Section I: Trajectories
1 Diverse Economies: Performative Practices for “Other Worlds”
J.K. Gibson-Graham
2 Geography in Economy: Reflections on a Field
Richard Walker
3 Release the Hounds! The Marvelous Case of Political Economy
Geoff Mann
4 The Industrial Corporation and Capitalism’s Time–Space Fix
Phillip O’Neill
5 Theory, Practice, and Crisis: Changing Economic Geographies of Money and Finance
Sarah Hall
6 The “Matter of Nature” in Economic Geography
Karen Bakker
7 East Asian Capitalisms and Economic Geographies
Henry Wai-chung Yeung
8 Contesting Power/Knowledge in Economic Geography: Learning from Latin America and the Caribbean
Marion Werner
Editors’ Introduction: Trajectories
Some disciplines show little interest in the trajectories through which their current state of knowledge has emerged; they see themselves as approaching the end of 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, aspiring to 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, with Nobel prizes to prove it, and are highly canonical; that is, there is consensus on both the object to be known and how it is to be known, producing a proper, capitalized Physics or Economics (although the two approaches to knowledge between these two disciplines differ significantly, cf. Anderson, Arrow and Pines 1988; Mirowski 1989). Not so, however, in economic geography; for most of its existence it has shunned capitalization and the idea of a “proper” discipline.
Given that economic geography has changed so much over the past 60 years, it is perhaps unsurprising that its participants have sometimes felt insecure about its status, frequently reflecting on its development. In so doing, they have drawn on a particularly active area of debate across the social sciences and humanities: science and technology studies (STS) (Hackett, Amsterdamska, Lynch et al. 2008). That literature suggests that rather than debating in the abstract the merits of contrasting philosophical principles and programs, elevating philosophy above society, emphasis should be on how society (and nature) co-evolves with knowledge production. Under which societal conditions do particular ways of knowing become plausible, and how? How do particular ways of knowing, as they become widely practiced, shape society (and nature), including our understandings of them? It is in this spirit that we begin this Companion by focusing on “trajectories” (a shift from the approach taken in the 2000 Companion’s emphasis on philosophies).
Our use of the plural, trajectories, is deliberate. Rather than asserting a single, “best” path toward knowledge production in economic geography (whether as a description of the field or as a prescription), we hold that much of the field’s vibrancy comes from the coexistence of multiple trajectories of knowledge production in economic geography. Such trajectories are in part fueled by the particular historical and geographical settings in which scholars are embedded. Knowledge production always comes from somewhere. But trajectories are also created internally, within a discipline that has always been tolerant, even encouraging, of differing knowledge types and claims. We believe economic geography’s pluralism, its anti-canonical stance, is a key strength of the field rather than a weakness, provided that we can also cultivate a disciplinary culture of constructive, critical engagement across these (Barnes and Sheppard 2010). There are, of course, many possible trajectories: there are not only those that become realities, but there are also the paths not taken. Reflecting on trajectories of knowledge production that have not (yet) been taken, and what they might add to our understanding of economic geography, is also crucial.
Trajectories imply change over time, but also have important spatial dimensions. The historian of geography David Livingstone (2003) identifies how geography matters to the production of scientific knowledge (where knowledge is created, how it moves across space as well as through time, how it is received in different places). Paying attention to such spatiotemporal trajectories is essential. It shows that knowledge taken as universal, as taken-for-granted, is always the result of a set of geographical processes that subsequently are made invisible. For example, the free trade doctrine, the assertion that free international trade, under the umbrella of the World Trade Organization, is beneficial to all nations, is taken as a universal truth; a placeless piece of knowledge. Once one interrogates its origins, not only philosophically (rooted in Lockean liberalism) but also spatiotemporally (located in Western European enlightenment thought but also physically, in cotton textile capitalists around Manchester, UK, seeking to capture global textile production and lower wages), we see that Free Trade is not a universal truth, but the product of a particular time and place, and instantiated social interests. The doctrine’s relation to these interests in turn helps us understand what is at stake in asserting the principle and why the United States contested the principle until 1944, only to become its major protagonist at least until recently, a role now being taken over by China (Sheppard 2005; Peet 2009).
