Moving beyond Anglo-American economic geography

ABSTRACT

Over the last fifteen years, we have been observing an increasing fragmentation of economic geography, concerning both schools of thought, perspectives, paradigms, themes and the educational background of researchers. The poly-vocal character of economic geography includes a variety of language areas, a phenomenon so far unknown to a large part of Anglo-American economic geographers. Particularly in the literature about theories, perspectives and paradigms, the non-English speaking world is largely ignored as a basis for debate. Even worse, leading scholars in the field increasingly use the term Anglo-American economic geography to refer to the whole field, although they describe trends and theories in both general and authoritative terms. The aim of this paper is to move beyond Anglo-American economic geography by introducing and reviewing economic geography literature in some other main languages, namely Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese. The purpose of doing so is not merely to show that there is more than Anglo-American economic geography, but also to derive from these non-English voices insights in how to move to an integrative paradigm of a truly international economic geography.

KEYWORDS:

• Anglo-American economic geography
• Anglo-American human geography
• integrative paradigm of economic geography
• Chinese
• Spanish
• Portuguese

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Jung Won Sonn for organizing the panel session ‘Moving beyond Anglo-American economic geography’ at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers, Boston, April 2017 and the International Journal of Urban Sciences for sponsoring it. We are also grateful to Klaas Fröhlich for his support preparing the figures and to Fabian Faller for discussing the issue of positionality. Moreover, we thank one anonymous reviewer for giving comments on an earlier version of this paper, as well as several colleagues who contributed to a discussion on Anglo-American Economic Geography on the Online Platform ResearchGate, in particular Anssi Paasi, Michiel van Meeteren, Dominic Power, Ray Hudson, and Phil Cooke, see https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_is_the_purpose_of_using_the_term_Anglo-American_economic_geography_by_leading_scholars_in_the_field_Barnes_Sheppard_Peck_Scott_etc

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Robert Hassink http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7524-4577

Huiwen Gong http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4764-6867

Notes

1 In a similar vein, Coenen (2012) is critical on the Anglo-American hegemony in his book review of the SAGE Handbook of Economic Geography (Leyshon, Lee, & McDowell, 2011).

2 This sub-section draws from Hassink (2007).