Economic Geography

Personal and educational background – and early years
of research experience
Also personally and educationally a contextual perspective promotes understand-
ing. Trained as a business economist with a broad background in business 

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174
Bjørn T. Asheim
administration, economics, economic geography and economic history (MSc from
the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration in Bergen) 
I already in my early years got a substantial (in contrast to only a formal) under-
standing of economics due to economic geography and history, even though the
teaching in economics was mainstream.
1
After graduating in 1971 I continued studying regional economics and geog-
raphy before starting as a research assistant in a governmental research project
called ‘The Level of Living Study’ in mid 1972. Being the only researcher with
some background in economic geography I got the responsibility of handling the
regional part of the study together with the senior researcher within this area. This
was not an easy task, as very little had been done or written about regional inequal-
ities in level of living. David Smith has just started doing some research in the
United States before moving to South Africa, Richard Morrill had published a
few small articles in Antipode as had Anne Buttimer, however, these initial
attempts in the beginning of the 1970s did not provide a lot of support for a
young researcher. Antipode, of which I was the first and for a long time the only
subscriber in Norway, was my main source of inspiration.
My own (level of living) research taught me a couple of very important
lessons. When presenting preliminary results from my study at a graduate 
seminar at the end of 1972 at the (common) geography department of the
Norwegian School of Economics and the University of Bergen I was told by the
professors that this was not geography but sociology, as it studied regional aspects
or dimensions of social problems and processes, and not only spatial processes as
the ‘spatial analysis’ tradition said. This in fact was the first time that the ‘social
relevance’ discussion, which in an Anglo–American context was introduced at
the end of the 1960s, was raised in Norway. In this way it can be argued that I
actually brought the discussion of ‘social relevance’ to Norwegian geography. In
later writings David Smith (1979) stated explicitly that the perspective of geog-
raphy of welfare or social well-being made it necessary to have the social as the
starting point, as welfare and well-being was fundamentally a social and not a
spatial phenomenon. Space can never be the starting point for theoretical work
within social sciences.
This, of course, concerns the key problem in geography of the space-society
relationship or the adequate level of the theoretization of space. Geography as
chorology traditionally implied an analytical distinction between space and society,
defined as a non-spatial entity, which was studied by other social scientists (e.g.
economists). In the ‘spatial analysis’ tradition, dominating economic geography
until the beginning of the 1970s the explicit object of study was the spatial and
the ambition was analytical, as was indicated by the title of some of the seminal
contributions of this period, Location Analysis, by Peter Haggett (1965) and
Spatial Organization by Abler et al. (1971). While clearly representing a scientific
progress moving from descriptive and idiographic regional geography studies to
theoretical and nomothetic spatial analysis, at the end of the 1960s – paradoxically
around the time when David Harvey published his methodological bible on
positivist spatial analysis (1969), The Explanation in Geography – this tradition

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had stiffened in empty, formal analyses, using tools developed by the ‘quantita-
tive revolution’ in geography,
2
of the appearances of spatial phenomena as such
independent of the social, economic and political importance of the events stud-
ied. This approach could neither survive the political radicalization of the student
population after 1968 nor the critique of positivism in the social sciences (which
also turned up at a later stage in human geography compared to other social
sciences), and a strong demand for more ‘social relevance’ in the discipline was
the result.
The demand for ‘social relevance’ influenced human geography in many ways,
and resulted in the appearance of several new directions. In addition to the level
of living or welfare geography studies, which clearly was a response to the previ-
ous lack of ‘social relevance’ focusing on real social questions,
3
a radical approach,
which came to mean a Marxist based approach, to economic geography was the
most prominent. I became associated with this approach in the early 1970s
through contacts with young Danish geographers at the geography departments
at Copenhagen University and the newly established (1972) Roskilde University
Centre (RUC) just outside Copenhagen. For the rest of the 1970s I was the only
Norwegian Marxist geographer. Danish human geography had been extremely
traditional, and the young generation graduating around the time when the 
idea about ‘social relevance’ diffused, looked to an East German geographer,
Schmidt-Renner, for inspiration. The outcome of these efforts was that Denmark
became one of the strongholds of Marxist human geography in the 1970s outside
the Anglo-American world, with radical milieus at all three geography depart-
ments (in addition to the two above mentioned also at Aarhus University). They
formulated what was to be known as the ‘territorial structure’ geography. My
contacts with this milieu were strengthened when moving to Lund University in
1976 to start on my PhD degree. In the autumn of 1978 I was employed as an
external lecturer at RUC to teach the history of geographic thought to graduate
students. In the spring of 1979 I became associate professor in human geography
at Aarhus University approximately around the same time as I defended my PhD
dissertation (May 1979) on Regional inequalities in level of living. My contacts
with graduate students at Roskilde and Aarhus, who in most cases were Marxist
oriented economic geographers, forced me to speed up my reading of Marx to be
able to give competent supervision. The main focus of the students’ work was the
analysis of technological change in a capitalist mode of production. At this time
the Marxist frame of reference (especially at RUC) had moved away from the
rather orthodox historical materialist interpretation of the territorial structure
geography to what is known as ‘west-European left-Marxism’.
Characteristic for this tradition is a history of ideas approach to the back-
ground and development of Marx’ thought. Of special importance is the high-
lighting of the importance of the dialectical, philosophical thinking, derived from
Hegel, in Marx’ political economy work. Moreover, in contrast to more traditional
interpretations this approach differentiates between (Asheim and Haraldsen, 1991):
(a) three different phases in Marx’ writing (the young Marx up; the period with
historical-materialist works (1845–57); and the period to his death in 1883 in