here to the work on multinational corporations
and the global economy, where most of us
still labour under ridiculously simple-minded
assumptions about the ease and power with
which these corporate behemoths can transfer
their products and practices from their home turf
to new markets and production spaces, erasing
local cultures of consumption and production
(and national borders) along the way. I have
already reviewed the arguments to the contrary,
coming out of the institutionalist literature on
national business systems and varieties of capi-
talism. However, it is possible to read too much
into this critique. A recently fashionable view
pursues an equally extreme alternative, by claim-
ing that the global corporation has become
re-embedded in local clusters of knowledge pro-
duction, whereverthese may be, thereby freeing
themselves from the geographical legacies of
their local and national origins. Appealing as this
vision may be to some, the accumulated evidence
thus far suggests that there remains a substantial
gap between the rhetoric of local embedding and
the reality of corporate spatial organization and
practices (Doremus et al., 1998; Gertler et al.,
2000). If embedding takes place anywhere, this
is still largely in one’s original home market.
Continuing this theme, the power of local,
regional and national communities to shape the
contours of production systems represents another
somewhat neglected issue in today’s economic
geography.^20 A culturally inflected approach to
this question has emphasized the importance of
public investments in education and scientific
research. The state has also been called upon to
help modify the behaviour of economic agents
by inculcating cultures of individual enterprise
and entrepreneurship, and especially cultures of
cooperation, where none existed before – what
Jessop (2000: 76) refers to as a fundamental shift
from government to governance and meta-gover-
nance.^21 Taking the longer view, the presence of
the public sphere in the realm of production has
historically been considerably larger than this,
suggesting that we need to resist the urge to reduce
its role to that of educator, coach and matchmaker.
Through its control of key economic and
social institutions, the state’s continuing role in
shaping the behaviour and practices of firms, and
in imposing order on an otherwise unruly world
of markets, remains vital to our understanding of
how production works and how production
cultures are themselves produced at a variety of
spatial scales. This role for the state as a producer
and regulator of the ‘soft infrastructure’ of the
economy is as old as capitalism itself (Polanyi,
1944). Of course these institutions, while durable,
also evolve through time and are themselvesshaped by local, national and international politics
and power struggles (Clark et al., 2000b). It is
here that we need to reconsider explicitly the
third big idea from the cultural economic
geography of production – path dependency.
Whether at the national or the regional scale, the
influence of human action can and does bring
about change within institutional structures. Our
present level of understanding of the evolutionary
dynamics of lock-in versus change still remains
woefully underdeveloped, with seemingly little or
no room for local or national politics.
In summing up, there is little doubt that a
cultural economic geography of production has
opened up new conceptual and empirical terrain
previously considered off-limits to economic
geographers, and the field is richer for it. Certain
truisms – once unthinkable – have now become
widely accepted. Culture and economy are now
accepted as two sides of the same coin. Seem-
ingly natural structures such as markets are now
understood to be deeply embedded. One simply
cannot understand how economies in particular
places work (or how production processes
unfold) without considering the broader social
matrix within which they are situated. While this
has always been true, our awareness of this
relationship, and of the importance of local
cultures of production, has been heightened by the
growing importance of two major phenomena: the
social division of labour in production systems
and the role of knowledge production and shar-
ing (learning). All the same, with these basic
insights now effectively assimilated within the
canon of economic-geographical thought, it is
now time to take our analysis to another level of
sophistication. In the heady early days of
economic geography’s cultural turn, the choice
posed by many – to which I alluded at the begin-
ning of this chapter – was between cultural
economy and political economy. As we enter a
more mature phase, perhaps we shall see greater
value in reworking earlier themes and questions
concerning the geography of production. How
about a cultural political economy of geography?NOTESThe author wishes to acknowledge the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the
Goldring Chair in Canadian Studies at the University of
Toronto for their continuing support. He would also like
to thank Trevor Barnes, Gordon Clark, Norma Rantisi
and the editors for their very helpful comments and
insights.
1 Thrift describes economic geography’s cultural turn as
‘probably the most important event to impact on the142 THE CULTURE OF ECONOMY3029-ch06.qxd 03-10-02 10:40 AM Page 142