Economic Geography

The wayward course of economic geography in the last half-century
Economic geography reproduces these features of geography as a whole 
in microcosm. On the one side, it is greatly influenced by issues of social and
political theory. On the other side, given its substantive emphases, it has partic-
ularly strong areas of overlap with economics and business studies. At any given
moment in time, it nevertheless functions as a more or less distinctive intellec-
tual and professional community that brings unique synthetic perspectives to 
the tension-filled terrain(s) of investigation that it seeks to conquer. At the 
same time, economic geography has been greatly susceptible to periodic shifts of
course over the last several decades, often in surprising ways, and equally often
with the same dramatis personae, as it were, appearing and re-appearing in different
costumes in different acts of the play.
The period of the 1950s and 1960s was especially important as a formative
moment in the emergence of economic geography as a self-assertive subdisci-
pline within geography as a whole. This was a period of great intellectual and
professional struggle in geography between traditionalists and reformers, with the
latter seeking to push geography out of its perceived idiographic torpor and – on
the basis of quantitative methodologies and formal modeling – into a more forth-
right engagement with theoretical ideas (Gould 1979). Economic geographers
were in the vanguard of this movement, and they were able to push their agen-
das vigorously, partly because of their strategic affiliation with a then-powerful
regional science, partly because the questions they were posing about the spatial
organization of the economy were of central concern to much policy making in
the capitalism of the era, with its central mass-production industries and its
activist forms of social regulation as manifest in Keynesian economic policy and
the apparatus of the welfare state (Benko 1998; Scott 2000).
This early moment of efflorescence was succeeded by a sharp turn toward
political economy as the crises of the early 1970s mounted in intensity, and as the
general critique of capitalism became increasingly vociferous in academic circles.
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Allen J. Scott

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This was a period in which geographers developed a deep concern about the
spatial manifestations of economic crisis generally, as reflected in a spate of papers
and books on topics of regional decline, job loss, regional inequalities, poverty,
and so on (Bluestone and Harrison 1982; Carney et al. 1980; Massey and
Meegan 1982). It was also a period in which much of economic geographers’
portrayal of basic social realities was cast either openly and frankly in Marxian
terms or in variously marxisant versions. The first stirrings of a vigorous feminist
encounter with economic geography also began to take shape at this time.
As the initial intimations of the so-called new economy made their appearance
in the early 1980s, and as the crisis years of the 1970s receded, economic geo-
graphy started to go through another of its periodic sea changes. A doubly-faceted
dynamic of economic and geographic transformation was now beginning to push
geographers toward a reformulated sense of spatial dynamics. On the one hand,
new spatial foci of economic growth were springing up in hitherto peripheral or
quasi-peripheral regions in the more economically-advanced countries, with neo-
artisanal communities in the Third Italy and high-technology industrial districts
in the US Sunbelt doing heavy duty as early exemplars of this trend (Becattini
1987; Scott 1986). In this connection, geographers’ interests converged intently
on the theoretical and empirical analysis of spatial agglomeration. On the other
hand, a great intensification of the international division of labor was rapidly
occurring, especially under the aegis of the multinational corporation (Fröbel et
al. 1980). In this connection, the main issues increasingly crystallized around
globalization and its expression in international commodity chains, cross-border
corporate linkages, capital flows, foreign branch plant formation, and so on 
(e.g. Dicken 1992; Johnston et al. 1995; Taylor et al. 2002). The themes of
agglomeration and international economic integration more or less continue to
dominate the field today, though many detailed changes of emphasis have
occurred as research has progressed. Indeed, of late years, these two themes have
tended increasingly to converge together around the notion of the local and the
global as two interrelated scales of analysis within a process of economic and
political rescaling generally (Swyngedouw 1997).
These thematic developments represent only a thumb-nail sketch of the recent
intellectual history of economic geography. We must recognize that there 
have been many additional twists and turns within this history, both of empirical
emphasis and of theoretical debate. As it stands, however, this account now
serves as a general point of entry into a detailed examination of some of the
major conceptual tensions that run through the field today, including a number
of claims, which if they can be sustained, presage some quite unexpected new
directions of development.