Economic Geography and the Financial Crisis: Full Steam Ahead?

Abstract

This article considers whether the growing theoretical and methodological diversity or pluralistic nature of economic geography contributes to its lack of engagement outside the discipline and academy. Although we are enthusiastic about the vibrancy this pluralism brings, we also speculate that it contributes to the discipline's tendency to fall short of significantly impacting key debates in the social sciences. In particular, we consider the disciplinary challenges to influencing mainstream debates over financialization and the recent financial crisis and the recurring lament that economic geography “misses the boat” by failing to significantly impact key scholarly and policy issues. Specifically, we suggest that methodological and theoretical diversity, local contextualization, and relational analysis, all of which we support as vital to the discipline, make it difficult to isolate a disciplinary core. We conclude that pluralism produces a vibrant discipline with unique explanatory power but that it also has important impacts on the design, execution, and influence of geographers’ research outside the discipline.

本文探讨经济地理学中逐渐增长的理论与方法多元性, 是否有助于改善该领域在学术及学科之外缺乏参与的问题。我们虽然热切欢迎多元主义所带来的活力, 但亦同时质疑其是否有助于改善该学科无法显着地影响社会科学中重要辩论的发展倾向。我们特别关照”影响关于金融化与近日金融危机之主流辩论”的学科挑战, 以及重新浮现有关经济地理学无法影响重要学术与政策议题以致”错失良机”之感叹。我们特别主张, 方法与理论的多元化、在地的脉络化、以及关係性的分析——这些我们所支持的学科关键, 皆导致难以分离出单一的学科核心。结论部分我们将主张, 多元主义创造了具有独特解释力的活跃学科, 但同时对地理学者的研究在学科之外的设计、执行与影响力具有重要的影响。

Este artículo trata de establecer si la creciente diversidad teórica y metodológica de la geografía económica, o su naturaleza pluralista, contribuyen a su falta de compromiso por fuera de la disciplina y de la academia. Si bien somos entusiastas acerca de la vitalidad que conlleva ese pluralismo, también especulamos que esto fortalece una tendencia de la disciplina en el sentido de quedarse corta en impactos significativos en los debates claves de las ciencias sociales. Consideramos, en particular, los retos disciplinarios para influir en los debates de actualidad sobre financialización y la crisis financiera reciente, y los recurrentes lamentos de que la geografía económica “pierde el barco” al no impactar significativamente temas cruciales académicos y políticos. Específicamente, sugerimos que la diversidad metodológica y teórica, la contextualización local y el análisis relacional—todos los cuales consideramos vitales para la disciplina—dificultan la clara demarcación de un núcleo disciplinario. Concluimos que el pluralismo puede dotar a una disciplina vibrante con un poder explicativo único, pero al mismo tiempo tener impactos importantes sobre el diseño, ejecución e influencia de la investigación de los geógrafos por fuera de la disciplina.

Key Words::

• crisis
• economic geography
• finance
• pluralism.

关键词:

• 危机
• 经济地理学
• 金融
• 多元主义

Palabras clave:

• crisis
• geografía económica
• finanzas
• pluralismo

Acknowledgments

Notes

*We are grateful to all of the attendees of the 2010 Summer Institute in Economic Geography for cultivating the ideas that resulted in this article. Specifically, we would like to thank Jamie Peck, Trevor Barnes, David Rigby, and John Agnew, and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of this article. The authors, however, are solely responsible for any errors.

1. By disciplinary core we refer to a theoretical and methodological canon, something that we believe economic geography lacks relative to other disciplines, especially other social science disciplines such as economics and sociology. We realize, however, that although economic geography might appear from within to be loosely constituted, heterogeneous, and plural, the external view is of a relatively closed and exclusive milieu with rigidly policed processes of interpellation. This applies to most academic disciplines when observed from the outside.

2. Although we are oversimplifying the argument, Peck suggests that by attempting to engage with neoclassical economics, economic sociology, or at least the “new economic sociology” (NES), was “disciplined” into accepting some of the key neoclassical axioms such as rational actors and efficient markets. This made it difficult, if not impossible, to arrive at significantly different conclusions. You might say, following Amin and Thrift (2000), that NES lay down with the lion and ended up as prey.