Cultural Geography

These are undoubtedly important questions,

and their centrality within economic geography

in recent times has helped enliven the field con-

siderably (Barnes and Gertler, 1999; Clark et al.,

2000a; Lee and Wills, 1997; Sheppard and

Barnes, 2000).^1 It has also served to build valu-

able bridges to scholarship in other related fields,

such as economic sociology, industrial economics

and the study of material culture, where inter-

esting things have been happening recently.

However, the cultural turn in economic geo-

graphers’ study of production is already, in some

ways, old news.^2 The question now to be asked

is: what has it delivered? The answer I would

venture at this stage is: not as much as had been

promised or hoped for originally. For every

advance towards enlightenment there has been

an equal measure of confusion. While the intro-

duction of cultural arguments has greatly

enriched and enlivened the study of production

questions, it has also raised pressing new ques-

tions without answering them, and has left many

important older questions unanswered or

neglected. Because of this, some constructive

criticism concerning this larger project and its

progress thus far is appropriate.

In this chapter, my aim is to address these

developments by taking a sceptical view of what

has been achieved to this point. My purpose is

notto belittle or denigrate the important and use-

ful work that has been completed thus far, for I

agree wholeheartedly with Thrift (2000a) that,

thanks to the cultural turn, we can never again

look at ‘the economic’ in quite the same way –

nor should we. My goal is to challenge the sense

of self-satisfaction that has, in my view, perme-

ated the subdiscipline rather prematurely, by

posing some unsettling questions. I begin by

attempting to distil the recent ferment around the

cultural and its relationship to the economic (at

least in the realm of production)^3 into three big

ideas: the rediscovery of ‘the social’ in produc-

tion systems, the rise of the learning paradigm

and the idea of regional culture, and the evolu-

tionary dynamics of local production systems. I

then offer up a critical commentary on this

newish cultural economic geography, focusing

on several important areas of controversy. In par-

ticular, I argue that we have made surprisingly

little progress in advancing a plausible theoreti-

cal understanding of one of the most central

entities within capitalist production systems – the

firm. As a consequence, our ability to provide

useful answers to some very fundamental ques-

tions – like ‘When and why is the local important

in production and innovation processes?’ or

‘Under what circumstances does production

knowledge travel between places?’ – remains

very poorly developed. I conclude by enunciating

some other important questions that have been

neglected or left for dead, but which are still

pressing and in need of our serious attention.

A CULTURAL ECONOMIC

GEOGRAPHY OF PRODUCTION:

BIG IDEAS

Just where did this renewed interest by economic

geographers in the culture of production come

from? Why is the cultural seen as being so

important now? I think it is possible to answer

this by singling out key debates and questions at

several different scales of analysis. At the macro

scale, the tremendous interest and attention given

to the success of ‘Japan, Inc.’ during the 1980s

(Oliver and Wilkinson, 1988) and Germany’s

‘Rhineland model’ of stakeholder capitalism in

the 1990s (Hutton, 1995) has foregrounded what

many have inferred to be the central role of

national cultures in determining economic

success (Sayer and Walker, 1992). After all,

though it seems somewhat unlikely given the

tenor of commentary in today’s mainstream busi-

ness press, these two models were not all that

long ago much admired by academics and busi-

ness writers alike. Their successes were most

commonly interpreted in terms of national busi-

ness cultures, not only shared by all national

firms, but also deeply engrained in the psyches

and mentalities of workers and the general

public. In retrospect, a lot of this writing strikes

one now as more than a little crude and naive, for

reasons I shall enumerate below.

At the micro scale of the individual firm, the

concept of ‘corporate culture’ came into vogue

in the 1990s as a central variable capable of

explaining both spectacular successes – such as

the rise of Dell and Microsoft – and colossal

failures – the chastening of Xerox, DEC or

Lockheed in the world of big business

(Schoenberger, 1997; 2000). More recently, the

idea has also been invoked to understand the

problems emerging in the wake of highly publi-

cized mergers between corporate giants (for

example, the fundamental incompatibilities

between Daimler and Chrysler, or between

BMW and Rover, only a few years after their

much celebrated unions). The prevailing narra-

tives have laid virtually all the blame upon

incommensurate corporate (and/or national)

cultures that have produced worldviews and

behaviours so fundamentally divergent that they

cannot be overcome.

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