Trevor J. Barnes

Retheorizing Economic Geography: From the Quantitative Revolution to the “Cultural Turn”

In this article, I reflect upon and attempt to understand the changing theoretical nature of post–World War II Anglo-American economic geography. In particular, I contrast the kind of theorizing that first occurred in the discipline during the 1950s with the very different kind now carried out under what has been called the “cultural turn”or the “new economic geography.” I argue that, during this transition, not only did the use of specific theories alter, but the very idea and practice of theorization also changed. I characterize the phases of this movement by using the terms “epistemological” and “hermeneutic theorizing,” defined on the basis of works by pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty and science studies writer Donna Haraway. I argue that “epistemological theorizing” best describes the first period of theorization in the discipline around the quantitative revolution of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and that it is bound by the quest for accurate (mirror) representation. In contrast, hermeneutic theorizing describes the kind of theorizing found in the new economic geography, marked by an interpretive mode of inquiry that is reflexive, open-ended, and catholic in its theoretical sources.

'Nothing includes everything': towards engaged pluralism in Anglophone economic geography

Economic geography has become increasingly fragmented into a series of intellectual solitudes that has created isolation, producing monologues rather than conversation, and raising the question of how knowledge production should proceed. Inspired by science studies and feminism, we argue for an engaged pluralist approach to economic geography based on dialogue, translation, and the creation of ‘trading zones’. We envision a determinedly anti-monist and anti-reductionist discipline that recognizes and connects a diverse range of circulating local epistemologies: a politics of difference rather than of consensus or popularity. Our model is GIS that underwent significant shifts during the last decade by practicing engaged pluralism, and creating new forms of knowledge. Similar possibilities we suggest exist for economic geography.

Relocating resource peripheries to the core of economic geography's theorizing: rationale and agenda

Theorizing in economic geography has focused on core regions, industrial and non-industrial, old and new. Indeed, contemplation of the idea of globalization has reinforced this quest. This paper disputes this blinkered thinking that peripheralizes resource peripheries, and seeks to re-position and emphasize resource peripheries within economic geography’s theoretical agenda, specifically that associated with the new ‘institutional’ approach. A truly ‘global’ economic geography cannot afford to ignore resource peripheries. In particular, we argue that characterizing resource peripheries, and making them distinct from cores, is the intersection of four sets of institutional values or dimensions which we summarize in terms of industrialism (economic dimension), environmentalism (environmental dimension), aboriginalism (cultural dimension) and imperialism (geopolitical dimension). This admittedly preliminary framework underlies our hypothesis that resource peripheries around the world have become deeply contested spaces, much more so than those found in cores.

Between Regions: Science, Militarism, and American Geography from World War to Cold War

Abstract Histories of American geographic thought and practice have sketched, but not critically explored, the relationship between war, intellectual change, and the production of spatial knowledge. This article sheds light on a crucial period, the middle decades of the twentieth century, when new modes of understanding and representing geography were being formulated at a variety of sites across the nation-state, from Princeton to the University of Washington. In particular, there emerged an altered conception of region, not as a descriptive but as a theoretical unit. This intellectual transformation, driven by an invigorated scientific imperative, was closely wedded to broader geopolitical conditions of war and militarism—to the demands for synthetic regional intelligence and new collectives of research that could adequately address complex technical and social challenges consistent with global influence. Moving from the formative hub of the Office of Strategic Services to the more diffuse but no less powerful structures of Cold War funding, we chart the emergence of a new regional model, inextricably linked and concurrent with the solidification of a world of strategic regions open to the exertion of American power, but also part of a remarkable emergent technoscientific complex at home.

Lives Lived and Lives Told: Biographies of Geography's Quantitative Revolution

In this paper I draw upon both biographical and sociological approaches to examine one moment in the history of geographys quantitative revolution of the late 1950s and early 1960s: the publication of Brian Berry and William Garrisons paper, “The functional bases of the central place hierarchy”, in Economic Geography in 1958. The origins of that paper are traced through the life stories—the ‘lives told‘—of the two authors. In particular, I try to connect the specific life trajectories of Berry and Garrison up until 1958 with the wider social and cultural contexts in which they lived. The theoretical impetus for the study are three literatures: the first is science studies, and especially the work of Bruno Latour and his ideas of ‘black boxing’ and ‘translation’; the second is on the history and sociology of quantification; and the third is on biography, particularly scientific biography. The broader argument of the paper is that the seemingly disembodied numbers, calculations, and precisely drawn figures and graphs that increasingly inflect human geography from the late 1950s, and found in such papers as Berry and Garrisons, are socially embedded, a consequence not of a universal rationality but of specific lives and times that infuse the very substance of the works produced.

