THE CULTURAL TURN IN

ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY:

IS THAT ALL THERE IS?

Culture is now solidly on the agenda of economic

geographers, and nowhere is this more evident

than in their study of production processes and

dynamics. There are few who would not regard

this as a very good thing. After all, the classical

intellectual foundations of economic geography,

whether the minimalist industrial location

calculus of Alfred Weber, the hydraulic engi-

neering models of market equilibration devised

by Léon Walras, or the input–output systems of

Wassily Leontief, were all based on mechanical

metaphors (Barnes, 1996). They were also

thoroughly marginalist in their approach. If one

held constanta variety of considerations, factors

and processes known to be in more or less

constant flux (such as product or process

technologies, market demand, the number and

strength of competitors, sources of supply for

goods and services), one could designate the

optimal location for a production facility or pre-

dict how a perturbation in one part of a regional

or national production system (say, a rapid

increase in demand for a particular product, or

the creation of a major new production facility)

would affect all other parts of the economy. Of

course, these approaches either held constant or

assumed away all of the most interesting and

important aspects of economic life. Looking

back, perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this

era in the life of the ‘economic sciences’ was that

so many claimed to find something of value in

this work for so long (Thrift, 2000a).

The growing popularity of Marxian political

economy in the 1970s and 1980s was in many

ways a breath of fresh air. It brought a new

appreciation of the role of power to economic

geographers’ analyses of workplace change and

the ‘inconstant geography’ of capitalist produc-

tion systems (Storper and Walker, 1989). Ulti-

mately, however, it too came to be regarded by

many as too reductionist to capture the most

beguiling and elusive features of economic

dynamism. Its heavy reliance on the concept of

class as the principal determinant of interests,

identity and behaviour proved to be too limiting

(Gibson-Graham, 1996). At a time when ‘the

emancipatory politics of class struggle’ had largely

been rejected in favour of ‘the representational

politics of political, cultural and environmental

recognition’, political economic approaches

within economic geography had clearly lost

steam (Crang, 1997: 3).

Therefore, the move towards a cultural view of

the geographical economy beginning sometime

in the mid 1980s signalled a growing

interest in fundamental questions pertaining to

economic change which had not, until then,

received their proper due. What are the social

dimensions of technological change in produc-

tion systems, and how are these situated in locali-

ties and regions? How do local production

practices interact and intersect with the global

economy, and must the process of globalization

obliterate all differences and distinctive charac-

teristics of regional and national production

systems? How are economic processes struc-

tured and shaped by social institutions, and at

what geographical scales do these institutions

exert their influence?

6

A Cultural Economic Geography

of Production

Meric S. Gertler

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