Politics and Practice in Economic Geography

Adam Tickell, Eric Sheppard, Jamie Peck, Trevor J Barnes, Adam Tickell, Eric Sheppard, Jamie Peck, Trevor J Barnes

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781412907866, 9781412907859
• eBook ISBN: 9781446234341
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

"The biggest strength of the book is its pedagogic design, which will appeal to new entrants in the field but also leaves space for methodological debates... It is well suited for use on general courses but it also involves far more than an introduction and is full of theoretical insights for a more theoretically advanced audience."
- Economic Geography Research Group

In the last fifteen years economic geography has experienced a number of fundamental theoretical and methodological shifts. Politics and Practice in Economic Geography explains and interrogates these fundamental issues of research practice in the discipline.

Concerned with examining the methodological challenges associated with that ?cultural turn?, the text explains and discusses:

• qualitative and ethnographic methodologies
• the role and significance of quantitative and numerical methods
• the methodological implications of both post-structural and feminist theories
• the use of case-study approaches
• the methodological relation between the economic geography and neoclassical economics, economic sociology, and economic anthropology.

Leading contributors examine substantive methodological issues in economic geography and make a distinctive contribution to economic-geographical debate and practice.

Section 1

Position and Method:
Producing Economic
Geographies

1	POLITICS AND PRACTICE: BECOMING A GEOGRAPHER
	Erica Schoenberger

As one moves deeper into a subject, one sees how much the power of the subjective operates, even in the sciences; and one does not advance until one begins to know one’s own self and character. (Goethe)

In this chapter, I try to work through aspects of my self and character in order to better understand the connections among theory-building, research questions, method and politics – at least in my own work. (Better late than never, you might think.) My approach will be to apply to myself the method I have used in analyzing corporate executives. This means trying to work out questions of identity, history, and social position and how these are involved in producing both ontological and epistemological commitments and a sense of the rightness and wrongness of things.

The difference between corporate executives and me, of course, is that their actions in the world are consequential and mine aren’t particularly. So one might wonder what the value of this exercise is. I offer it here as a kind of heuristic. I think we should follow Goethe’s advice, and am just barely willing to try to do it in public, if only to illustrate the astonishing misperceptions and horrible delusions that may complicate the task.

This kind of analysis, being retrospective, is unavoidably neater and more logical than the lived experience, which felt more like a long series of bizarre accidents. It had never, for example, even entered my head to become an academic until years after I was one. So much for clarity.

Identity, commitments and research project

I want to propose here that our specific historical and geographical origins critically shape our identities and worldviews and these, in turn, underlie the shape and orientation of our research. For me, the identity at issue is political identity – not merely being a leftist but being a leftist – this is who I am. But I am a leftist who came of age in the American anti-war movement of the 1970s.

This means, first of all, that I grew up in a place with no tradition of viable labour party or socialist party politics. For people who come out of the labour movement or socialist politics, I imagine that labour, work and class appear to be more or less ‘natural’ objects of research. For people coming directly out of the civil rights and/or feminist movements, race, gender, community and place may be more immediately salient. The politics that I grew up in was involved in the first instance with political and military power and oppression and connected this up with economic injustice and social class rather than the other way round. For someone like me, the neo-imperialist state, the defence industry and multinational corporations are what appeared most urgently to require attention.

A little bit more in the background, this historical context also produced persistent questions about the misuse of power linked with the misuse of knowledge. That is to say, knowledge about what ought to be done or what is feasible and effective is available and accessible, yet is contravened because those in power are pursuing contradictory goals. So a large and powerful entity (in this case the USA) ends up acting against its own best interests while causing a tremendous amount of damage to others. With the publication of the Pentagon Papers, it became abundantly clear that the government had consistently lied to its citizens about nearly everything connected with the origins and prosecution of the war in Vietnam. We also know that the government pursued strategies in that war that it knew in advance would be ineffective because it had to do something and couldn’t think of anything else to do that would be compatible with its own idea of itself (McNamara and VanDeMark 1995; Sheehan 1988). The costs hardly need enumerating. Vietnam would stand as a monument to a certain kind of human and social folly, were we not actually engaged in repeating the entire process – complete with lies and the misuse of knowledge – in Iraq. Apparently, we cannot yet erect the memorials to this particular pathology.