Remaking the Global Economy

Whether from the perspectives of production networks, finance, labour or state institutions, economic geographers have made substantive contributions to understanding globalization as an uneven, differentiated and dynamic process. In particular, a strong and growing body of literature has emerged over the last decade in economic geography and cognate disciplines that uses a global production networks (GPN) framework to investigate and explain economic globalization and regional development. Building on earlier Global Commodity Chain (GCC) and Global Value Chain (GVC) approaches in economic sociology and development studies, GPN research has made steady progress in theoretical as well as empirical terms and produced sophisticated analyses of socioeconomic development at scales ranging from the global to the local. However, the same dynamic character of global economic change also compels us to look outward and forward to explore new frontiers of global economic shifts and developmental outcomes. This series of themed sessions and panel(s) will explore dynamic shifts in global production networks (broadly defined) along five key domains: firms, finance, consumption, state and labour.

Stormy Weather: Cyclones, Harold Innis, and Port Alberni, BC:

This paper uses the work of the Canadian economic historian, Harold Innis, to reflect on the nature of resource economies and the single-industry towns that form their backbone. For Innis resource or staple economies are subject to extreme spatial and temporal disruptions that are both creative and destructive. Single-industry towns are on the front line of both that creativity and that destructiveness. They enjoy rapid growth when a new resource is found, but are equally hastily abandoned when resources run out, or prices fall. Innis used the metaphor of the cyclone to depict this pattern of staples accumulation and consequent crisis. This paper will, first, elaborate on Inniss general cyclonic scheme that joins space, time, and staples production, and second, provide a case study of the forest-industry town of Port Alberni, British Columbia, to exemplify his argument.

A history of regression; actors* networks, machines, and numbers'*

In this paper the history of correlation and regression analyses, both in the discipline of statistics generally and in human geography particularly, is examined. It is argued that correlation and regression analysis emerged from a particular social and cultural context, and that this context entered into the very nature of those techniques. The paper is divided into three sections. First, to counter the idea that mathematics and statistics are somehow outside the social, the arguments put forward by David Bloor and Bruno Latour suggesting that mathematical propositions arc socially constructed are briefly reviewed. Second, using the ideas of both Bloor and Latour I turn to the development of statistics as an intellectual discipline during the 19th century, and specifically to the invention of correlation and regression at the end of that period. It is argued that the development of statistics as a discipline and its associated techniques are both stamped by, but also leave their stamp on, the wider society in which they are set. Last, the importation of correlation and regression analyses into human geography which occurred in the 1950s is examined. Following my general social constructionist argument, it is suggested that because of the difference in context the correlation and regression analyses devised in the late 19th century were often inappropriate for mid-20th century spatial science.

The place of locational analysis: a selective and interpretive history

The paper has two purposes. The first is to provide a selective review of the history of locational analysis as it bears on economic geography. Three periods are examined: the German location school of von Thunen, Weber and L6sch that begins in the first part of the nineteenth century and ends in the middle of the twentieth century; American spatial science that starts in the mid-1950s and is in decline by the late 1970s; and the new economic geography associated with the economist Paul Krugman, and inaugurated by his 1991 book, Geography and trade. The second is to make a methodological argument. Locational analysis is most frequently justified in terms of the purity of its logical and mathematical reasoning, permitting some commentators to trace an unbroken line of progress over its 175-year history. I argue that such a claim is based upon acceptance of a broader philosophical position, rationalism - the belief that the foundation of knowledge is reason - which takes its most perfect form in logic and mathematics. Rationalism has been criticized in various ways ever since it first emerged in the Enlightenment, however, and the same critical sensibility informs this paper. Specifically, I criticize the rationalist interpretation of locational analysis by drawing upon a recent interdisciplinary body of literature arguing for the importance of local knowledge, the idea that knowledge, even abstract theoretical knowledge of the kind found in locational analysis, is shaped not by the universal but by the peculiar historical and geographical context of its production. This antirationalist argument in favour of local knowledge is exemplified by discussion of the three periods of locational analysis that form the papers core.

Is There a Place for the Rational Actor? A Geographical Critique of the Rational Choice Paradigm*

Behavioral models in economic geography, and even in Marxist social science, are increasingly dominated by the postulate of the rational actor. Three parables are intimately associated with the rational choice model: that individual action dictates a social organization of maximum benefit to all individual members of society; that rational choices have rational consequences; and that self-interested individual behavior dominates collective action (the free rider problem). The first parable has been logically negated by Marxian applications of the rational choice model, but the second and third parables are not questioned by Marxist work. If the presumption that the rational actor can be abstracted from his/her geographical context is rejected, however, the second and third parables are also fundamentally challenged. Rational economic choices made in a spatially differentiated but integrated economy can lead to actions that have the unintended consequence of undermining the very intentions those actions were supposed to realize. Rational actions need not have rational consequences in a space economy. The places in which everyday life is constituted provide all the conditions necessary for denying the general validity of the assumptions that legitimize the free rider argument.