Economic Geography

particular, be alert to the social and institutional frameworks that encourage or
block the development of ideas in certain directions, as well as to the professional
interests that drive choices about research commitments. Moreover, since science
is (either consciously or unselfconsciously) a vehicle for the promotion of social
agendas, we need to examine the wider ideological and political implications of
any knowledge claims. A basic question in this regard is: whose interests do they
ultimately serve, and in what ways? The simple posing of this question implies
already that the form of appraisal that follows entails a degree of partisan engage-
ment (Haraway 1991; Yeung 2003), though in a way, I hope (given my preced-
ing critical comments on relativism), that maintains a controlled relationship to
an underlying notion of coherence and plausibility. Last but by no means least,
then, we must certainly pay close attention to the logical integrity, the scope 
of reference, the correspondence between ideas and data, and so forth, of the 
various versions of economic geography that are on offer.
Economic geographers at work
Geography and the disciplinary division of labor
Geographers long ago gave up trying to legislate in a priori terms the shape and
form of their discipline. In any case, from what has gone before, we cannot under-
stand geography, or any other science for that matter, in relation to some ideal
A perspective of economic geography
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normative vision of disciplinary order. Geography as a whole owes its current
standing as a distinctive university discipline as much to the inertia of academic
and professional institutions as it does to any epistemological imperative. The
geographer’s stock-in-trade, nowadays, is usually claimed to revolve in various
ways around questions of space and spatial relations. This claim provides a reas-
suring professional anchor of sorts, but is in practice open to appropriation by
virtually any social science, given that space is intrinsically constitutive of all social
life. In fact, geographers and other social scientists regularly encounter one
another at points that lie deep inside each other’s proclaimed fields of inquiry, and
this circumstance reveals another of modern geography’s peculiarities, namely its
extreme intellectual hybridity. It is perhaps because of this hybridity that geogra-
phy is so susceptible to rapidly shifting intellectual currents and polemical debate,
but also – and this is surely one of its strengths – an unusual responsiveness to the
burning practical issues of the day.