A second example is postcolonial theory. This suggests that accounts of the history of development are (unconsciously or self-consciously) located within Western European and North American understandings, reflecting the historical sociospatial positionality of those two places, providing them with an ability to shape globalizing capitalism. The perspectives of those located elsewhere, in the global South (Escobar 1995), are quite different but rarely visible. They are trajectories not taken, lacking influence. The result, as Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, is that conventional stories of development (e.g. Walt Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth, an ‘anti-communist’ manifesto’) are Eurocentric (Rostow 1960; Chakrabarty 2000). The claimed universality of such narratives of development must be be challenged by provincializing them (to use Chakrabarty’s term). This requires economic geographers, inter alia, to identify the particularity of the European origins of such ideas in order to create space for taking seriously alternative trajectories of knowledge production and ways of understanding the world (e.g. Jim Blaut 1993; 2000; Sheppard 2011).
The unequal global geography of economic geography poses further challenges to such provincialization. As in other disciplines, economic geography as a formal academic practice is dominated by Anglophone geographers, writing in English for English-speaking audiences, largely located in European and Anglophone universities, publishing in English-language journals mostly located and edited in North America and Europe, and attending high-profile conferences where English is the language of presentation and mostly located in the global North. While economic geography is practiced in many other places, those other spaces receive little attention. Indeed, these practitioners increasingly are urged, and incentivized, to gain international recognition by publishing in the high profile Anglophone journals included in citation counting metrics. To be published, “southern” authors must align their work with what is published in those journals by Anglophone scholars. Such de facto dominance of the field by Anglophone scholars and institutions, and indeed by the English language, inevitably fosters convergence toward Anglophone norms and fads – with its attendant advantages and disadvantages (Braun and Disch 2002; Raju 2002; Rodriguez-Pose 2004).
In order to stimulate reflection on the trajectories taken, or not, in Anglophone economic geography, we asked a selection of differently situated authors to offer their perspectives. It is impossible, of course, to represent the scope of trajectories, and interpretations thereof, constituting the field, even within the confines of the Anglophone literature. We thus picked contributors who vary in terms of their areas of scholarship, approach, their geographical location, and stage in their career.
J.K. Gibson-Graham, from the United States and Australia, emerged as scholars in the late 1970s embedded within the squarely Marxist economic geography of Clark University in Massachusetts. Here they describe how they turned to a non-essentialist, post-structural Marxism (in conversation with the Rethinking Marxism collective in Amherst, MA), and how this has enabled them to move dramatically away from the kinds of questions Marxists traditionally ask, to emphasize the many ways in which non-capitalist economic logics coexist with, and contest, the taken-for-granted norm of capitalism. Their work has spawned a vibrant subarea of economic geography originally dubbed “community economies” (www.communityeconomies.org) and now “diverse economies” (Smith, this volume). Gibson-Graham argue for an affective, positive approach to scholarship and practice, provoking diverse economy scholars to also pay renewed attention to ecological systems and the ethics of interacting with non-humans.
By contrast, the American Richard Walker, from the first generation of geographical political economists (the first North American student of David Harvey’s), and the Canadian Geoff Mann, from the emergent generation of new radical scholars, make the case for Marxian accounts of the field. From a perspective that few others could provide, Walker narrates the long history of economic geography since the 1960s. His story is broken down into nine acts moving from location theory to financialization. He concludes that Marxism has been a pervasive and important influence throughout. Importantly, by linking the evolution of the field to shifts in the global economy, his essay reminds us that how we make sense of the world depends greatly on what we perceive to be going on; our situated observations and perceptions shape our approaches to knowledge production. Mann, representative of a reemergent Marxism within Anglophone economic geography over the last decade, particularly since the onset of the global economic crisis, argues that economic geographers should think of themselves as Marxist political economists analyzing the shifting geographies of capitalism, and describes what is at stake in doing so. Distinguishing two approaches to political economy, which he dubs the street and the sidewalk, he advocates detective work along the sidewalk, where issues often seemingly at odds with Marxism are being productively linked with political economy. He suggests that economic geographers provide exemplary versions of the latter approach.
