Economic Geography: A Critical Introduction

Trevor J. Barnes and Brett Christophers. Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2018. viii and 325 pp., maps, photos, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $49.95 paper (ISBN 978-1-118-87432-5); $99.95 cloth (ISBN: 978-1-118-87433-2); $39.99 electronic (ISBN 978-1-118-87430-1).

This Book Review Forum draws on some of the highlights of an engaging session at the American Association of Geographers (AAG) meeting in New Orleans convened to discuss Trevor J. Barnes and Brett Christophers's Economic Geography: A Critical Introduction, with commentaries from Susan M. Roberts, Chris Muellerleile, Leigh Johnson, and Shaina Potts, followed by a response from the authors. Innovative in form and purpose as well as content, Economic Geography is most certainly not a textbook in the conventional sense. As a “critical introduction,” it is not only critical of its object of analysis—properly pluralized economies, economic lives, economic discourses—but unflinchingly self-critical, too, in that the field or discipline of economic geography is subject to searching, reflexive, and refreshingly original analysis. It is a book in which economic geography takes a good look at itself in the fragmented mirror that is the variegated, contested economy. There is no attempt here falsely to stabilize a singular or fixed understanding of how economic geography should be understood, or for that matter taught, but at the same time there is a quite unwavering commitment to the discipline's purpose and promise. It is a book written not by aloof authorities or skeptical bystanders, but by “partisans” and even “fanboys” (p. 2).

As an assemblage of texts and curricula, as an evolving and quite decentered research field, and as a cluster of readings and understandings of the world, economic geography has long been a creature of the restructuring present, seeking to make sense of conjunctures that it cannot ever really see from the “outside.” For these and other reasons, questioning the status quo—asking why things are as they are, and where they are, rather than taking this for granted—is really at the heart of the book. This also explains why it is necessary to question economic geography's own conventions, practices, norms, “worrying away at … the discipline, as materialized in institutions, texts, and so on” (p. 16). In this respect, the book operates as a sort of metatext, exploring what might be considered the conventional fare of economic-geography lectures (like globalization, money and finance, industrial transformation), but at the same time reflecting on the sociology of the field, its go-to methods and modes of explanation, and its shifting relations with other travelers around the archipelago of economic studies.

So what is economic geography? In light of Barnes and Christophers's approach, the answer to this question cannot be a self-evident or indeed simple one, but they venture one nevertheless: Economic geography “can be productively defined as an analytical attentiveness to, and an explanatory emphasis on, the substantive implication of space, place, scale, landscape, and environment in (what are deemed to be) ‘economic’ processes” (p. 28). It is a different kind of textbook, indeed, that rises to this challenge, but scrupulously does so as a “critical introduction.” Introductions, of course, are about opening doors and making connections, so what Barnes and Christophers call their “recouped,” “open-ended,” and somewhat “muddied” (p. 309) understanding of economic geography stands in some degree of tension with the standard-issue version of Econ 101, with its austere and rationalist gaze. It is a reminder of one of the most basic premises of so many economic geography classes, that things can always be otherwise.

Here is a riddle: When is a textbook not a textbook? The answer might be when it is written by Trevor J. Barnes and Brett Christophers. Barnes and Christophers have produced a book that both is and isn't a textbook. Their Economic Geography: A Critical Introduction is a wonderfully original work. It aims to open readers' eyes to the power of a critical geographical approach to economic life. It does so through explorations of the development of the subdiscipline of economic geography and through substantive demonstrative analyses. The first part of the book, roughly, is devoted to the workings, theoretical, methodological, and sociological, of economic geography. Economic geography is then put to work in the second part of the book, where matters such as money and finance, and industrial change are examined. Both parts are true to the “critical” aspirations of the authors.

As Barnes and Christophers explain, by “critical” they mean two things: questioning the status quo or asking why things are the way they are, and evaluating different approaches. In both cases, the object of critique is economic geography.

They are correct when they state that “Textbooks generally do not focus on the internal workings of a discipline, or reflect systematically on its larger intellectual character” (p. 17), and the first half of this book shows how fresh and lively such tasks can become in talented hands. I appreciated especially the clear typologies that help organize the discipline's various approaches (p. 42), and the author's evaluations of each. The approaches are not described as if by a neutral referee. They are assessed. Again, this gives readers a refreshingly explicit point of view that they can themselves assess.

Chapter 7 is titled “Unboxing Economic Geography” and it is perhaps the most fascinating one in the book. It aims to reveal the inner workings of economic geography as a social formation. Critiquing assumptions of rationalism, Barnes and Christophers dissect the discipline using Latourian tools—showing how economic geography is constituted by particular persons, institutions, practices, and objects. I wonder, though, does my fascination with this chapter come from the fact that it is largely about my life? It describes a world I have been a part of and care about. I am not sure I would expect the majority of students to be interested in the inner sociological workings of our discipline. In fact, I suspect many might find the sheer volume of names and ideas in this chapter and in others in the first half of the book quite overwhelming.

Although this might not work as a traditional textbook, my guess is that Barnes and Christophers have done a huge service by prompting reflection and discussion about how and why we teach economic geography. Engaging with this book prompts questions such as these: What are our ambitions, for our students and for ourselves? Do we aim to be evangelists for economic geography? Does that mean we want students to become economic geographers? Or does it mean that we want students to be better equipped to critically analyze the world around them?

The authors reflect on Barnes's experience teaching his course in Fall 2016 when he took news items and helped students see how a critical geographic approach to matters such as Brexit, oil prices, a new iPhone, and the U.S. presidential election, can be powerful and compelling. They state:

The larger point is that, if you know what you are looking for and have the right kinds of critical conceptual tools at hand, it doesn't take much to tease out and analyze an economic geography story… . In our book, we wanted both to show you what to look for, and to provide you with the right conceptual tools. With that, economic geography and its importance will stare you in the face. (p. 306)

This, it seems to me, is what I am aiming for when I teach: to help students open their eyes to how a critical geographical approach to the world can help make some sense of it. Because “student” is not an abstract or monolithic category, how exactly one can most effectively perform this task will be highly variable and deeply contextually specific. The type of institution we teach in; the location of the institution and its priorities; the types of students in the course—their experiences, worldviews, preparation, aspirations; the place of the course in the curriculum and its broader purpose (does it serve a general education requirement, or is it a part of a major, or both?); current events; and the instructor's own strengths, interests, and goals, are all part of the equation. Teaching economic geography (or anything, for that matter) is not a one-size-fits-all kind of endeavor. For some courses, and some students, therefore, this book will work well. For most students, I suspect, parts of the book will be overwhelming and they will rely on their instructor for guidance.

For us instructors of economic geography, though, Barnes and Christophers have given us a most wonderful gift: a truly original guide to the discipline—at once a textbook and a more-than textbook. It is no mere addition to the field of economic geography textbooks—it is an intervention, and one that I am pretty sure will generate serious reflective discussion about the serious business of how and why we teach.

In my short time teaching economic geography, one of the biggest challenges has been finding the right balance between analyzing the world on one hand, and analyzing the way economic geographers explain the world on the other. Although a challenge, it is something I enjoy grappling with because it reflects the messiness of “real” economic geographies as well as the radically open nature of economic geography as an approach to that world. I suspect the authors of this book have similar feeling about teaching economic geography, even if they have significantly more experience than I. As part of its critical approach, this textbook foregrounds this balance. Unlike some introductory economic geography texts that do not take an explicitly critical approach, this one takes the discipline itself as an object of critical inquiry. As the authors say early on, they are “worrying away at the status quo of the discipline” (p. 16). This approach, to which the authors remain faithful throughout the text, translates into an interesting, insightful, and unique analysis, which means the book will be interesting to not only undergraduates and first-year graduate students, but also established economic geographers. This is no small achievement for a textbook, and it does mean that employing it in the classroom will require careful planning, but I suspect it can be a very useful text for advanced undergraduates, especially those preparing to conduct field research or write a capstone thesis. I want to make two brief observations about the book, both of which relate to its value as an aid for teaching.

The first is that this book takes a resolutely reflexive approach to economic geography. This is most evident in the first half of the book, which is explicitly positioned as an engagement with the discipline, rather than the world per se. Including chapters on the history of the discipline (chapter 3), its relationship with proximate disciplines (chapter 4), “theory and theories” (chapter 5), and methods and methodology (chapter 6), the first half of the book is a combined critical intellectual history and practical user guide. In other words, it provides applied knowledge, but following the pluralistic nature of economic geography, it offers that knowledge as situated and contingent. This reflexive approach culminates in the rather remarkable seventh chapter, “Unboxing Economic Geography.” This chapter is a science and technology studies (STS) inspired analysis of the “hidden life of a discipline” (p. 158). Drawing on thinkers like Latour and Kuhn, it seeks to break apart the “black box” that is economic geography through careful consideration of the competing paradigms of the discipline. As such, it explains the discipline not as a set of established rationalizations or truths about the world, but rather as a set of sociocultural practices and “worldly achievements” (p. 161). The chapter considers things like the kinds of tools and machines that help reproduce the discipline (e.g., cameras, Xerox machines, and, of course, computers). It considers researchers' bodies, how those bodies move through space, and even their even their garb. It describes the funding mechanisms the discipline relies on, the journals and conferences where economic geographers typically disseminate their work. It even considers the importance of various economic geography textbooks, how and where they were published and distributed, and how the physical act of reading one of them “acculturates” (p. 173) or “disciplines” new students into the field (p. 175).

Some readers might question the usefulness of a chapter like this to undergraduate students, but anyone who has attempted to teach undergraduates the importance of the cultural or hermeneutic turns in economic geography (Barnes 2001) will appreciate the challenge of simultaneously explaining to students the complexities of actually existing economic geographies and the complexities of the theoretical interpretation of those worlds. In its explicitly self-critical approach, this book will make this kind of teaching easier.

This is not to suggest that the book is somehow preoccupied with radical deconstructionism or philosophical navel gazing. Far from it. In fact the book, particularly in the second half, examines grounded economic geographic questions from historical and political economic perspectives. Take, for instance, the chapter on globalization (chapter 8), which explicitly analyzes both the material and discursive constitution of globalization, but then ends with an extended discussion of globalization as both a worldly instance of uneven development as well as an occasion to interrogate the various strands of this classical geographic theory. Chapter 9 on money and finance presents a clear introduction to the spatial constitution of banking and monetary systems, but at the same time explains the dangers, both analytically and politically, of a noncritical or insufficiently reflexive approach to these topics. Throughout the grounded and substantive chapters of the second half of the book the authors maintain their fidelity to a critical and situated theoretical approach.

Although it is by now hopefully clear, my second point is that this book is excellent for teaching students the meaning and usefulness of a critical approach to economic geography. It might sound trivial, but teaching young people how to be both critical of the world as well as critical of their own perspective, and to embed this in a systematic analysis of an academic discipline is no easy task. As such, I suspect this book will be particularly useful for preparing advanced undergraduates who are headed into the field to conduct their own research, as is the case with most third-year undergraduates in the United Kingdom. In my own advising in the United Kingdom, one of the more difficult things to explain is the necessity of the iterative process of looking at the world and looking at the literature and letting the two inform each other. This is seemingly even more difficult inside a discipline that is, as the authors of this book emphasize, fundamentally pluralistic, open, and always under construction.

Barnes and Christophers have done economic geography a service in writing this book. It synthesizes the discipline as a critical approach to the world without oversimplifying the pluralistic nature of the discipline or the messiness of actual economic geographies. Anyone who teaches economic geography will greatly benefit from reading this book.

