Economic Geography

The new economic geographies of the 1980s: greater
variety and heterogeneity
No sooner had critical geographers begun to engage with the Marxian tradition
than others began to criticise them on various grounds for so doing. Whatever
their specific motivation and legitimacy, however, these criticisms encouraged
economic geographers to explore approaches that put more weight on agency 
and that allowed fuller consideration of the variety of evolutionary paths and insti-
tuted forms of capitalism through time and over space and so on. For conven-
ience, I shall group these under three broad headings.
Agency, structure
Economic geographers exploring the potential of Marxism were accused of
structural determinism, of privileging structure at the expense of (individual or
collective) agency and closing off space for the effects of agency and practice,
reducing people to passive ‘bearers of structures’. In response to this criticism
economic geographers engaged with a range of positions in modern social theory
that sought to understand relationships between structure and agency. Giddens’
(1984) theory of structuration (which drew heavily on the work of the geogra-
pher Torsten Hagerstrand in its approach to the time/space patterning of behav-
iour) was particularly influential, translated into the geographical literature by Thrift
(1983). This recognised the mutually constitutive relationships between agency and
structure via the social constitution of structures and the social structuration of
agency, and revived interest in agency in the explanation of social action.

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The ‘new’ economic geography?
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Within economic geography, this led to a greater attention to the knowledges,
rationalities and actions of managers, workers and consumers and the ways 
in which these both reflected and affected their positions in the socio-spatial struc-
tures of the economy. This resulted in a more detailed understanding of how the
economic geographies of capitalism evolve as a result of differential knowledges,
learning processes and rationalities and the asymmetrical power relations between
different groups of economic actors (for example, see Amin and Cohendet 2004;
Dicken 2003; Herod 2001; Peck 1996).