Economic Geography

Concluding reflections: the ‘missing links’ 
and the way forward
This chapter has among other things demonstrated the integrative and inter-
disciplinary potential of (economic) geography. In the Nordic context this has 
especially become evident in the close cooperation with other heterodox 
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Economic geography as (regional) contexts
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(evolutionary and institutional) economists in the area of innovation studies.
Nordic innovation research – especially on innovation systems – has always been
strong internationally (Edquist 1997; Lundvall 1992, see also Fagerberg et al.
2005), as is also the case with innovation research having a geographical or
regional focus. In addition to my own work on regional innovation studies, my
close colleagues, Anders Malmberg in Uppsala and Peter Maskell in Copenhagen,
have pioneered research on regional clusters internationally (Maskell and
Malmberg 1999). A reason for this beyond the general strength of Nordic inno-
vation research, is the fact that human geography in the Nordic countries rank
among the smallest social sciences. This has partly made it necessary for human
geography to focus on what it is best at – in contrast to, for example, Britain
where the size and strength of geography has allowed its practitioners to expand
into the domains of neighbouring disciplines and nearly do ‘whatever they like’,
sometimes with a result not very encouraging. Partly it has ‘forced’ geography
to exploit its interdisciplinary potential as a synthetic discipline, which among
other things implies that it has to apply an eclectic strategy concerning theoreti-
cal work (the integrative potential). This, however, provides an excellent plat-
form for cooperation with other disciplines, which, for example, is demonstrated
by the collaborations in CIRCLE. Belonging to a small discipline has in general
made (economic) geographers rather proactive and positive to other disciplines
taking up regional questions. One example of this is Porter’s work on cluster,
which has been received much more positively by Nordic economic geographers
(see the work of Malmberg and Maskell) than by British geographers (Asheim et
al. 2006; Martin and Sunley 2003). For Nordic economic geographers Porter’s
work has opened the eyes of many policymakers for the importance of territorial
agglomerations (continuous) for the innovativeness and competitiveness of firms
and regions in a globalizing economy. Without such an eye opener this would
not have been possible, due to the lack of (political) influence that follows from
belonging to a minor discipline. The very nice thing about this development is
that it is (with a few exceptions) only economic geographers that can carry out
such research, as these subjects are not taught on advanced levels for economists,
something that has strongly benefited the research funding of economic geogra-
phers. Finally, the limited size of the local milieus has made it necessary to 
establish an international network as well as research cooperation.
11
There is, however, one problematic aspect connected with the co-evolution
of economic geography with evolutionary and institutional economics. The focus
on firms’ and regions’ innovativeness and competitiveness has missed out 
everything about the ‘social’, as such, the focus has only been on ‘development in
a region’ (growth in regional per capita income) and not on ‘development of a
region’ (impact on the level of living in regions). The blame for this cannot solely
be thrown at economic geography, as the cultural turn in human geography at
the end of the 1980s, based on post-modernist and – structuralist approaches –
substituted concerns for real social problems (the actual problem of people) with
interest in the representations of such problems. Thus, neither economic geog-
raphy nor cultural turn-human geography took any responsibility for studying

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Bjørn T. Asheim
social problems. This is a paradox when thinking about the role that the demand
for ‘social relevance’ played in radicalizing and modernizing the discipline around
the 1970s. The work on learning regions as development coalitions (Asheim
2001), inspired by action oriented organizational research, may represent a small
exception and a starting point for alternative research in economic geography.
Development coalitions refer to a bottom-up approach based on broad mobiliza-
tion promising at one and the same time economic growth and job generation
as well as social cohesion. Another approach potentially bridging the gap
between the economic and the social is Florida’s differentiation between business
climate vs people climate (Florida 2002). So far the focus of economic geogra-
phers has solely been on clusters and RIS to improve the competitive conditions
of business, while ignoring the living conditions of people. Experiences from the
Nordic countries – enjoying synergy effects between efficiency and equity –
shows that caring for people by strengthening (and not dismantling) the welfare
state is good for employment, innovativeness, competitiveness and economic
growth (Hall and Soskice 2001).
12
This has also very much to do with contex-
tualization, theoretically as well as empirically.
Notes
1. This points to interesting aspects of Nordic business schools (i.e. in Norway, Sweden
and Finland) offering economic geography as an optional subject. Many chairs in
economic geography in these countries have such a background.
2. It is interesting to note that the development and increased use of quantitative tech-
niques, which came late to human geography compared to other social sciences, was
called the ‘quantitative revolution’ in geography and not in other disciplines. This – I
think – indicates the void found within human geography of not having a social object
of study that could constitute the basis for geographical theoretical work.
3. In the literature on the history of geographical thought this is often called the ‘liberal’
response, because it was not primarily a reaction towards positivist methodologies 
and methods.
4. This guideline is of course potentially highly relevant, but so general that it could as
easily be interpreted as a defence for a pure deductive approach.
5. An understanding of space as a property of an object, and, thus, eliminating the
distinction of the relative conception of space between the spatial and the non-spatial,
was introduced already in 1973 by David Harvey with the concept relational space in
his book Social Justice and the City, which represented his personal transition from a
liberal position (part one) to a socialist (or radical) one (part two). In the introductory
chapter of the book he writes that ‘the view of relative space proposes that it be under-
stood as a relationship between objects which exists only because objects exist and
relate to each other (what Sayer calls the spatial relations of “between-ness” (my
comment)). There is another sense in which space can be viewed as relative and I
choose to call this relational space – space regarded, . . . , as being contained in objects
in the sense that an object can be said to exist only in so far as it contains and repre-
sents within itself relationships to other objects’ (Harvey 1973: 13). However, this
position runs the risk of reducing space to its constituent objects, which Harvey actually
has done by arguing for the possibilities of theorizing space in ‘abstract research’ as