Regional Geography (RLE Social & Cultural Geography)

Current Developments and Future Prospects

Ron Johnston, Joost Hauer, G. Hoekveld, Ron Johnston, Joost Hauer, G. Hoekveld

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317820604
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

This book urges the case for reinstating regional geography as a contemporary and relevant methodology. Much interest was shown in the 1980s in reviving, yet restructuring, the field of regional geography. The essays in this book both review that work and propose a way forward. The essays divide into three sections. The first assesses traditional regional geography and its relevance to the study of contemporary situations; the second, the alternative approaches of world-systems analysis, diffusion and structuration theory. The book concludes by considering the potential of regional geography to interpret the structures within which society operates and its claim to remain at the core of the discipline.

1 Region, place and locale: an introduction to different conceptions of regional geography

R.J. Johnston, Joost Hauer, and Gerard A. Hoekveld

In his influential book, Ideology, Science and Human Geography (1978), Derek Gregory concluded by arguing that

Ever since regional geography was declared to be dead – most fervently by those who had never been much good at it anyway – geographers, to their credit, have kept trying to revivify it in one form or another.… This is a vital task.… We need to know about the constitution of regional social formations, of regional articulations and regional transformations.

(Gregory 1978:171)

His advocacy had little immediate impact, and the critique of positivism that was presented in the book made a much greater impression than the call for a revised regional geography. In the ensuing decade, however, Gregory’s case has been taken up by a number of other authors who have argued for the need not to revive regional geography as it was traditionally conceived but rather to develop a new regional geography that is sensitive to the nuances of areal differentiation and can show how they were central to the operations of most aspects of past and contemporary societies.

The relative decline of regional geography began in the English-speaking world in the 1950s, with the expansion of interest first in topical specialisms and then in the methodological developments that were widely represented as the ‘quantitative and theoretical revolution’. Although some adherents of the latter trend argued that they were merely improving the practice of regional geography and its emphasis on synthesis (Berry 1964), in effect regional geography was substantially downplayed (Johnston 1983) and replaced by a focus on regularities in spatial organization and behaviour. That trend was slowly accepted in other countries, where the discipline similarly changed and, among other things, saw the links between physical and human geography become weaker.

Why, then, did Gregory call for a revival of regional geography, little more than two decades after others were seeking to promote its demise? Was it because he wished to bring back the concepts of synthesis and areal differentiation to the top of the geographer’s agenda – to be the ‘highest form of the geographer’s art’ (Hart 1982) – because synthesis is the discipline’s raison d’être in an increasingly fragmented academia? Or was it because the search for universal tendencies by spatial analysts was proving unfruitful, and hence leading geographers into a ‘spacious cul-de-sac’ (Blaikie 1978)? There can be little doubt that it was the latter much more than the former. Gregory’s terminology – with references to ‘social formations’ and ‘transformations’, for example – is very different from that of traditional regional geography. Although his Ph.D. thesis (Gregory 1982) has been interpreted by some as little more than a conventional regional historical geography, set within a brief introductory and concluding framework that is somewhat divorced from the empirical material, his goal was certainly innovative. As he expressed it:

This book is intended as a break with … traditions. In it, I draw upon social theory to explicate the transformation of the woollen industry of the West Riding of Yorkshire between c. 1780 and c. 1840, and in particular to show how the change from a domestic to a factory system of production … involved a local transition in human experience and social structure which was tied into much wider congeries of changes in economy, politics and ideology.

(Gregory 1982:2)

Similarly, there can be no doubt that his earlier book was intended and accepted as such by most readers, to be a devastating critique of the practice of geography as it had developed through the ‘quantitative and theoretical revolution’. Indeed, he opens it with the statement that:

In this book I have tried to develop an alternative conception of science on which our inquiries might be based.

(Gregory 1978:11)

What, then, are the criticisms of the type of geography (specifically, human geography) now widely and often derogatively referred to as ‘positivist’ which lead to the call for a revived, yet new regional geography? And what form should that new regional geography take? These are the central questions addressed by the contributors to this book; the present introduction highlights the issues that are to receive attention.

