Economic Geography

Conclusions
For much of its history, economic geography has been preoccupied with where
commodities are produced, where they are traded, and where they are consumed.
This kind of logic can be found in textbooks, in past and in current research, and
in a barely articulated world-view that joins us together as a field of academic
research and practice. Of course, commodities matter. This kind of reference
point provides us a means of understanding where people live and work and how
they joined together in institutions of action and negotiation. But for too long
this kind of recipe for research has been blind to the role and significance of
global financial markets, the rules of investment, and the imperatives behind
successive waves of industrial and regional restructuring (Christopherson 2002).
Just as geography matters, finance matters!
One of the unfortunate consequences of a single-minded focus upon the sites
of production has been an uncritical commitment to describing the landscape in
terms of its particularities as if each and every region is its own ensemble of
untraded interdependencies. This has led us down a path that has been joined by
other disciplines such as political science and sociology similarly committed to
understanding capitalism in terms of its variety rather than its commonalities (see
Hall and Soskice 2001 and compare with Strange 1997). In my own research, 
I have made contributions to this theme albeit in the shadows cast by the world
of finance and its arbitrage processes (see, for example Clark 1989). My objection
to this kind of research is not an objection to the fine-grained case studies that
are so informative about the geography of production. My objection is to claims
that the best economic geography is that which begins with local units, with
production, and with a commitment to path dependence. Finance is all about
pricing and trading in and out of path dependence, whatever its jurisdiction, and
whatever it special circumstances. We might object to this fact of life, but we
should do so in terms of its social consequences (Clark and Wójcik 2007).
The world of finance seems very different to that which we inherited. It has a
different language, dictionaries of terms and concepts that seem, at first light, to
be quite foreign (Clark et al. 2006). But as I have shown in this chapter, the diction-
aries of terms are subject to their own internal tensions. Furthermore, the tensions
between the theory and practice of finance provides us a way of understanding
the processes that promise to remake the global economic landscape over the twenty-
first century. We should be part of understanding global finance, its markets, and its
social and economic processes. At the same time, as is the case in all social science
disciplines, we have an obligation to build holistic models of the whole world.