The Dictionary of Human Geography

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decisions involved around, say, choosing

where to live, or from which retailer to buy

or where to site a new factory have nothing

to do with one another, in reality, say meth-

odological individualists, they all obey the

same fundamental logic of rationaldecision-

making. The facts and circumstances of each

particular case can be eliminated because they

are reducible to a more elementary set of

formal axioms.

While reductionism as a methodological

strategy is powerful and productive, seemingly

yielding ever more secrets of nature and social

life, it has been criticized on a number of

grounds:

(1) The relationship among phenomena is

holistic rather than reductionist. That

is, the systemas a wholedetermines how

its parts behave. Reductionism therefore

necessarily fails.

(2) Some entities, by their very nature – such

as human motivations, emotions or

sparks of creativity – are simply not divis-

ible into constituent parts; there is always

a ‘ghost in the machine’, to use Arthur

Koestler’s (1967) phrase. Humans can-

not be reduced to Pavlovian salivating

dogs or Skinnerian rats in a maze.

(3) Some phenomena or events are charac-

terized by the property of emergence; that

is, interactions of elements produce ef-

fects that cannot be predicted by examin-

ing the properties of those individual

elements themselves (see alsocontext-

ual effectandcompositional theory).

(4) There is often something important in

the original facts and setting that is lost

when it is reduced to a different form.

Translations are never perfect, and im-

portant contextual factors useful in ex-

planation may be lost when

reductionism is applied.

In human geography, reductionism was

most strenuously applied during the period of

the quantitative revolution and spatial

science. Then the complexities of geograph-

ical landscapes were reduced to supposedly

more fundamental entities, such as the postu-

lates of geometry or the axioms ofrational

choice theory. Even after this period, reduc-

tionism remained important within the discip-

line.radical geography, for example, was

often characterized by economism; that is,

the reduction of spatial relationships to eco-

nomic ones. Historically, however, the discip-

line has always emphasized the importance

of context, attempting to keep geographical

facts intact rather than reducing them to

something else. This sensibility has taken on

greater theoretical momentum in the wake

ofpost-structuralismandpostmodernism,

movements entering geography in the 1980s

and associated with an explicitly anti-

reductionist agenda. Critiques of reduction-

ism, and attempts to develop non-reductionist

research strategies, are found in feminist

geography (Pratt, 2004), cultural geo-

graphyandeconomic geography(Gibson-

Graham, 2006). tb

Suggested reading

Dupre ́(1993); Koestler and Smythies (1969).

reflexivity Reflection upon the conditions

through which research is produced, dissem-

inated and received. Emphasis on reflexivity

often accompanies discussion ofpositional-

ity. Debates on reflexivity have emerged from

feminist research (England, 1994; Rose,

1997b), associated in particular with Donna

Haraway’s argument that all knowledge is

situated knowledge(Haraway, 1991c), cri-

tiquing a ‘god-trick’ of disembodied, objective

scientific neutrality. Reflexivity entails consid-

eration of a variety of factors: personal

biography, social situation, political values,

situation within the academic labour structure,

personal relationship to research respondents,

relations of authority within the research pro-

cess and so on. Reflexivity is thus a complex

field, concerningepistemology, politics and

methodology. Rose (1997b) critiques claims

to ‘transparent reflexivity’, whereby an author

assumes that reflexivity can produce a full

understanding of researcher, researched and

research context. Rose argues that such an

approach risks playing a ‘god-trick’ of its

own: ‘we may be performing nothing more

than a goddess-trick uncomfortably similar to

the god-trick’ (p. 311). For Rose, attention

should instead be directed towards the uncer-

tainties of research practice, and the emer-

gence ofdifference through the research

process, reflexivity becoming ‘less a process

of self-discovery than of self-construction’

(p. 313). What might appear as failure from

a perspective seeking transparent reflexivity

becomes the spur to another mode ofper-

formativereflexivity, ‘webbed across gaps in

understandings, saturated with power, but

also paradoxically, with uncertainty’ (p. 317).

In emphasizing self-conscious reflection, the

term ‘reflexivity’ tends to downplay another

meaning of the term ‘reflex’, namely the

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REFLEXIVITY