The need for regional study

Gregory’s general argument has been taken up by a number of authors, who have developed the thesis – in a variety of ways – and have provided empirical backing for the argument. Notable among these has been Doreen Massey, whose empirical research for more than a decade focused on understanding the changing industrial geography of the United Kingdom. She argued that ‘geography matters’ (Massey 1984a:53), but that neither space nor distance is a crucial independent variable affecting human behaviour. Rather, her case was that the social relations on which the geography of production is based vary spatially; the labour process under capitalism is not the same everywhere, but differs between ‘regimes’ in ways that reflect their particular histories and influence their futures. As she and others have clearly demonstrated (e.g. Harvey 1982; Smith 1984), uneven development is a necessary characteristic of the capitalist mode of production, but the pattern of uneven development is not fixed. It is rewritten as part of the restructuring that is also a necessary element of capitalism, and each new chapter in the rewriting (what she terms ‘layers of development’) reflects the interaction of general processes with specific regional contingencies (Massey 1984b).

How do we approach the study of those regional contingencies? And why are they there in the first place? With regard to the latter, it is argued that the capitalist mode of production has been superimposed upon, and has thus incorporated, a great variety of pre-capitalist modes, where the local modus vivendi was a function of the local physical environment, as the residents had come to appreciate it. It was modified through centuries of accommodating to environmental change and contacts with other regional groups (forced or otherwise) who had developed slightly different ways of organizing for survival. Thus the pre-capitalist map of the world was a very rich mosaic of regional cultures, of local organizations created to promote collective survival, passed on between generations, and slowly modified in response to contemporary events.

As the capitalist mode of production spread out from its origins in north-western Europe, so it incorporated an increasing variety of such local cultures. In part they were subjugated, because their structures were counter-productive to the capitalist goal, but many elements were retained, since capitalism is a very robust mode of production that can accept a wide variety of practices as long as they do not prevent (nor substantially retard) the goal of wealth accumulation. Thus we find the great range of local cultures today, all embracing capitalism and advancing its general goals.

The need for regional geography, then, is a need to understand the contexts within which the capitalist mode of production has expanded and is practised today. (The same case can be made for socialism, too, as Kuklinski’s [1987] work on Poland shows.) To appreciate how capitalism operates today, we need to understand the milieux within which it was nurtured, and the milieux that it has created. To understand our present and our future, we must understand their origins in a spatially differentiated past. And, most importantly of all, since uneven development (= areal differentiation = geography) is apparently a necessary component of the capitalist mode of production, we must appreciate how that is created.

What method to use?

How are we to do that? Is it through a series of case studies, out of which general understanding emerges in an inductivist way? Is it by the development of some grand theory that can tell us how geography is created and recreated?

The last two decades have seen geographers actively searching for a theoretical framework that will allow them to develop a general understanding of the processes of uneven development, with which they can situate their empirical materials. Within their discipline, the most attractive such framework has been that developed by Hägerstrand (1968) under the rubric of time-geography. Initially, this was interpreted as a ‘physicalist’ model for the study of behaviour constrained by space and time (Thrift 1977); the emphasis was on tracing people’s paths through time and space and appreciating their personal development by understanding the contexts in which they resided (as shown in Pred’s [1979; 1984] autobiographical writings). But Hägerstrand and his sympathizers showed that the project was much more subtle and wide-ranging, concerned with understanding situations (that could be interpreted as local cultures) and their meanings to those present.

Outside geography, a theoretical framework that has attracted considerable attention is that of structuration, developed single-handedly by the Cambridge sociologist Anthony Giddens (see especially Giddens 1984). Giddens’s goal is to break down the dichotomy, which is typical of much social theory, between the structure of society and the behaviour of individual agents. Neither is independent of the other: the structures of society are created by human actions; humans are then socialized in the context of those structures; their actions reflect the structures; in acting, they recreate the structures. Thus there is a continuous reflexive interrelationship between structure and agent: the structure both constrains and enables action (it provides the resources with which agents act, and without which they could not respond knowingly to situations, but the range of resources that is provided constrains them to certain actions and precludes others); the actions recreate the structure, perhaps not in exactly the same form.