The uniqueness of Economic Geography: A Critical Introduction is the remarkable mirror it holds to the discipline, conveying the great breadth of economic geographic scholarship, the conditions and cultures of knowledge production, and their positions in relation to the “archipelago of heterodox economics” and “mainland economics” (p. 87). Although Barnes and Christophers do not cloak their own opinions about the most productive theoretical lines of inquiry, neither do they conduct the backstage magic trick of so many economic geography volumes, in which lines of inquiry that do not accord with an author's or editor's own simply disappear. This systematic attention to situating the disciplines' principal contemporary narratives (geographies of capitalism, geographies of business, geographical economics, alternative economic geographies) in relation to one another will make the book extremely useful for graduate students making their way through the thicket of economic geographical theories, and seeking to understand the discipline's disparate theory cultures (chapter 5).

The liberty of a book review forum is that one can rely on the collective breadth of reviews rather than rehearsing detailed examination of contents. Thus, I take the opportunity to reflect on the text's engagement with methods. The book suggests that one of the unfortunate traits uniting economic geography's contemporary threads—outside of geographical economics—is their tacit embrace of a “don't ask, don't tell” policy regarding qualitative methods, conjoined with a general distrust of quantitative methods. The historical context for this tendency is the long shadow of the discipline's rupture with the naive models of spatial science, and resulting mistrust of positivist knowledge claims in both radical economic geography and the cultural turn. The outcome, Barnes and Christophers lament, has been methodological opacity and a tendency to bend the stick too far in the other direction: “qualitative methods have become a new orthodoxy. This is regrettable because in the process older quantitative methods have been eclipsed … while the economic geography of the real world now so often comes in the form of numbers” (p. 146). Meanwhile, interviews (usually with expert key informants) have become the “go-to method for the discipline” (p. 144), despite critiques that this method produces “pufferfish” answers from managers who offer ex-post facto rationales about decision making that disguise the actual practices and (il)logics at work (Dunn 2007).

This should provoke us to ask what imagination and insight into the operations of the economy we collectively miss when we endorse the interview as the discipline's “go-to method,” or when we are tacitly complicit with fuzzy or even nonexistent methodological explanation. In the spirit of chapter 6's plea for more diverse and transparent approaches—which the authors exemplify with reference to critical realist, feminist, and critical geographic information systems (GIS) methods—we should model epistemological good practice by circulating and celebrating methodologically explicit and novel work of all stripes. I am thinking, for instance, of Field's (2016) hybrid econometric/qualitative account of index funds' contribution to food price volatility from 2008 to 2011 (featured in chapter 9), and Schurr and Militz's (2018) haunting transnational ethnography of the affective economies of attachment and detachment between mothers and babies in Mexico's surrogacy market.

Beyond destabilizing the hegemony of the interview, one could push farther to a curious silence within the text. Despite the authors' call to engage with quantitative methods and practice strategic positivism, at no point does the book reckon with the 600-pound gorilla at the door: the big data and geospatial analytics that are breathing new life into spatial science. This is surprising given the book's actor-network attentiveness to machines within spatial science (chapters 3 and 7), its empirical attention to digital innovation and Silicon Valley (chapter 12), and its claim that “many problems are now, in part, mathematical problems, a result of our prevailing digital and audit cultures” (p. 146). If we wish new scholarship to remain intimately acquainted with the logics and operations of economic processes—and particularly if we want students to interrogate the ways in which (often private) geospatial data analytics shapes economic geographical outcomes and inequities—the discipline will have to become more ecumenical in the methods and training it embraces. Although students will need help navigating the cognitive dissonance that inevitably results, there is no reason that they can't or shouldn't learn Python, R, or ArcGIS while also reading The Limits to Capital.

Finally, what of the undergraduate uses of the book? In combination with the introduction, part II provides the empirical “stuff” of the discipline that is likely to resonate best in undergraduate classrooms. Although we don't often think of explicitly teaching economic geographic methods at the undergraduate level, there is an increasing onus—at least for those of us in U.S. institutions where many students graduate in heavy debt—to teach “transferable skills.” This is arguably where critical pedagogy in economic geography can shine. The text provokes students to become “aware of the constructed nature of economic geographic knowledge … by probing, picking at, and disputing it” (p. 309). To inhabit such awareness, though, students must become critical methodologists themselves. They might construct commodity chain profiles dissecting the value generated or captured at each link in the chain; critically evaluate entrepreneurial city development projects in their midst; assess barriers to relocalizing food or energy systems; estimate the unremunerated value of collegiate athletes' labor to their university; investigate their university endowment's fossil fuel or farmland investments; or trace the economic geographies of big university donors' fortunes. To riff on the theme of the book's conclusion, producing small armies of questioners and gadflies might not make us popular with our institutions, but that is likewise what it means to be critical.

