geography. Processes beginning from the
1970s, such as the emergence of anew inter-
national division of labour, the increasing
hegemony of multinational corporations,
the growth of international financial capital,
and new forms ofcommunicationand long-
distance transportation, showed economic
geographers that they needed to deal with
whole world. Further, under globalization the
old intellectual division of labour in geography
was not just redundant but obstructive.
Dicken’s (1988) work on the geography of
multinational corporations (now in its fourth
edition) was one of the first to make this point.
But he made another, just as important – that
globalization was no seamless process, eradi-
cating geographical difference. Globalization
represented not ‘the end of geography’, as
economists portrayed it (O’Brien, 1992b, p. 3),
but another form of its continuing importance.
Geographical differentiations were the very
preconditions for globalization’s possibility
and achievement. Dicken and a former stu-
dent, Yeung (2002), sharpened the point for
firms, but similar conclusions were reached
for the study of global commodity chains
(Hughes and Reimer, 2004), international
finance, world-wide mega-project property de-
velopment (Olds, 2001), and the international
migratory circuit of professional elites looking
for elite jobs.
(4) Finally, and perhaps surprisingly, primary
resourcesandnaturehave become the focus
of an animated disciplinary discussion. For a
long period the topic was a backwater, and was
almost lost altogether under spatial science.
The simplifying assumptions required for spa-
tialmodellingmeantthattheunevenandlumpy
nature of resources were treated as complicat-
ing factors, the analysis of which was promised
but indefinitely postponed. Harvey (1974a)
made a powerful case for considering nature
alongwiththe economy,butthis wasnot nature
‘red-in-claw’ butsocial-nature, ‘the production
of nature’, as Smith (2008 [1984]) put it. The
production of naturedid not mean creating
something where before there was nothing. Na-
turepre-existed,buthowitwasexploited,used,
thought about and represented once market
capitalism arrived was utterly altered. The
original Marxist approach emphasized the
centrality of social relations in constituting the
economic resource, and in doing so joined dis-
cussions withpolitical ecology. In a classic
paper, Watts (1994b) brilliantly showed how
social relations in Nigeria made the natural
resource ofoilneither natural nor a resource;
instead, it created mal-development, social dis-
cord and political mayhem (see alsopetroca-
pitalism). Since then, discussions of nature
and resources have centred around two axes.
One turns onhybridity, a notion drawn from
science studies and extending what counts
as social relations, and connoting the insepar-
ability,theirmixingandblending, ofnatureand
the social – for example, Swyngedouw’s (1999)
work on the political economy ofwaterin
Spain, and Morgan, Marsden and Murdoch’s
(2006) on food. The other turns on the influ-
ence of discursive and regulatory regimes, par-
ticularly neo-liberalism, in defining nature and
resources – for example, Bakker’s (2003) work
on water, and the edited collection by Heynen,
McCarthy, Prudham and Robbins (2007).Economic geography is a discipline that is
intellectually open, eclectic, pluralist, possibly
chaotic and anarchic, and subject to tempor-
ary whims and fancies. Inconstancy is the only
constant, inconsistency the only consistency.
Over the past two decades the boundaries
between economic geography and other sub-
fields have become increasingly muddied and
indistinct, as the very idea of a separate discip-
line, and a separate empirical object of study,
has been contested (as reflected in the new
textbooks for the discipline; e.g., Coe, Kelly
and Yeung, 2007). Almost anything can now
be fodder for its enquiry. Critics from outside
have complained of a hopeless ‘fuzziness’ and
slapdash approach (Markusen, 1999), while
even inside there have been grumblings of a
lack of rigour, focus and policyrelevance
(Martin, 2001b). The unusual challenge for
the discipline will be less breaking new
ground, which it seems to do on a daily basis,
than holding its existing ground. tbSuggested reading
Amin and Thrift (2000); Barnes (2001); Coe,
Kelly and Young (2007); Scott (2000a);
Sheppard and Barnes (2000).economic growth A sustained increase in
the production of goods and services, usually
measured at the national level as the change in
thegross domestic product(gdp) of a coun-
try’s economy. Economic growth is, at the
same time, one of the most fundamental and
perplexing issues in economic theory. There
are still no conclusive answers to the questions
of what causes economic growth and to what
extent it can be sustained, which have been
hotly debated since the time of Adam Smith
and Thomas Malthus. Smith believed that theGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_E Final Proof page 181 1.4.2009 3:17pmECONOMIC GROWTH