It is important to note that tendencies to consider the Gibson-Graham approach as in opposition to Marxist accounts are over-stated; there is much, under-utilized, space for constructive mutual engagement. The Australian Phil O’Neill, influenced by conventional Marxism and an occasional collaborator with Gibson-Graham, exemplifies this convergence. His account of the trajectory of economic geographical research on the corporation (cf. Barkan this volume) stresses the mutually constitutive role of profit-driven relocation strategies and capital-labor relations, on the one hand, and corporate cultures, ethics, and gendered work relations on the other. Using the example of the Australian mining giant BHP Billiton, he resists coming to easy conclusions about whether corporations are good or bad, emphasizing instead their power to do both, often at the same time. These powerful actors, he notes, require our attention. The British scholar Sarah Hall offers a parallel account of research on the economic geography of money and finance, tracing a very similar trajectory to O’Neill from more squarely Marxian theories of money, to analyses based in the cultural turn and STS-influenced studies of the performance of financial practices in (re)producing the idea of capitalist markets as inherently efficient. Reflecting on how the global economic crisis called such claims deeply into question, Hall calls for financial geographers to resist the seductions of finance and pay more attention again to issues of power. She also notes how Anglophone geographers’ spatial focus on the largest financial markets, particularly in the United States and United Kingdom, has resulted in a neglect of other important areas of finance located elsewhere (for example, Islamic finance and sovereign wealth funds). She challenges us to diversify our research sites.
The Canadian geographer Karen Bakker examines trajectories of research that connect biophysical processes (“nature”) with economic processes. She tells how a previous focus on resources, on nature as exogenous to the economy (exemplified by the presence of a section titled “resource worlds” in the 2000 Companion), has diversified as researchers moved on to study environmental governance, neoliberal natures, global commodity chains, and production networks (highlighting how the biophysical processes harnessed for production connect with the delivery of final products to consumers). She notes that this necessary diversification of research on nature-economy relations entails moving beyond the boundaries of economic geography per se, to political ecology (McCarthy this volume) and to cultural geographic research on materialities. The latter stresses the material aspects of objects and the agency of non-human actants, decentering our focus on humans as the prime-movers of economic-biophysical processes (and, presumably, as the prime-suspects for whatever goes wrong). Economic geographic studies of nature also must increasingly attend to culture, as well as to biophysical processes in their own right.
The Chinese-Singaporean scholar Henry Yeung takes up Hall’s theme of the need to diversify our research sites, to develop more embedded understandings of developments in East Asia. He argues that the turn to the spatiality of networks by economic geographers, for example global production networks, reflects distinctive aspects of the experience of capitalism in East Asia, taken up by Asian economic geographers who incorporated them into economic geographic theory. Yeung narrates three waves of research applying network thinking in East Asia: understanding Japan’s export-oriented strategy, the role of translocal ethnic-based networks in spearheading economic development, and the grounding of such networks in particular places. He then asks how this research may make “theorizing back” possible, whereby East Asian perspectives would shape Anglophone trajectories of knowledge production. He identifies three potential arenas: the articulation of networks with territorialized relations, mobilizing a materialist turn in cultural economic geography, and attending to the divergent development of hybrid capitalisms. By doing so, he challenges us to self-consciously make space for hidden or neglected trajectories in Asia, with the potential to decenter what Anglophone critical economic geographers take for granted about geographies of economies.
The US geographer Marion Werner examines trajectories of research on production, work and economic restructuring in the Hispanic Americas and the Caribbean. Going beyond Hall’s call for economic geographers to diversify their research sites, and wondering whether the kind of approach advocated by Yeung represents an alternative to Anglophone canons or simply reflects research sites shifting to new global frontiers of capitalism, she argues that we need to do more if we are to truly decenter our largely northern understandings of globalizing capitalism: we need to create space to engage with other trajectories of knowledge production developed by economic geographers and others located in the global South. Her analysis of past research on production, work, and economic restructuring emphasizes how this research, even as it turns to other parts of the world, nevertheless interprets what is going on there through northern lenses. She turns to multilingual scholarship in Latin America and the circum-Caribbean to unravel some distinctive perspectives on globalizing capitalism, alternative loci of enunciation in her terms, which then become visible. Of course, transactions between such contrasting and differentially empowered trajectories of knowledge production are inevitably complex and uneven. She uses the example of the take up of Doreen Massey’s (1993) concept of power-geometries by Chavez’ Venezuela to tease out how southern alternatives often have northern influences, yet cannot simply be reduced to northern knowledge.
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