Economic Geography: A Critical Introduction is an excellent book. Trevor J. Barnes and Brett Christophers have produced an engaging and incisive work that will be of great use to economic geographers, both as scholars and as teachers. The book tacks between economic geographic analyses of the world around us and analyses of the discipline of economic geography itself. Throughout, the authors give respectful recognition to multiple strands in economic geography, from a subset of geographically oriented mainstream economics to critical geographies of capitalism. I especially appreciated the attention to feminist and postcolonial approaches and to how usefully they can be brought into conversation with Marxian political economy.

The book's pedagogical value lies both in its concise and powerful explanations of economic processes of world importance and in its constant attention to difference, power, and the critical project of denaturalizing dominant economic discourses. Part I, “Thinking Critically about Economic Geography,” will be invaluable for graduate students (and professors), helping them situate economic geography in relation to both its own history and to other disciplines. Part II of the book, “Doing Critical Economic Geography,” will be especially useful for undergraduates, providing concise yet nuanced introductions to complicated topics like globalization, urbanization, and finance.

In full recognition of the fact that no text can do it all, there are two absences in the book that I believe are worth mentioning, relating to time and history on the one hand and to the rest of human geography on the other. History is central to the book in important ways: in the emphasis on the development of economic geography as a discipline; in the historicized presentation of the empirical topics addressed in part II; and perhaps most important, in the repeated assertions that the critical project always demands asking how things came to be the way they are, as well as denaturalization. Yet the presentation of economic geography could, in my opinion, have been strengthened by a more explicit incorporation of the historical in two ways. First, the authors list space, place, scale, landscape, and environment as the building blocks of human and economic geography (pp. 38–39). This left me wondering, however, what it would mean to add “time” to the “stuff” of economic geography, and to include “process” in the discussion of what makes economic geography so different from mainstream economics. Much of critical geography's power comes from its refusal to separate spatial and temporal analyses.

The lack of explicit attention to economic geography's historical dimension is also apparent in the discussion of the discipline's connections to other fields. Chapter 4 on economic geography's “border country” was among my favorites. It brilliantly analyzes economic geography's mutual “trading zones” with other fields, from economics to anthropology to environmental studies. Yet neither history nor international political economy are included in this list, and historical contributions from fields like sociology are not regarded as of primary importance. This, however, seems to overlook the fact that the “geographies of capitalism” strand of economic geography at least has been strongly influenced by the deeply historical work of Marxist scholars outside geography (e.g., Gowan 1999; Brenner 2006; Arrighi 2010). These scholars are all concerned with histories of capitalism and have all been influenced by and influenced economic geographers.

My second comment involves the place of the broader field of human geography in this book. Although the authors might simply not have included history or international political economy due to space constraints, their decision not to discuss the relationship between economic geography and the rest of human geography was surely deliberate and raises some interesting questions. Many of the important discussions the authors provide about critical economic geography, for instance, apply to critical human geography in general. Indeed, I suspect that several of the geographers cited in the book might well identify just as much with political geography or development geography or urban geography as they do with economic geography. The authors explain that economic geography, although intellectually thriving, is currently in some danger, especially in the United Kingdom, whereas cultural geography is on the rise. They make a compelling case, in this light, for the need to strengthen economic geography's appeal to students. Nevertheless, I do wonder what pitfalls focusing on economic geography to the exclusion of the rest of human geography in a book like this might hold, first for teaching economic geography, and second for how richly we are able to conceptualize a subfield that in practice overlaps with and is enriched by many other areas of geography.

