where they are located, and in terms of generation – when they embarked on a career in economic geography. We also asked each author to take the opportunity to write self-consciously about their theme, offering their personal assessment rather than a detached, “just the facts” overview of the field. And of course it was essential that all of the contributors wrote with an awareness of their particular situatedness.
This goal also underlies the overall organization of the book. Critical assessments of scholarship around the broad themes of accumulation and value, regulation and governance, and embodiment and identity are to be found in Section 2. A diverse group of geographers was asked to take up some aspect of what we feel are the major developments of the last decade. None of these contributions should be taken as the definitive assessment of these respective fields; each should be read as an informed and thoughtful assessment from a particular perspective. It is our firm belief that becoming more self-conscious and reflexive about our presuppositions is the first step toward genuinely learning from other perspectives: the essence of critical scholarship. Indeed, it will be evident that individual authors rarely confine themselves to a particular approach, underlining ways in which conversations become possible across this variegated field and countering the tendency for its islands of practice to become detached or introverted.
These critical commentaries on the various substantive projects, programs, and preoccupations of economic geography constitute the core of the book. However, in a fast-moving, promiscuous, and polycentric field like economic geography, this can never be the end of the story. The opening and closing sections of the book, “Trajectories” and “Borders,” are designed to put the “internalist” assessments of Section 2 within a broader framework. We discuss each in turn.
Trajectories (Section 1)
Some disciplines show little interest in how their current state of knowledge has emerged; seeing themselves as approaching the end of intellectual history, with little to learn from the past (Fukuyama 1992). Physicists repeatedly debate how close their discipline is to completing its chapter of knowledge production, teetering on the edge of accomplishing a “theory of everything” (Hawking 2005). Mainstream economics has been eliminating courses on the history of economic thought as a requirement of graduate training, presumably on the grounds that there is a direct deductive line from Adam Smith to contemporary mathematical economic theory, which is little more than a footnote to contemporary achievements. It is noteworthy that both physics and economics constitute themselves as “real” sciences and are highly canonical fields with an ostensible consensus on what is to be known and how to know it (although the two approaches to knowledge production differ significantly, cf. Anderson, Arrow, and Pines 1988; Mirowski 1989). Not so, however, in economic geography, where paradigm contestability and deep reflexivity are both entrenched characteristics of academic practice. Rather than representing this condition in terms of contrasting philosophical subparadigms (as in the 2000 Companion), we focus here on what we have termed trajectories.
By trajectories we mean the, often circuitous, intellectual paths our respective contributors have followed that brought them to this point in their career, and to writing the chapter you will read. Necessarily, trajectories are pluralized: Everyone gets to where they are by a different route. Moreover, the trajectory our contributors take, and the trajectories they don’t take, rubs off on the kind of economic geographer they become. For us, this multiplicity of trajectories is a source of disciplinary strength. It is constructive rather than debilitating, instilling disciplinary vim and vigour. It makes possible an engaged pluralism in which people who hold different kinds of knowledge critically discuss and debate with others, not turning their backs on one another, but facing each other, interacting, in the process even sometimes changing minds (Barnes and Sheppard 2010).
Trajectories often imply temporal change, but, as the synonyms we have already used like “path” and “route” suggest, the term also carries geographical baggage. Trajectories reflect not only history but also geography. David Livingstone’s (2003) work in particular reveals the “place of science.” For him, even the most universal and aspatial scientific findings, from Boyle’s Law to the Higgs Boson (“God’s”) particle found at the Hadron Collider, depend upon a peculiar geography of discovery and transmission. The same is true in economic geography. Place matters not only as an object of enquiry within the discipline, but also in determining the object of enquiry of the discipline. George Chisholm’s (1889) place at the centre of the British Empire in the late nineteenth century was critical to how he drew the boundaries of the new discipline of economic geography. The foci he placed at the centre of the new disciplinary inquiry, like primary commodities produced by the colonies, manufactured goods produced by Great Britain, the construction of large infrastructural projects such as railways and ports, and the global movements of commerce along well-marked shipping lines, strongly reflected Chisholm’s location in London at the very heart of the Imperial system.
