Economic Geography

Allen J. Scott

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In addition to these economic concerns, we must recognize that contempo-
rary capitalism is intertwined with enormously heterogeneous forms of
social and cultural life, and that no one element of this conjoint field is
necessarily reducible to the other. Directions of causality and influence
across this field are a matter of empirical investigation, not of theoretical 
pre-judgment. Note that in this formulation, class becomes only one possi-
ble dimension of social existence out of a multiplicity of other actual and
possible dimensions.
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This nexus of economic, social, and cultural relationships constitutes a
creative field or environment within which complex processes of entrepre-
neurship, learning, and innovation occur. Geographers have a special inter-
est in deciphering the spatial logic of this field and in demonstrating how it
helps to shape locational dynamics.
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In combination with these modalities of economic and social reality, we
need to reserve a specific analytical and descriptive space for collective action
and institutional order at many different levels of spatial and organizational
scale (the firm, the local labor market, the region, the nation, etc.), together
with a due sense of the political tensions and rivalries that run throughout
this sphere of human development. By the same token, a vibrant economic
geography will always not only be openly policy-relevant (Markusen 1999),
but also politically engaged. A key question in this context is how to build
local institutional frameworks that promote both economic success and social
justice.
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We must recognize that social and economic relations are often extremely
durable, and that they have a propensity to become independent in varying
degree of the individuals caught up within them. This means that any
normative account of social transformation and political strategy, must deal
seriously with the idea that there are likely to be stubborn resistances to
change rooted in these same relations. The solutions to this problem proposed
by sociologists like Bourdieu (1972) and Giddens (1979) strike me as provid-
ing reasonable bases for pushing forward in this respect, for they explicitly
recognize the inertia of social structures while simultaneously insisting on the
integrity of individual human volition. Unfortunately, these solutions (most
especially the structure-agency formulation of Giddens) have been much
diluted in recent years by reinterpretations that lean increasingly heavily on the
agency side of the equation, partly as a reflection of the cultural turn, partly
out of a misplaced fear of falling into the pit of determinism.
5
Invocations of
unmediated agency (or, for that matter, neoclassical utility) as an explanatory
variable in social science are often little more than confessions of ignorance, in
the sense that when we are unable to account for certain kinds of relationships
or events, we are often tempted to fall back on the reassuring notion that
things are thus and so for no other reason than because that’s the way we want
them to be, irrespective of any underlying structural conditions.
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A corollary of the structured organization and sunk costs of social life is that
economic relationships (especially when they are locationally interrelated, 
A perspective of economic geography
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as in the case of a regional production system) are likely to be path-depend-
ent. This observation suggests at once that an evolutionary perspective is
well suited to capture important elements of the dynamics of the economic
landscape (cf. Boschma and Lambooy 1999; Nelson and Winter 1982). It
follows that any attempt to describe the economic landscape in terms of
instantaneous adjustment and readjustment to a neoclassical optimum opti-
morum is intrinsically irrelevant.
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All of these moments of economic and social reality occur in a world in
which geography has not yet been—and cannot yet be—abolished (Leamer
and Storper 2001). The dynamics of accumulation shape geographic space,
and equally importantly, geographic space shapes the dynamics of accumu-
lation. This means, too, that capitalism is differentiated at varying levels of
spatial resolution, from the local to the global, and that sharp differences
occur in forms of life from place to place. Indeed, as globalization now
begins to run its course, geographic space becomes more important, not less
important, because it presents ever-widening possibilities for finely-grained
locational specialization and differentiation. Critical analysis of these possibil-
ities must be one of modern economic geography’s principal concerns.
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Finally, I want to enter a plea for methodological variety and openness. One
corollary of this plea is that economic geographers need to recover the lost
skills of quantitative analysis, not out of some atavistic impulse to reinstate
the economic geography of the 1960s, but because of the proven value of
these skills in the investigation of economic data. The steady erosion of
geographers’ capabilities in this regard over the last couple of decades is
surely a net loss to the discipline.
These remarks still leave open a wide range of alternative research strategies
and theoretical orientations in economic geography, including approaches
marked variously by heavy doses of algebraic formalization or cultural commen-
tary. A particular point of focus, however, is provided by the continuing commit-
ment by significant numbers of economic geographers to critical analysis and to
the search for progressive social change. The pursuit of some sort of social demo-
cratic agenda and the fight against global neoliberalism, it seems to me, must
stand high in any set of priorities in this regard at the present time, and all the
more so as our world remains an arena in which tremendous variations in living
standards, economic opportunity, and possibilities for cultural self-realization
persist tenaciously from place to place and country to country. More than
anything else, the great testing ground for economic geography, now and in the
foreseeable future, must surely be identified in one way or another in relation to
the central question of development, not only in its expression as a problem in
historical geography, but as a normative project of global significance.
Economic geographers have much work to do in dealing with the multiple
challenges of this evolving situation. But they also need periodically to take criti-
cal soundings of their tools, their practices, and their theoretical commitments if
they are to remain equal to the daunting tasks ahead.
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Allen J. Scott

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