The Dictionary of Human Geography

reinvigorate this sub-field (see Lemke, 2001;
Elden, 2007b; Legg, 2007b). se

Suggested reading
Burchell, Gordon and Miller (1991); Dean
(1999); Foucault (1988, 1991); Huxley (2007).

Grand Theory A term devised by American
sociologist C. Wright Mills (1959) to attack
what he took to be the obsessive concern of
post-Second World War social science with
empty conceptual elaboration (‘the associating
and dissociating of concepts’) at high levels of
abstraction. In his view, Grand Theory was
more or less severed from the concrete con-
cerns ofeveryday lifeand largely indifferent
to its immense variety in time and space. His
main target was Talcott Parsons, another
American sociologist and the architect of
structural functionalism, against whom
he insisted ‘there is no ‘‘grand theory’’, no
one universal scheme in terms of which we
can understand the unity of social structure,
no one answer to the tired old problem of
social order’.
In geography, the postwar development
ofspatial sciencemade similar promises to
Parsons’, but about spatial rather than social
order: indeed, Chorley and Haggett (1967)
anticipated the construction of a ‘general
theory of locational relativity’ and a unified
spatial systems theory (seesystem). The cri-
tiques of structural functionalism (in the
social sciences) and spatial science (in geog-
raphy) did not lead to the demise of Grand
Theory, however, so much as its reformulation.
By the 1980s, so many other candidates had
emerged that Skinner (1985) could write of
‘the return of Grand Theory’. These included
critical theory,structuralism,structural
marxismandstructuration theory, all of
which left their marks on human geography.
Indeed, Barnes and Gregory (1997a, p. 64)
claimed that much of the late-twentieth-
century history of Anglo-Americanhuman
geographyhad involved ‘the search for a sin-
gle or tightly bounded set of methodological
[and theoretical] principles that, once found,
would provide unity and intelligibility to the
disparate material studied. When located,
such principles would function as a kind of
philosopher’s stone, transmuting the scattered
base facts of the world into the pure gold of
coherent explanation. No matter the kind of
phenomenon investigated, it could always
be slotted into a wider theoretical scheme.
Nothing would be left out; everything would
be explained.’

There have been two critical responses

to this search, fastening on (i) its theoretical

ambitions and (ii) its totalizing ambitions:

(1) There has been a continuing debate

about the scope oftheory in human

geography. Few would advocate a return

to the supposedly theory-less world of

empiricism, but Ley (1989), in the spirit

of Mills’ original objections, nonetheless

complained of a fixation upon theory (or

rather Theory): of the privilege accorded

to the ‘theorization of theories’, second-

order abstractions ‘doubly removed from

the empirical world’, whose proliferation

threatened to produce a disturbing frag-

mentation of geographical enquiry. Yet in

the same year Harvey and Scott (1989)

were exercised by what they saw as a with-

drawal from ‘the theoretical imperative’

and, in consequence, the dissolution of

intellectual enquiry into a host of empir-

ical particulars. The fragmentation that

dismayed both these responses (in differ-

ent ways) was often the product of the-

oretical work conducted outside the

confines of (and in large measure work-

ing against) Grand Theory: see, for ex-

ample, historicism, postmodernism

andpost-structuralism. Hence Dear’s

(1988) exuberant insistence that ‘there

can be no grand theory for human geog-

raphy!’ was coupled with an equally ex-

uberant demand for human geography to

engage withsocial theory. His inten-

tion was to fashion a human geography

that was at once theoretically engaged

and sensitive to empirical particularity –

to ‘difference’. Similarly – but differently

• Thrift (1996, p. 30; see also 2006)
  argued that a yet more ‘modest’ form of
  theorizing was needed to avoid a ‘theory-
  centred’ style of research ‘which continu-
  ally avoids the taint of particularity’,
  though to his chagrin several critics
  plainly regard his own project ofnon-
  representational theoryas yet another
  exorbitation of Theory with a capital T.
  Whether Thrift has successfully clipped
  the wings of Grand Theory remains an
  open question, but in any event Katz
  (1996) urged human geographers to find
  other ways of letting theory take flight.
  She recommended an openness to
  minor theory: subverting the claims to
  mastery registered by Grand Theory by
  working in the heterogeneous ‘spaces-
  in-between’ different traditions, by

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GRAND THEORY