society and nature, explored in recent
debates about actor network theory and
related arguments about ‘non-representational
theory’ (Thrift, 1996), provide further evi-
dence that ‘society’ is no longer a valid object
of sociological discourse. Reversing the con-
ventional logic, theorists like Bruno Latour
(2000) have argued that the social should
now be seen as that which circulates within
the world of things, not what things circulate
within.
Social historians such as Patrick Joyce have
also put ‘the social’ in question, challenging our
tendency to think of society in reified terms
(as in ‘social structure’ or the ‘social system’).
Joyce (2001) seeks to replace this solid, onto-
logical sense of ‘society’ with a more fluid
understanding of the social as constituted
through particular practices, materialities and
embodied beings. As these debates among
sociologists and social historians imply, the
social sciences have, as disciplinary forms of
knowledge, played their own part in the con-
stitution and transformation of the social.
And, as Joyce himself points out, geographers
have made a significant contribution to this
current rethinking of the social.
For geographers, rethinking ‘the social’ has
involved a parallel rethinking of space. Like
society, space is no longer adequately theo-
rized in a static or bounded sense but is
increasingly understood in relational terms. In
Doreen Massey’s (1994) work, for example,
the emphasis is on the linkages between
places at a variety of scales from the local to
the global, rather than on a more fixed and
bounded sense of place. A progressive or
global sense of place is, she argues, about trac-
ing the routeswhich connect different places
rather than a nostalgic concern for the rooted-
nessof any particular place.
The chapters in this section all approach
‘the social’ through the lens of the spatial. This
does not imply that the social can only be
understood through empirically grounded
research on particular places at particular
times (though an insistence on historical and
geographical specificity has much to recom-
mend it). It also involves a commitment to
exercising and interrogating our geographical
imaginations(Gregory, 1994). More broadly, it
means that human geographers and other
social scientists should expend more intellectualenergy in seeking to understand the spatiality
of social life.
This might seem unremarkable, but for
generations social theory has emphasized
temporality rather than spatiality. So, in the
mid 1980s, it was felt necessary to remind
social scientists that society does not take
place on the head of a pin, that social relations
are underpinned and reproduced through
spatial structures, and that there are spatial as
well as social divisions of labour (Gregory and
Urry, 1985; Massey, 1984). Indeed, the 1980s
were characterized by Ed Soja (1989) as
involving a ‘reassertion of space in critical
social theory’.
Since then, across the social sciences, there
has been significantly more interest in the com-
plex relationships between society and space.
As a result, geographers need no longer be
quite so insistent in asserting that ‘Geography
matters!’ (Massey and Allen, 1984), although
there is still much to be done to demonstrate
‘the difference that space makes’ (Sayer, 1985)
in particular social situations. From the late
1980s, the intellectual traffic between geography
and the other social sciences has been
increasingly two-way, with books like David
Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity(1989)
attracting a remarkably wide audience beyond
the discipline of geography. The interdisciplinary
field of cultural studies has seen a proliferation
of works that explore the significance of spatial
metaphors such as borders and margins,
spaces and places, centres and margins – though
the use of such metaphors is itself contested
(Pratt, 1992).
This growing interest in spatiality across the
social sciences has been reciprocated by geo-
graphy’s increasing engagement with social
theory. Both trends came together in the
so-called ‘cultural turn’ which brought cultural
questions of meaning, identity and representa-
tion to centre-stage and caused some to ques-
tion whether political and economic issues
had been displaced. Within geography, Nigel
Thrift declared the cultural to be virtually
hegemonic by 1991 and, a few years later,
Andrew Sayer (1994) was warning cultural
geographers of the dangers of ignoring ‘the
economy, stupid’. Charging geographers with
neglecting material inequalities in society,
Nicky Gregson (1995) felt as though she was
writing an obituary for social geography. It was38 RETHINKING THE SOCIALSection-1.qxd 03-10-02 10:32 AM Page 38