The Dictionary of Human Geography

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the introduction to his revisionist account,

‘There was no such thing as the Scientific

Revolution, and this is a book about it.’

Geographers and others working on this

period have also come to stress thespatiality

of natural philosophy at the time, and the

different ways in which what has come to be

called The Scientific Revolution was consti-

tuted in different arenas (Livingstone and

Withers, 2005). At the global scale of East

and west, at the continental scale of

European regionalism, and at the micro scale

of dedicated scientific venues such as the

laboratoryand observatory, the new science

was prosecuted in different ways. The influ-

ence of Chinese alchemy on medicine and the

significance of Islamic geodetic methods on

practical mathematics, the markedly different

rhetoricalspaces of the Italian court and the

Royal Society, where scientific engagements

were staged, the contrasts between knowledge-

producing practices in the laboratory compared

with the field, and differences acrosseurope

in styles of patronage, pedagogic traditions,

conduits of intellectual transmission and

expressions of religious devotion all conspire

to render troublesome the identification of

something called ‘The Scientific Revolution’

as an essential singularity. Scientific revolu-

tions have their own historiesandtheir own

geographies. dnl

Suggested reading

Kuhn (1970 [1962]); Livingstone (2003c).

search behaviour The process of seeking

out and evaluating alternative courses of

action. In spatialdecision-making, searching

• as in the selection of a new home – is often
  constrained by thefrictions of distance,so
  that actors operate within spatially-delimited
  search spaces containing a subset only of all
  the options available to them. rj

secession The transfer of political control of

a piece ofterritoryfrom one polity to a new

or existing polity. Commonly, the term relates

to aregionwithin an existingstateaiming

either to become part of another state or to

function as an independent state. The process

may be peaceful or manifest itself through

terrorismand guerillawar. Contemporary

examples include northern Italy (Giordano,

1999) and Chechnya. Increasingly, the pro-

cess has been explored at the local level as

local stateunits seek to secede from the

authority of metropolitan units (Purcell,

2001). cf

Suggested reading

Macedo and Buchanan (2003).

Second World A term that emerged during

the cold war to describe the communist,

industrial states of the Warsaw Pact (formerly

the Eastern bloc) in contrast to the countries

of NATO. In time it came to refer to the

centrally planned economies and communist

party states of Central and Eastern Europe

(e.g. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary,

Romania and Bulgaria), the Former Soviet

Union states from the Baltics to the Black

Sea (e.g. Belarus, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia,

Estonia, Moldova and the Ukraine), Russia,

the Caucuses and the former soviet states of

Central Asia (e.g. Kazakhstan), as well as

China and other Maoist and Marxist states

in the third world. With the widespread

collapse ofcommunismsince 1989, however,

the term has fallen out of favour. Former

‘Second World’ states are now members of

the European Union, experimenting with

liberal political and economic systems, or pur-

suing market socialism (seepost-socialism:

see also Pickles and Smith, 1998; Smith,

2005). jpi

secondary data analysis In contrast to

primary data analysis, this involves data col-

lected by different researchers than those

undertaking the analysis. The advantages are

potentially a great deal of saving of time and

resources, and thereby it is possible to extend

the scope of a study well beyond the means of

a lone researcher or even small teams. The

disadvantage is that concepts may not be oper-

ationalized in the manner that the secondary

analyst would ideally like. There are a number

of sources of such data, which include

data collected for primary research that has

been subsequently made available to other

researchers (seedata archive). It is increas-

ingly a requirement of grant awarding that this

is done. Another source is when a large-scale

data collection is undertaken on behalf of the

wider social science community. Important

examples of these are the Panel Study of

Income Dynamics, begun in 1968, a longitu-

dinal study of a representative sample of US

individuals and the family units in which they

reside, and the British Household Panel

Survey began in 1991 which is part of the

European Community Household Panel.

Geographers have been able to linkneigh-

bourhooddata to the individual data from

the panels without compromising confidential-

ity (Bolster, Burgess, Johnston, Jones, Propper

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_S Final Proof page 670 1.4.2009 3:23pm

SEARCH BEHAVIOUR