Economic Geography

Discussion
Capitalism had an uncanny ability to dissolve and reorganize previous arrange-
ments. One of its most powerful levers for melting ossified social arrangements
was the application of science and technology to the workplace. Capitalism,
through the medium of the entrepreneur, constantly searches for opportunities to
integrate more people into its orbit, and today we are seeing the integration of
both India and China. At this point, it is impossible to predict what the outcome
of this process will be, but there is ample evidence that it will be profound.
Economic geography can play a central role in providing a better understand-
ing of globalization and its implications for the global economy. There is a
continuing need for theoretically informed study of globalization. There is a
paucity of studies on the telecommunications and transportation infrastructures
that are facilitating globalization. The remarkable emergence of China onto the
global economy has received only minimal attention from geographers, this
should be a very profitable vein of research and Chinese scholars are eager to
cooperate with those in the West. The rise of China is already obvious, if under-
studied, the case of India is almost entirely unexamined, and the Indian case is
probably more important, because it immediately leads one into a contemplation
of what is the nature of services, or, what could be termed, ‘mental’ labor. Trying
to better comprehend the redistribution of this mental labor globally is possibly
the most interesting and possibly most profound new wrinkle in the continuing
evolution of the global economy.
With such exciting topics, the growing awareness in all of the social sciences
of the importance of the spatial, the interest in understanding globalization, and
the intellectual ferment within economic geography provides ample grounds for
optimism for the future of economic geography. To justify this optimism,
economic geography must escape from the cul de sac of post-modernist (best left
in architecture where it made sense), deconstructionist (best left in literature)
cultural studies to reengage with studies of the real world of economic action,
Digitizing services
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otherwise it seems likely that the core topics of economic geography will be
absorbed by the other social sciences and as Dicken (2004) so well sums it up,
‘geography will miss the boat’.
Notes
1. This section draws heavily upon Dossani and Kenney (2003).
2. On the geography of producer services in the US, see, for example, Beyers and 
Lindahl (1996), though producer services is too narrow as a description of what is
being relocated offshore.