economic geography from the mid-1990s
(Thrift and Olds, 1996). Often drawing
upon post-structuralism, there was an
attempt to rethink both the larger nature of
the discipline – itsempiricist epistemology,
its entrenchedmasculinism, its economistic
logic (Barnes, 1996; Gibson-Graham, 2006b
[1996]) – as well as particular substantive
topics that could benefit from the new con-
ceptual armature, such as labour and work
(McDowell, 1997a: seelabour geography),
financial and business services (Thrift, 2005b:
see money and finance), consumption
and retailing (Miller, Jackson, Holbrook,
Rowlands and Thrift, 1998) and the firm
(Schoenberger, 1997). Such a turn, its propon-
ents argued, also allowed economic geographers
to denaturalize the object of investigation, the
economy. Rather than treating the economy as
‘out there’, as a single inviolable object, it had to
be conceived as a cultural product, fragile, per-
formed and capable of realization in a variety of
forms. In this conception, the line between cul-
ture and economy is not just hard to see, but is
no longer there (see alsocultural economy).
The ‘cultural turn’ is far from dominant,
however, and already criticisms have
mounted, and new alternatives or versions of
old alternatives proposed. In truth, there is still
no received view, orthodoxy or standardpara-
digmwithin economic geography. The current
discipline is like a palimpsest, with past ver-
sions of the discipline still partially visible, not
completely erased and continuing to contrib-
ute to the discipline’s present form. While
there is no single leading approach, several
areas of the discipline are marked by energetic
research and debate:
(1) Discussion of methods is one (Tickell,
Sheppard, Peck and Barnes, 2007). In the
beginning economic geography was heavily in-
debted toempiricism(and still is), assiduously
collecting numbers and statistics. Even during
economic geography’s least numerate period,
regionalism, Hartshorne (1959, p. 161) could
claim that ‘objectivity ... can best be accom-
plished ... by quantitative measurements’.
That was taken to an extreme during the quan-
titative revolution, but as that movement broke
up during the 1970s it facilitated the prolifer-
ation of newqualitative methodsand tech-
niques, including intensive case-study
research (Sayer and Morgan, 1985), in-depth
interviews, oral histories (Schoenberger, 1996),
ethnographies, participant observation,
discourse analysis(Barnes, 1996) and action
research (Gibson-Graham, 2006b [1996]). It is
an approach to methods in which nothing is
proscribed and everything is permitted. The
upside is diversity and rapid change – most of
the methodological techniques listed would
have been viewed as beyond the pale, or at
best, suspiciously avant-garde, even in the
mid-1980s. The downside, though, is a pre-
occupation with the instant of disclosure rather
than the slower processes of substantiation and
extension (Martin and Sunley, 2001).
(2) Hand-in-hand with permissive method-
ology has gone permissive theory. Thrift and
Olds (1996, p. 313) speak of a ‘polycentric’
economic geography consisting of a ‘set of nar-
rative communities’ that ‘celebrate a qualita-
tive multiplicity of ‘‘economic’’times and
spaces’. Those communities include an older
mathematical modelling tradition, sometimes
refurbished for the new economictimesand
spaces(e.g., Webber and Rigby, 1996) (but
often not); varieties ofpolitical economy,
loosely grouped aroundmarxism, and fre-
quently focused on thestate(most recently,
its role inneo-liberalism: Peck, 2008); vari-
ous stripes offeminismthat sometimes inter-
sect with political economy, and often turning
onbodiesofbothmenand women (McDowell,
1997a); a range of institutional approaches
linked to economic anthropology and sociology
(Polyanyi’s and Granovetter’s works are espe-
cially important) emphasizing embeddedness,
networks and social capital (Saxenian,
1994); and selective theories drawn fromsci-
ence studies(particularly the work of Bruno
Latour and Donna Haraway), used to under-
stand the brute materialities of economic geo-
graphical activities, from the use of machines to
the lurching movement of primary resources
along thecommodity chain(Cook, 2004).
The absence of a single approach is liberating
(no authority to which to kow-tow), but slightly
disconcerting (the discipline continually starts
anew with a clean slate).
(3) Both permissive theory and methods have
been used to understand an issue increasingly
preoccupying economic geography from the
late 1980s,globalization, and forming a
body of research as energetic as its focus of
study. Globalization was made for economic
geographical study. And in the beginning it was
economic geography. Although they did not use
the term, Chisholm and Smith were students of
globalization. That focus was lost, however, as
economic geography became the study of only
westernindustrial economies, and the rest of
the world was parcelled up and given over to
eitherregional geographyordevelopmentGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_E Final Proof page 180 1.4.2009 3:17pmECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY