Economic Geography

Capitalism, culture, and geography
Economic geographers discover culture
Just as geographical economics was making its appearance on the academic scene
in the early 1990s, a number of economic geographers were transferring their
attentions to an altogether different set of approaches rooted in issues of culture.
The emergence of this interest coincided with a growing conviction that not only
A perspective of economic geography
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were certain earlier generations of geographers and other social scientists incor-
rect to regard culture simply as an outcome of underlying economic realities, but
that these realities themselves are in fundamental ways subject to the play of
cultural forces.
Any casual scrutiny of contemporary capitalism reveals at once that it is
inflected with different social and cultural resonances in different localities, 
and that these resonances are directly implicated in the organization of economic
life and modalities of economic calculation. American, Japanese, and Chinese 
capitalism, for example, are at once generically similar and yet are marked by
socio-cultural idiosyncrasies with significant effects on the ways in which they
function. In addition, production systems in contemporary capitalism, while still
obviously highly focused on the mechanical manufacture of things, are shifting
more and more into the processing of information and symbols, from business
advice to cultural services. This trend is leading to dramatic changes in the 
form and function of commodified goods and services, and much research is 
now moving forward on the reception, interpretation, and social effects of 
these outputs (Bridge and Smith 2003; Jackson 1999; Thrift 2000). This
research points to important theoretical issues concerning the hermeneutics 
of the commodity, and the functions of capitalism generally as a fountainhead 
of symbolic representation in modern life (e.g. Harvey 1989; Lash and 
Urry 1994). Striking changes are also occurring in the social and psychological
make-up of the workplace. Over large areas of the new economy of capitalism,
dress, mannerisms, forms of speech, self-presentation, and so on have become
essential elements of workers’ performance. Equally, gender, race, ethnicity, and
so on, together with specific forms of empathy associated with them are 
being actively exploited and managed in various ways in the workplace (cf.
McDowell 1997). More generally, markets as a whole could not work in the
absence of a sociocultural system regulating the conventions and behaviors that
sustain them.
These brief remarks, schematic as they may be, already underline the obvious
and pressing need for economic geographers to pay close attention to the ways in
which culture and economy intersect with one another in mutually constitutive
ways. The urgency of this need is reinforced by the observation that the
economic and the cultural come together with special intensity in place (Shields
1999), and that many of the key agglomerations constituting the focal points of
the new economy around the world are critically dependent on the complex play
of culture. Thus, to an ever-increasing degree, the productive performance of
agglomerations like the City of London (Thrift 1994), Hollywood (Scott
2002a), or Silicon Valley (Saxenian 1994) can only be understood in relation to
their joint economic and cultural dynamics. Each of these places is shot through
with distinctive traditions, sensibilities, and cultural practices that leave deep
imprints on phenomena such as management styles, norms of worker habituation,
creative and innovative energies, the design of final outputs, and so on, and these
phenomena in turn are strongly implicated in processes of local economic growth
and development.
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Allen J. Scott

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