The Dictionary of Human Geography

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and/or preparation of the means of existence,

includingfood, shelter, clothing andhealth

care (Katz, 2001b). But any labour force is

historically and geographically contingent,

and so the notion extends to the reproduction

of a differentiated and differently skilled

labour force and the broad range of cultural

forms and practices that create, uphold and

rationalize these differences. Thuseducation,

the legal system and mass media are arenas of

social reproduction, helping to inculcate and

naturalize what Pierre Bourdieu (1977) called

thehabitus.

Social reproduction is defined and secured

through a fluidassemblageof sources associ-

ated with thestate,capital, thehousehold

andcivil society. The balance among these

varies historically, geographically and by

class, and its precise determinants are often

the outcome of struggles in the workplace,

communityandhome.Ifasocial formation

is to continue, thenconsumption, produc-

tion, circulation andexchange– of goods, of

knowledge, of values – must be ongoing.

While social reproduction implies endurance,

it should not be understood as stasis. Involving

the lively practices of everyday life and the

myriad efforts to secure these, social reproduc-

tion actively makes the conditions of ongoing

production (cf.resistance). In this way, social

reproduction is a critical concept: immanent

in its material social practices is the possibility

of rupture, renovation and transformation.

Social reproduction has political economic,

cultural and environmental aspects. The first

includes the reproduction of labour power, the

material social practices that sustain class and

other modes of difference, and the discursive

and other work that makes these distinctions

common sense. The cultural aspect of social

reproduction includes the production and

exchange of knowledge and skills, along with

the spaces in which they are carried out and

given meaning. This knowledge enables all

forms of work, but also contributes toiden-

tityand social group formation as well. The

environmental aspect of social reproduction

refers to the making and maintenance of the

forces and material grounds of production,

including tools, machinery and factories,

but also the environmental resources and

political ecologies that enable ongoing

production.

Social reproduction has been associated

withmarxism, but much of the attention to

it has come fromfeministsworking in – or

against – that tradition. This scholarship

brings into critical tension the social relations

ofclass,genderandsexuality, demonstrat-

ing the ways in which they build upon,

strengthen or undermine one another under

particular historical and geographical cir-

cumstances (e.g. Marston, 2000). Feminist

geographers have also revealed the ways in

which processes such as globalization,

labourmigrationand economicrestructur-

ing are reworked by incorporating social

reproduction in their analyses (e.g. Kofman

and Raghuram, 2006). ck

Suggested reading

Dalla Costa and Dalla Costa (1999); Mitchell,

Marston and Katz (2004).

social space With some notable exceptions,

human geographers traditionally conceptual-

izedspace as a blank canvas upon which

human activities are played out. This led to

the adoption of aeuclidiannotion of space

and technologically astute attempts to map the

way space is territorialized via economic, pol-

itical and social action. In the social sphere,

this reinvention of geography as aspatial sci-

ence triggered multiple attempts to utilize

censusdata to identify where residents shared

similar characteristics or lifestyles, with tech-

niques ofsocial area analysisfacilitating the

identification of more-or-less homogeneous

social areas. While some of this work perpetu-

ated theecological fallacy(implying that

all persons in a given area shared similar social

characteristics), more individually centred

methods ofsocial network analysis pro-

vided empirical evidence of the way in which

individuals’ social worlds characteristically

revolved around a localized set of social

spaces. Here, thetime-geographyassociated

with Torsten Ha ̈gerstrand and the Lund

School offered a different take on thespatial-

ityof social practice, giving some important

clues as to how social activities are distributed

across time and space. Elsewhere,humanistic

geographyexplored the emotional and even

spiritual ties that bind societies to spaces,

albeit often talking about the construction of

placerather than the making of social space

(Cresswell, 2004).

Reacting against these types of analysis, the

historical and geographicalmaterialismthat

emerged in the 1970s ushered in a rather dif-

ferent interpretation of spatiality, whereby

space was deemed to be inherently caught up

in social relations, both socially produced and

consumed. Perhaps most influentially, Henri

Lefebvre (1991b) insisted that there can be no

‘pre-social’ or natural space, as, at the moment

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_S Final Proof page 697 1.4.2009 3:23pm

SOCIAL SPACE