Economic Geography

Re-thinking and problematising the economy
A further twist to the evolving tail/tale of economic geography, linked to the
growth of interest in cultural economy approaches, is that there has been 
an increasing concern with the conceptualisation and definition of what we as
economic geographers take to be ‘the economy’. In part this is rooted in older
concerns, such as those of feminists and/or Marxists as to the conceptualisation of
domestic labour and unpaid work in the home that is critical to the reproduction
of labour-power in capitalist economies, in part it is related to more recent 
post-structuralist concerns with deconstructing the economy (for example, see

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The ‘new’ economic geography?
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Gibson-Graham 1996). It has also become linked to interests in ‘alternative’
economies that exist on the margins of, or in the interstices of, the mainstream
capitalist economy (for example, see Leyshon et al. 2003). This is important in
creating space for imagining alternative forms and spaces of economic relations
and theorisations of ‘the economy’ and its geographies.
There are however dangers, as Scott (2004: 491) has recently emphasised in
relation to Gibson-Graham’s (1996: 206) announcement that ‘the way to begin
to break free of capitalism is to turn its prevalent presentations on their head’. As
he acerbically points: ‘Presto. . . . The claim is presented in all its baldness, with-
out any apparent consciousness that attempts to break free of any given social
system are likely to run into the stubborn realities of its indurated social and
property relations as they actually exist.’ In arguing for a serious consideration of
culture but against the ‘cultural turn’, Scott goes on to suggest that ‘quite apart
from its dysfunctional depreciation of the role of economic forces and structural
logics in economic geography, the cultural turn also opens a door to a discon-
certing strain of philosophical idealism and political voluntarism in modern
geography’. But it is precisely such economic forces and structural logics that
shape the often brutal economically dominated world that economic geographers
need to be able to grapple with and understand.