My comments about the role of history and human geography in this book are less grounds for criticism and more points for further conversation about what does and should constitute economic geography. Of course, in a discipline that is so theoretically, methodologically, and substantively pluralist, traits I celebrate alongside Barnes and Christophers, these conversations are sure to continue. Economic Geography: A Critical Introduction offers a lasting contribution not just to describing economic geography's past and present, but to shaping its future.

We are at once delighted, honored, and humbled by these very generous commentaries on our book, by four scholars whose work we greatly admire—whose work is, in fact, exemplary of precisely the kind of economic geography our book aims to celebrate and popularize, namely critical economic geography. Indeed, for us these reviews already represent a measure of success for our book. In writing it, we were determined to produce something that would appeal to and animate colleagues as well as students—something different from a “normal” textbook, a “more-than textbook,” to use Susan M. Roberts's felicitous expression, which we shall henceforth shamelessly appropriate. These lively, engaged, and provocative commentaries suggest we at least partly succeeded.

As several of the commentators observe, however, writing a more-than textbook, or as Roberts also puts it, a textbook that is not a textbook, raises thorny issues of relevance, interest, and comprehension when the book is used as an “ordinary” textbook, which is to say, as a classroom text for undergraduates and lower level graduate students. More than one of the reviewers ask whether our discussions of the histories, sociologies, and methodologies of the discipline of economic geography, which preoccupy the first half the book, will engage students. As Roberts pointedly said in the Authors Meet Critics session at the 2018 New Orleans AAG meeting where this book forum originated, “I liked the book because it was about me. But will any student care? Will they see it as about them?” She feared that students would view that part of the book as a set of boring, old-fart insider stories, just like those their parents and friends of their parents ritualistically tell at family dinners on special occasions. Yawn. Can I leave the table?

We, too, have wondered and worried about this issue, but in thinking about and then writing the book, we increasingly came to the view that the worry was based on a series of false dichotomies. Those dichotomies surface in various ways in several of the commentaries assembled here, and we begin our response by reflecting briefly on them.

The first and most important such dichotomy is between the discipline of economic geography and what tends to be referred to as the “real world.” Chris Muellerleile says that part I of our book, “Thinking Critically about Economic Geography,” is “an engagement with the discipline, rather than the world per se,” the latter being the subject of part II (“Doing Critical Economic Geography”). Yet one of the points we emphasize is that the discipline of economic geography—like all academic disciplines—is itself worlded. It is shaped by, as well as shapes, real-world entities and processes such as imperialism, militarism, statism, and corporatism. In this sense, the discipline is as real as the economic geographical worlds that it studies and represents. Students need to know this. They need to be taught that all of us, professors and students alike, are disciplined by our discipline; that we only come to know the world outside our scholarly discipline by staying inside it. There is no getting outside our disciplinary bubble, no external Archimedean point from which to survey the world. One of us, Christophers, recalls with dismay a conversation with a famous current Harvard economics professor. He asked the professor, “Don't you think it is important for your econ students to know the history of the discipline, about how today's orthodoxies became such, about the intellectual and political battles that were won and lost, and on what grounds, to arrive at today's mainstream?” To this admittedly convoluted question, the professor replied simply and bluntly, “No.” It was the same for Barnes. As a graduate student at the University of Minnesota he went to speak to the economist Anne Krueger to ask her to be on his supervisory committee. When he told her that his first thesis chapter would be on the history of economics, she immediately stopped him. “There is no history of economics, it has been the same since the beginning,” she said. End of conversation.

