The Dictionary of Human Geography

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on student development (cf. education).

Although empirical studies have identified

behaviours consistent with contextual effects,

however, theprocessesassumed to produce

them – for example, the role of social inter-

action in the spread of attitudes and behav-

ioural norms – is less well understood. Indeed,

in some situations it may be impossible to

identify the causal impact of a local context

because of an endogeneity effect whereby

(some at least) individuals select their inter-

action contexts (as with working-class people

who aspire to middle-class status and so

choose to live in middle-class areas and send

their children to local schools).

Jencks and Mayer (1990) suggested five

mechanisms which can generate outcomes

consistent with contextual effects:

(1) epidemic effects, whereby peer influences

within an area spread to neighbours;

(2) collective socialization, whereby local role

models are important ingredients in atti-

tude development;

(3) institutional models, in which local insti-

tutions rather than people provide the

influences;

(4) competition models, whereby neighbours

compete for scarce resources; and

(5) relative deprivation models, which involve

individuals comparing their situations

relative to their neighbours’ and act

accordingly.

Two or more of these may be relevant in any

particular situation. rj

Suggested reading

Agnew (1987); Johnston and Pattie (2006).

contextuality The situated character of

social life, involving coexistence, connections

and ‘togetherness’ as a series of associations

and entanglements in time–space. The con-

cept of context has deep historical roots. It

is initiated in relations of language, and it

has always contained some double sense of

‘circumstances’ and ‘connections’. Liketext,

context is ametaphorderived from the Latin

texere, ‘to weave’, and in traditions of inter-

pretation, context came to refer to the coher-

ence of the text, the connections between

the parts and the whole.

The term was translated intogeographyby

the Swedish geographer Torsten Ha ̈gerstrand as

part of the ontological and epistemological basis

oftime-geography.Ha ̈gerstrand (1974) distin-

guished between compositional approaches,

which proceed by splitting up their objects into

structural categories derived via formal–logical

method, andcontextualones, in which objects

and events are treated in their immediate

spatial and temporal setting and attributed a

property of ‘togetherness’ that must not be split

asunder. In time-geography, trajectories of indi-

vidual entities are represented in time–space,

not as movements in an empty Cartesian time–

space, but as bundles of activities together con-

stituting a web of trajectories. Ha ̈gerstrand saw

theideaofsuchawebasabasicpostulateof

the contextual approach. It should ensure an

understanding oftimeandspaceasresources

‘drawn upon’ in the conduct of life. It does,

however, remain debateable whether his reduc-

tion of human action to moving entities and his

graphical illustrations still retained a sense of

time and space as external frameworks.

Stripped of their connotations of ‘physical-

ism’, Ha ̈gerstrand’s ideas eventually inter-

sected with threads in modernsocial theory

and socialphilosophypursuing ontologies of

practiceand understandings of the ‘situation’

for social action. Instructuration theory,

introduced by the British sociologist Anthony

Giddens (1984), for example, contextuality

does not denote boundaries of social life but,

rather, features that are inherently involved in

its construction. ‘All social activity’, it says, ‘is

formed in three conjoined moments of differ-

ence: temporally, structurally and spatially;

the conjunction of these express thesituated

character of social practices’ (Giddens, 1981,

p. 30). Giddens provides a set of concepts that

describe contextuality as inherently involved

in the connection of social integration and

system integration; of face-to-face interaction

and more extensive relations of mediated

interactions. One of them is the concept of

locale, describing ‘settings’ of interaction

connected to different social activities. Many

geographers have worked in critical dialogue

with these formulations. Pred (1984), for

instance, pursues a ‘theory ofplaceas histor-

ically contingent process that emphasizes

institutional and individual practices as well

as the structural features with which those

practices are interwoven’. Simonsen (1991)

adds a more phenomenological aspect by

emphasizing the ‘situated life story’ in an

approach to the constitution of social life

involving the interaction between different

modes of temporality andspatiality. In these,

and other, contributions, a central point is that

contexts are not passive backdrops. They are

‘performative social situations, plural events

which are more or less spatially extensive and

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_C Final Proof page 111 31.3.2009 9:45pm

CONTEXTUALITY