Nicky Gregson

And now it's all consumption?

At a recent party in Athens held to mark the opening of the Fourth Intensive Course on Gender and Geography, Jan Monk remarked on what she’d identified as one of the main features of the AAG conference in San Francisco ’the Brits’ seemingly were all ’talking consumption’. Although generalizations such as these are fraught with problems, I tend to agree with the tenor of these observations. Suddenly, a number of individuals in British social geography some of whom have a highly visible profile in the discipline and some of whose work tends to be highly influential have identified consumption as a major concern. Further evidence in support of such observations came at the IBG Nottingham conference, where consumption comprised the focus for a number of paper sessions while, closer to ’home’, within the Sheffield department three current ’social geography’ research projects concern consumption issues. As yet, the influence of such research is only just beginning to filter through to the journal literature (although see Sack, 1988; Clarke, 1991; Knox, 1991). However, the ’turn’ to consumption among social geographers is becoming both more widely referenced and heralded as indicative of broader tendencies within the social sciences (see, for example, Glennie and Thrift, 1992; Jackson and Thrift, 1994; Wrigley and Lowe, 1995). As someone involved in this ’turn’, I am acutely aware that focusing a review on some of one’s own interests might be seen as both myopic and somewhat of a ’lazy option’. But, as I hope to show, these developments are not only important in themselves but are also more than useful in exposing some of the characteristics of the contemporary moment in social geography. And certainly, I regard such a focus as offering considerably more than a bland survey of research on housing, crime, minorities and other allegedly social geography subject fields. But enough of this defensiveness! Here I consider critically some of the main features of this emergent geographical research on consumption, highlighting in particular two areas of published work, on the mall and advertising imagery respectively.2 These are then used to raise some

The multiple estate model: some critical questions

This essay is intended to initiate debate concerning the multiple estate model as developed by Glanville Jones over the past twenty years. The model is considered to be closely associated with work on early settlement organization by Maitland, Stenton and Jolliffe and is discussed as part of this historiographical tradition. The focal point in this paper is a critical evaluation of the framework provided by Joness multiple estate model. Three key problem areas are identified and considered-problems of definition, of method and of empirical application-and the possibility of circumventing these difficulties by using a check-list of key multiple estate features is discussed. Areas of north-west England, south-west Scotland and some of Jones published examples of multiple estates have been examined with the aid of this check-list and suggest that the multiple estate model may be a far from universally applicable description of early intersettlement organization.

Book reviews: Duncan, S. and Savage, M., editors, 1991: New perspectives on the locality debate, special issue: Environmental and Planning A 23(2). London: Pion. 153 pp. £20 paper. ISBN: 0 308 518 X

to develop a new conceptual framework of economic classification based on empirical studies of the Canadian, Danish, French and Swiss economies. Economic activities are more correctly classified by their function within the wider exchange system: i.e., manufacturing; circulation; distribution ; and regulation. The taxonomy which emerges bears more than a passing resemblance to that used by Allen (1989) in his critique of service industry research, but can one only assume this similarity is coincidental since Allen is not cited by the authors. Five further chapters focus upon the relationships between producer service growth and the evolution of national metropolitan hierarchies. The papers by Beyers (US), Ley and Hutton (Canada) and O’Connor and Edgington (Australia), Tordior (Netherlands) and Leo and Phillipe (France) all point to the growing concentration of financial and business services

Book reviews : Cohen, I.J. 1989: Structuration theory: Anthony Giddens and the constitution of social life. Basingstoke: Macmillan. ix + 307 pp. £30.00 cloth

has to be said more limited category; one in which the primary objective is to describe Giddens’ ideas as well as to develop certain of these. To be fair, this is not entirely Cohen’s fault. The book, after all, is produced within a series which aims ’to introduce the work of major figures in social science to students beyond their immediate specialisms’. It needs, therefore, to be considered primarily in the light of the requirements of undergraduate students for whom, presumably, it is designed. In this context there are a number of reservations which need to be made about this