Economic Geography

5
A perspective of economic
geography
Allen J. Scott
In search of perspective
In this chapter, I attempt to evaluate a number of prominent claims put forward 
in recent years by both geographers and economists about the methods and scope
of economic geography. Much of the chapter revolves around two main lines of
critical appraisal. First, I seek to highlight the strong and weak points of geograph-
ical economics as it has been formulated by Paul Krugman and his co-workers
(though I also acknowledge that geographical economics is now moving well
beyond this initial point of departure). Second, I provide a critique of the version
of economic geography that is currently being worked out by a number of geo-
graphers under the rubric of the cultural turn, and here I place special emphasis
on what I take to be its peculiar obsession with evacuating the economic content
from economic geography. On the basis of these arguments, I then make a brief
effort to identify a viable agenda for economic geography based on an assessment
of the central problems and predicaments of contemporary capitalism. This
assessment leads me to the conclusion that the best bet for economic geogra-
phers today is to work out a new political economy of spatial development based
on a full recognition of two main sets of circumstances: first, that the hard core
of the capitalist economy remains focused on the dynamics of accumulation;
second, that this hard core is irrevocably intertwined with complex socio-cultural
forces, but also that it cannot be reduced to these same forces. In order to
ground the line of argument that now ensues, we need at the outset to establish
a few elementary principles about the production and evaluation of basic 
knowledge claims.
A large recent body of work in the theory of knowledge and social epistemo-
logy has made us increasingly accustomed to the notion that research, reflection,
and writing are not so much pathways into the transcendental, as they are
concrete social phenomena, forever rooted in the immanence of daily life. By the
same token, knowledge is in practice a shifting patchwork of unstable, contested,
and historically-contingent ideas shot through from beginning to end with
human interests and apologetic meaning (Barnes 1974; Latour 1991; Rorty
1979; Shapin 1998). Mannheim (1952), an early exponent of the sociology of
knowledge, expressed something of the same sentiments in the proposition that

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the problems of science in the end are mediated outcomes of the problems of
social existence.
Postmodernists, of course, have picked up on ideas like these to proclaim the
radical relativism of knowledge and the dangers of ‘totalization’ (cf. Dear 2000),
though the first of these claims carries the point much too far in my opinion, and
the second turns out on closer examination to be largely a case of mistaken iden-
tity. I accept that knowledge is socially constructed and not foundational, but not
that it is purely self-referential, for although knowledge is never a precise mirror of
reality, it does not follow – given any kind of belief that some sort of external real-
ity actually exists – that one mirror is as good as another (Sayer 2000). The aversion
to so-called totalization among many geographers today seems to translate for the
most part, in a more neutral vocabulary, into the entirely sensible principle that
theories of social reality should not claim for themselves wider explanatory powers
than they in fact possess. However, the principle strikes me as pernicious to the
degree that it is then used to insinuate that small and unassuming concepts are
meaningful and legitimate whereas large and ambitious concepts are necessarily irra-
tional. This in turn has an unfortunately chilling effect on high-risk conceptual and
theoretical speculation.
These brief remarks set the stage for the various strategies of assessment 
of economic geography that are adopted in what follows. We want to be able 
to account for the shifting substantive emphases and internal divisions of the field
in a way that is systematically attentive to external contextual conditions, but
which does not invoke these conditions as mechanical determinants. We must, in