Economic Geography

14 Economic geography 
as (regional) contexts
Bjørn T. Asheim
Introduction: geography as context
Context is important for understanding. Geography, according to my PhD super-
visor at Lund University, the famous Swedish geographer Torsten Hägerstrand, is
about doing contextual analysis as opposed to compositional analysis, which is the
task of other scientific disciplines (Hägerstrand 1974). This distinction corre-
sponds to the one the German philosopher Immanuel Kant used when classifying
sciences either as physically or logically defined. Geography and history under-
stood as chorology and chronology respectively constitute the physically defined
sciences, while other disciplines are logically defined based on their respective
objects of study. Geography and history are synthetic (i.e. empirical based)
sciences, while the logically defined are analytical. These distinctions are in my
view fundamental in understanding the raison d’
^
etre of geography as well as its
place and position in the division of labour with other disciplines.
Looking specifically at human geography and the whole history of ideas of the
subject, the last 70–80 years can be interpreted as a struggle between a tradi-
tional position of geography as an idiographic, physically defined discipline (i.e.
regional geography), others wanting to turn human geography into a nomo-
thetic, analytical discipline, and later attempts trying to develop a theoretical
informed, contextual approach transcending the idiographic-nomothetic
dichotomy. The nomothetic position was primarily represented by ‘spatial analy-
sis’ defining the object of study of geography as ‘space’ (i.e. ‘spatial patterns’ and
‘spatial processes’), leaving ‘history’ to history and ‘society’ to the other social
sciences and, thus, finding a place for human geography among the analytical
social sciences (Schaefer 1953). As will be discussed later, this position was
neither unproblematic nor sustainable in the long run for a social science, even
if it had a hegemonic position until the demand for ‘social relevance’ started to
be voiced loudly at the end of the rebellious 1960s.