Or again, in the post-War period, when economic geographers first began to undertake abstract forms of theorizing, using rigorous statistical methods, and drawing on electrical calculators and main frame computers, reflected where those economic geographers were located. They were in the United States during the 1950s. Because of Cold War imperatives, and previous experiences during the second World War, all social sciences, and even some humanities, were contorted to resemble natural sciences (Barnes and Farish, 2006). That involved becoming quantitative, team-based, sometimes machine-driven, exact, logical, and abstruse. Some geographers who were in America, especially younger ones, could not help themselves. They had to join this larger movement, reconstituting economic geography as a particular kind of science as they did so. Imperial Britain and its geography was the past, but America was the here and now, if not the future.
The larger point, which economic geographers should appreciate, is that space and place are never neutral. Where one comes from makes a difference to the ideas that one carries. Economic geographers also appreciate that not all spaces and places are equal. Some are much more equal than others. Those economic geographers who were born and trained in North America and the UK are more likely to have their ideas listened to than those born and trained elsewhere. Having English as your native language provides an immediate advantage given that most academic geographical journals, and the prime venues for academic dissemination and acquisition of status, are located and edited in English-speaking countries, primarily the UK and the USA. This has at least two deleterious consequences for the kind of engaged pluralism we advocate. First, these journals are dominated by material, vocabulary, conceptual frameworks, and knowledge that stem from only a limited portion of the world, perhaps the most powerful. It is a form of hegemony, replete with both coercion and consent. Second, what is produced is a blinkered or occluded geography given the tendency for economic geographers to engage in research and to publish on only their own back yard. There are obviously exceptions, which are amply found in our volume. But it is clear that true globalization has yet to arrive in economic geography. Here, as for the economy more generally, the form that globalization has taken continues to be highly differentiated and uneven in effect, with many places left out.
At one level, this book can be seen as reproducing such a situational, Anglophone bias. Consequently it runs the danger of ignoring, for example, the enormous amount of (largely applied) economic geography being undertaken in China or Russia and seen as critical to state management of the space-economy. Yet at the same time, we seek to take some baby-steps, at least, toward a less singular and Anglophonic representation of economic geography by incorporating the situated assessments of authors located outside the Anglophone countries, albeit authors who themselves publish in the Anglophone literature. We also assembled a mixture of generations, younger and older, to give a sense of the ways that perspectives on the field depend on how our personal trajectories intersect with economic geography.
Borders (Section 3)
Just as there are disciplines that seemingly believe that there is nothing to learn from their past, that they emerged Athena-like, fully formed in their latter finished state, so are there disciplines that seemingly believe there is nothing to learn from other apparently cognate disciplines. Their disciplinary logic, subject matter, methods, and approaches are their own, and theirs alone.
Economic geography has never been like that. It has been the great borrower, although admittedly rarely the great lender. From the beginning, economic geographers were interested in what happened on the other side of various disciplinary walls, fences, and borders. Most obviously that was true for what went on in economics and business studies, but also in sociology, anthropology, political science, and environmental studies, and more recently, in feminism, development, cultural, and science studies, and even on occasion, in mathematics and statistics, and in philosophy. No one could ever accuse economic geography of being intellectually narrow-minded and insular. Or that it has vigorously guarded its borders to exclude contaminating ideas from corrupting disciplinary purity. Or that it has doggedly policed disciplinary practices to ensure rigorous conformity to the canon. As an anti-canonical discipline, economic geography aspires to interdisciplinarity (the belief in conversation across academic subjects) and maybe even post-disciplinarity (the belief that we are better off by eradicating disciplines altogether). John Agnew and John Pickles are among those who take up these arguments here, neither being satisfied with the current state of affairs in economic geography.