By emphasizing the historically, socially, and geographically constructed nature of the discipline, our end is to ignite conversation. Further, it is a conversation that shouldn't end once the course finishes but should be taken by students into their other academic classes, indeed, into life itself. The lesson is general. It is the skill to reflect critically on any imparted knowledge; to be, as Muellerleile says, “reflexive.” Reflexive means turning something back on itself. In this case, it is turning thinking back on itself, to think about thinking. We believe it is an end that is essential for the edification of our students, to allow them to become informed critical citizens. If there is any place where thinking about thinking should occur, it is at the university. Not that it is a skill easy to teach, as Muellerleile also recognizes. In the case of economic geography, we have found it cannot be learned by rote, as if students were studying the agricultural products of the Upper Midwest of the United States. Rather, it is best done subtly, by stealth almost, coming by the back way, rather than by a full-frontal assault, done bit by bit rather than all at once. Hence, the need, as we hope we illustrated in our book, for engaging stories, personal anecdotes, jokes, ironies, and funny diagrams. In this way students learn the lesson despite themselves. They do need to learn it, though. For too long, there has been the patronizing notion that undergraduate students can't learn to be reflexive, and they wouldn't be interested anyway; and it doesn't matter because what happens in the university doesn't bear on their lives when they graduate and enter the “real world.” The university is not a cloister, however. It, too, is just as much a part of the real world as a bank, a hospital, or a factory. It's just different, and the things that happen in it, including learning to be reflexive, are as important for acting in the real world as what happens in those other places.

This brings us to the second, related dichotomy. Roberts believes our book will prompt reflection and discussion about “how and why we teach economic geography” (and of course we hope she is right), prompting questions such as these: “What are our ambitions, for our students and for ourselves? Do we aim to be evangelists for economic geography? Does that mean we want students to become economic geographers? Or does it mean that we want students to be better equipped to critically analyze the world around them?” Again, we think this latter distinction—between students becoming economic geographers and students becoming better equipped citizens with the ability to analyze critically the world around them—is misleading. Being evangelists for economic geography means, in our view, wanting students to become economic geographers wherever they end up working, inside the academy or outside it: There is, or should be, no “or.” We think that a critical economic geographical sensibility is useful for everyone, whatever they do; in fact, there is even a hunger for it, although likely it is not always recognized in those terms. That was one of the reasons we began our introductory chapter with the This American Life story about “Mr. Daisey and the Apple factory.” Mr. Daisey was no academic economic geographer. Likely he had never heard of economic geography. He had an instinctual interest in economic geographical questions, though, recognizing their fundamental relevance, as well as an intuition about how they should be critically answered. Hence his radio story. His economic geographical critical “a-ha” moment occurred in his New York City home while cleaning his MacBook Pro and reading about a recent purchaser of an iPhone who found four “test photos” still left on his machine taken at the “Apple factory” where it was made. It didn't take Mr. Daisey much sleuthing to locate that factory, the Foxconn plant in Shenzhen, China. In no time at all, he was standing outside the factory gates, carrying out critical field research, figuring out where Apple products come from, its makers, and the conditions under which they labor. The point here is that there is no sharp divide between doing formal economic geography, such as the kind we do within the halls of the academy, or doing it, to use Callon's (2007, 336) term, “in the wild,” which is what Mr. Daisey did. The provocation of our book is for everyone just to do it, to do economic geography.

This is where we think Leigh Johnson's commentary is so helpful. Her advice to produce “small armies of questioners and gadflies,” as she so wonderfully puts it, is exactly what we think teachers of critical economic geography should aspire toward. That should have been our last-line, final methodological rallying cry and injunction: “Go into the world and be critical.” Johnson makes the excellent point that although we clear the methodological space for undertaking critical work by emphasizing the open-endedness of the field—nothing is prohibited, anything is possible—we don't get down and dirty and provide specific illustrations of how that is done. Johnson wants us to point toward potential practical exercises, or drills, or how-to guides that assist students not just in acquiring an economic geographical sensibility, but more important, as she puts it, in “inhabiting” it, by becoming “critical methodologists.” That help is of the kind found, for example, in the work by Gibson-Graham, Cameron, and Healy (2013), who offered a set of methodological instructions to “take back the economy.” We recognize that this is a weakness, or at least absence, in our book. It is long on helping students understand economic geography and its modes of apprehension of the world, but it is demonstrably short on helping them to do it—getting their hands dirty, so to speak, economic-geographically—for all the “doing” in the title of part II. Johnson gives tangible examples of what students can do to live economic geography, whereas our book, for the most part did not. We were especially taken by her recommendation that students “learn Python, R, or ArcGIS while also reading The Limits to Capital.” If we were to do a second edition of the book, a proper discussion of inhabiting an economic-geographical sensibility would be a prime candidate for inclusion.