The structures to which Giddens refers are social systems that bind people together in order to enable them to live routine, everyday lives. Those systems are sets of rules that are evolved so that everyday conduct is routinized, and people are integrated into the local system of rules. Such routinized integration requires people to be co-present in time and space, hence the organizing units of societies are what Giddens terms locales, or regionalized social systems. Thus the processes of structuration, the recursive interrelationships between structures and agents, take place in particular spatial contexts (which we might term regions). Rules apply in places.

In complex societies, the rules are many and varied, and major elements of the social system comprise institutions that are created to make and enforce rules: these institutions form the state apparatus (Clark and Dear 1984). To some theorists of the state, the imposition of those rules requires a particular type of locale – a bounded territory within which the state apparatus is sovereign (Mann 1984). According to their arguments, territoriality as a strategy for imposing rules is not only efficient, as Sack (1986) would argue, but also necessary. Hence, if states are necessary to capitalism, then so are particular forms of locale.

Giddens’s theory has much in common with Hägerstrand’s, as he realizes (Giddens 1985). Others have enthusiastically built upon this commonality (Pred 1985; 1986). This approach is not without its critics (e.g. Gregory 1985; Gregson 1986; 1987a), yet they all accept the general arguments regarding the spatial specificity of social systems and the spatio-temporal constraints to human agency that both Giddens and Hägerstrand identify.

One issue that several commentators have raised concerns the conduct of research within a structuration context; where does one break into a continually reflexive process (Gregson 1986)? Gregory (1980) has argued that agency must come first, that all structures are social creations. Hence, full understanding requires historical depth, (as argued in Johnston 1989). Where do we get that depth?

To Harvey (1987), that depth comes from what he identifies as the only valid theoretical framework, Marx’s historical materialism. This provides the means for understanding the origins of the capitalist mode of production, the crises inherent to that mode, and the necessity of both uneven development and the spatial restructuring of that pattern of uneven development (Harvey 1982). But his approach, despite the claims of some critics of structural Marxism (Duncan and Ley 1982), is far from deterministic. He accepts that the details of locales will influence the processes of restructuring that produce and reproduce uneven development and he shows, through his studies of Baltimore and Paris (Harvey 1985), how detailed appreciation of local conditions influences the realization of general trends.

Harvey’s work connects to, but is also clearly distanced from, two other theoretical strands. The first is realism, a philosophy for social science that identifies three separate domains of study (Sayer 1984): the real, which are the structures containing the causal mechanisms (such as the need to accumulate under capitalism); the empirical, which are the outcomes of the operation of those mechanisms; and the actual, which are the events that result from interpretations of the real and that produce the outcomes, such as patterns of industrial investment. (For an expansion, see Johnston 1986). Thus one has general causal processes, but these are operated in contingent situations, the local social systems which comprise local cultural interpretations of how those processes should be enacted. Finally, there is Wallerstein’s world-systems project (Taylor 1985a; 1985b), which seeks to understand global capitalism within a Marxist framework, and into which Taylor (1982) has incorporated an explicit spatial referencing.

In both realism and world-systems analysis there is clear recognition that the causal mechanisms that are at the heart of the structures being considered are: (a) human creations; (b) operated through individual decision-making; and therefore (c) influenced in their outcomes by local contingent circumstances. People interpret the mechanisms according to their views of how the structure should be worked and these views are created by their socialization. This does not mean that their views, once developed, are fixed. It does mean three things. First they learn about the structures – often implicitly rather than explicitly – as part of their education, broadly defined. Second, in their activities, both routine and non-routine, they put the results of their learning into action, in some cases after considering what should be done in a particular context, and therefore they extend their interpretation of the structures. Such consideration may involve their taking the advice of others, either directly or indirectly (i.e. through books). Third, the consequences of their activities become part of the context within which others are socialized ...