Economic Geography

Culture and the ‘cultural turn’
A third development relates to the recent ‘cultural turn’ in economic geography,
with a resurgence of emphasis on cultural approaches to understanding
economies and their geographies. Broadly speaking, they fall into ontological
and epistemological concepts of a cultural economy (Ray and Sayer 1999). 

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Ray Hudson
The epistemological conception envisages the cultural as a ‘bottom up’ method of
analysis that is complementary to a more ‘top-down’ political economy and focuses
upon the meanings that social practices and relations have for those enmeshed in
them. The ontological conception suggests that a growing culturalisation of the
economy, in terms of both inputs to and outputs from it (see for example, Lash
and Urry 1994), has led to the economy becoming ontologically more cultural. 
It is certainly true that in some respects economic practices have become more
sensitive to cultural differences. Corporations are increasingly aware of this and
indeed have helped promote it via their advertising and brand management strate-
gies and in other ways (for example, in representing work as the route to 
self-fulfilment and personal development) as part of capital’s enduring concern
to raise productivity, increase sales and speed up the pace of accumulation more
generally. To some perhaps considerable extent, this ‘cultural turn’ in corporate
practice reflects a growing concern with the knowledge base of the economy and
the ways which the economy is thought about and talked about, issues that 
have increasingly come to interest business consultants, academics in Business
Schools and some influential economic geographers (for example, Thrift 2005).
However, while some economic geographers have embraced this ‘cultural turn’,
others remain much more sceptical about claims that the economy has become
ontologically more cultural and caution against the dangers of conflating changes
in academic fashion with changes in the economy and its practices.
Rather than approach cultural economy and political economy as an either/
or choice, some economic geographers have attempted to forge a synthesis and
develop a culturally sensitive political economy that begins from the assumption
that the economy is – necessarily – always cultural but one that is always alert to
the materialities, power geometries and dynamics of political economy (Hudson
2005). Such an approach to cultural political economy can be further developed
by exploring the constitutive role of semiosis – that is, the inter-subjective
production of meanings – in economic and political activities and institutions and
the social order more generally. This leads Bob Jessop (2004) to argue that cultural
political economy is a ‘post-disciplinary’ approach that adopts the ‘cultural turn’ in
economic and political inquiry without neglecting the articulation of semiosis
with the inter-connected materialities of economics and politics within wider
social formations.