This porosity of economic geography finds expression in every chapter of this book, but is at the center of the chapters making up this last section. It might seem unusual, strategically naïve, even wrongheaded, for a disciplinary text like this one to give over so much of its content to material from other academic subjects. Yet, as noted above, material from other subjects has always been part of the discipline; complacency has never been a prevailing disposition. George Chisholm (1910), possibly the first ever native English speaking economic geographer, drew on the German sociologist Alfred Webber’s location theory for his study of “the geographical relation of the market to the seats of industry.” Or again, the American economic geographer William Warntz (1959) placed Newtonian theories of gravity and potential at the heart of his project to understand the “geography of price,” even becoming a Research Associate at Princeton’s Institute of Astrophysics. Or more recently, Gibson-Graham (1996) used the work of the feminist theorist Sharon Marcus to rethink globalization and to consider alternative, non-capitalist imaginaries. The larger point is that the practice of taking ideas, theories, models, and methods from other disciplines is long-standing in economic geography, producing major new approaches and bodies of work as in location theory, or in models of spatial interaction, or in postcapitalist politics. For historical reasons alone, then, there is warrant for paying attention to economic geography’s borders.
But there is another reason that is normative rather than empirical. Indeed, it is part of the very rationale for this volume and lies behind our own willingness as editors to be involved in this project in the first place. Economic geography should engage in interaction, exchange, and conversation with other disciplines it borders. Such practices are justified by the moral conviction that dialogue is always preferable to monologue, that openness is always better than closure. An intellectual Schengen Agreement should be struck among disciplines, making border crossings as easy as any internal disciplinary travel. In some cases, as with anthropology (Dunn and Schoenberger, this volume) and cultural studies (Pickles, this volume), such an agreement with economic geography appears to be almost there. With other subjects, like economics, we are farther away, but even here intriguing possibilities are emerging (Sunley, this volume). The consequences of cross-border exchange, of engaging in trading zones to use our earlier vocabulary, include a series of characteristics that we hope will be seen to be cross-cutting features of the book: (1) enhanced experimentation, creativity, and innovativeness, (2) the invention of new enabling vocabularies, (3) novel theories and methodologies, (4) new models of academic debate and discourse, and (5) following the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey whose ideas have influenced our own, the practice of hope.
We recognize that there is no single iron-clad justification for our normative position. To assert one would be to slide towards foundationalism, universalism, and even dogma. We have to remain open-minded even about being open-minded. The best we can do, the only thing we can do, is to keep on talking; to engage in deliberation not only with those of our own kind, but across all borders.
Open-ended Economic Geographies
When we were invited to consider editing a new Companion, we had a number of reservations. In particular, we wondered to ourselves whether there was much more for authors to say, whether this would be little more than an attempt to repackage what we already know for a new audience. The more we thought about it, however, the more we became convinced that much had happened in the long decade since 2000. Not only are academic debates moving at an ever-faster pace, but the world itself has changed dramatically with the rise of China, the explosion of geographical information technologies (including Web 2.0), and the 2008 global economic crisis. New realities and new ideas are generative of one another.
Economic geography has become a peculiarly open-ended subdiscipline, one that has tended to privilege the analysis of rapidly changing phenomena, studied in real time. It is an anti-canonical project; it is open-ended and will remain so, repeatedly breaking out of the boundaries created for itself. In this book, we have tried to convey this open-endedness in terms of trajectories, approaches, topics, participants, and intersections with other disciplines that have emerged during the last decade. We have also sought to indicate boundaries that now need to be transcended. We have not attended to methodologies, an issue that has been taken up elsewhere (Tickell et al. 2007), but here the same applies. Economic geography also has proliferated its methodological registers – ranging from mathematical modeling to ethnography and participatory action research – and has much to gain from putting these into conversation with one another rather than pursuing them separately. An important task will be attending to the co-evolution of ideas, observations, practices, and politics. Such a vibrant field may well require another assessment in due course. In this sense, the work of economic geography is never done.
Notes
1 In 2000, frustrated with the unwillingness of mainstream economists to listen to alternatives, a group of French economics students founded the well-publicized post-autistic (now renamed “real world”) economics movement (www.paecon.net).
2 WDR 2009 organizes its three economic-geographical policy prescriptions, infrastructure, institutions or interventions, according to whether the primary geographical problem is (local) density, (intra-national) distance, or (international) division: “an I for a D” (World Bank 2008: 23).
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