Also beneficial, for such a second edition, would be to follow up Shania Potts's excellent suggestion about being more explicit about the need to recognize history. She is utterly right that the entire book is infused with a historical inclination. History is always our go-to starting point. Potts is also correct to think we do that because our critical project “demands asking how things came to be the way they are,” going to our broader end of “denaturalization”; that is, showing that the form of the economic geographical world is not inevitable, the result of a natural law-like principle at work about which we can't do anything, but overdetermined by power-laden contingent processes that as long as we recognize them we can at least criticize and contest, if not change. One of the virtues of geography as a discipline, and one that it shares with much of history, is the recognition of contingency and variation. Both disciplines are black spots for the assertion of universals, inevitabilities, and cast-in-stone principles. There is theory, but it is (usually) attuned to diversity, discrepancy, unintended consequences, and accident. Things come together not mechanically like the inner workings of a Swiss watch, but messily like a Heath-Robinson contraption; like Jackson Pollock splatter rather than Piet Mondrian colored squares.

For the same reason we agree also with Potts's other main comment that we needed to recognize the role of the larger surround of a robust and variegated human geography. Human geography, as we should have said, has been a crucial source of intellectual nourishment and institutional support for economic geography especially in North America. Peck uses the metaphor of the “doughnut” to describe economic geography (Peck and Olds 2007). It is a subdiscipline now without a center, with no core or essence. Any previous definitions of economic geography have been long abandoned. Consequently, the substance of the contemporary subdiscipline is found in the peripheral ring that once surrounded the (now absent) center. It is along this outer ring, and the various interactions with bordering subdisciplines of human geography like feminism, cultural geography, environmentalism, GIScience, and regionalism, that economic geography lives, at least in North America. Moreover, it appears to be a model that works in the sense that economic geography remains healthy and vital. The interesting comparison is with economic geography in the United Kingdom, which seems in contrast to have increasingly decoupled from British human geography, and has become weak and sick. It is not clear if British human geography has abandoned economic geography, or British economic geography has abandoned human geography. It is a murky relationship. One clear consequence, though, is that UK economic geography is currently experiencing an existential crisis, in danger of even becoming extinct (pp. 179–80). Taking the place of British human geography are UK schools of business and management. They are scooping up large numbers of apparently disaffected economic geographers in a process that James, Bradshaw, and Coe (2018) labeled the “great diaspora.” Whether pushed or pulled they are not only leaving economic geography but human geography.

From the beginning we conceived our volume as an alternative type of textbook, with us keen to practice a different kind of economic geographical pedagogy. Although we thought we knew what that pedagogy was, it sometimes (often?) felt as if we were making it up as we went along. In our bleaker moments we would ask, “Is anyone really going to read this?” After all, it wasn't as if we hated existing textbooks in the field. We had used them for our classes and admired them. In fact, we admired them even more after we wrote our own, appreciating just how much time and effort they took to produce. We didn't believe that all textbooks needed to be the same, however. Furthermore, we thought traditional textbooks in the field tended to make the discipline too tidy, too definite, too consensual, and too good to be true. Instead, we wanted our textbook, or maybe it is an antitextbook, to portray the economic geography that we knew and cared about, which was messy, inconclusive, fractious, and too true to be good. Despite those characteristics, or maybe because of them, we also wanted to say that economic geography was important for understanding both the world and everyday lives, that it was a vehicle for practicing a critical sensibility, and that it offered opportunities for anyone with diverse interests and politics. That's why we were such “aficionados,” “partisans” and “fanboys” (p. 2).

Necessarily the book was an experiment, and we are only too aware that most experiments fail. Consequently, we have been tremendously heartened by and grateful for the comments of our reviewers made at the showroom of the annual meeting of the AAG, and now here in its flagship publication of review. We know, though, that the real test drive of the book under road conditions is yet to come.

ORCiD

Jamie Peck https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1425-9705

Leigh Johnson https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7296-4296

Shaina Potts https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2414-4506