I want to make two observations about this problem of power and knowledge. The first is that it took a while for it to enter explicitly into my research. For a good ten years I was wholly absorbed in the problem of how and why firms sought to be competitive and to maximize profits through locating in high-cost, highly unionized, and highly regulated places. I wasn’t really attuned to the question of how and why they could also make staggering errors of judgement with hideous consequences for many people and places. This lack of attention was perhaps conditioned by my training in both conventional economics and political economy. In the former, individual capitalist rationality leads to rational and good social outcomes. In the latter, individual capitalist rationality leads to irrational and negative social outcomes. Neither theory is looking for irrationality at the firm level. And indeed, the problem is not exactly that the firm per se is irrational, but that the people running the firm have conflicting rationalities on behalf of themselves as social agents and on behalf of the firm as a social agent. I can see this now as analogous to the politically self-serving, identity-preserving yet nationally harmful behaviour of the Vietnam (and Iraq) war strategists. And perhaps this political conditioning allowed me to finally recognize it when I saw it repeatedly in corporations. But it took a while.

The second observation is that use of the phrase ‘power and knowledge’ seems to cry out for a Foucauldian analysis which I have never engaged in. This is for several reasons, based on a possibly defective reading of Foucault. One is that, for my money, power and society are rather reified concepts in Foucault. They have their own interests and objectives. These aren’t, for me, clearly connected to particular group or class interests. In my ontological universe, it is necessary to understand whose power is at issue and why – given whose it is – it wants what it wants. I want the mediation of class and social position, which I find much more clearly and productively articulated in Bourdieu. Further, the reified power of Foucault seeks knowledge in order to discipline people ‘in general’ and in so doing stabilize the social order. I want also to understand something about how social position and power relate to knowledge of self and the ability to productively use knowledge in general. Or, put another way, I want to understand how social position and power inflect the transformation of information into particular knowledge and how exactly this knowledge will be used.

Back to me. For various reasons connected with my personal and family history, it was both easy and comfortable to choose a corporate and defence focus rather than, say, researching the state directly. My father achieved middle-class status via the military and worked in the defence industry all his life, specializing in international marketing for a number of large, lethal firms. So I am a child of the military–industrial complex and the utterly white-bread suburbs. I suffer a lot from red diaper envy. I also apparently organized my research in part as a way of explaining my father to myself. This I realized so recently it would make a cat laugh.

Beyond that, I worked my way through college and while doing political work for some years afterwards as a secretary, bookkeeper and production analyst, which is how I learned to talk to businessmen (and – key to securing interviews – their secretaries). I also learned something of how they think and what they really spend time thinking about. It turns out if you’re a really good secretary (and I was), they don’t treat you like a servant. They treat you as an extremely ill-paid junior partner. And along the way I learned how to construct and read financial statements.

I’m not arguing for a perfect isomorphism between historical–geographical moment and research trajectory. But I think it may help explain why particular issues emerge as the big problems for each of us. We are thinking about them, confronted by them, stumped by them (how do they get away with it?!), angered or otherwise impassioned about them all the time. It is what we need to do.

Project and practice: the question and how to research it

When I was a graduate student, discussions about deindustrialization and the New International Division of Labour were very much in the air (Bluestone and Harrison 1982; Froebel et al. 1980; Harvey 1982; Massey 1984). It seemed evident that manufacturing investment was destined to desert the USA and other advanced industrial economies. Indeed, on this subject, there was a curious and troubling convergence between the leftists and mainstream economists.

As I was reading this literature, though, I was also obsessively reading the business press, a habit I acquired working for different left-wing research groups. And in the business press, what I was seeing was a positive flood of announcements of foreign manufacturing investments in the USA. My first reaction was a kind of indignant exasperation: ‘What idiots! Don’t they know any better?’ Then I thought it was probably better not to assume that they didn’t know what they were doing. So the question to research seemed plain: what on earth are they up to?

It is childishly easy to show statistically that international manufacturing investment is highly correlated with high wages, unionization and regulation. But the statistical evidence could not produce explanations of what I was seeing. The only alternative seemed to be to go talk with the people who were making these decisions. With my background, this seemed both obvious and relatively easy.

We can’t, of course, just ask them why and write down their answers. We’re not reporters. Neither are we ethnographers, but that model is closer to the point. We don’t want to list the practices the natives engage in. We want to understand them in the context of an entire way of life. So you talk with them about the whole way of life, and it is in that story that you find the explanation of the practice. You talk about the history of the firm, the history of the person, etc., and when you’ve got that in hand, then you ask for their explanations of the specific practices. These explanations are not the answers to your research questions – they are data that need to be analyzed and interrogated.

For a long while, I resisted any impulse to analyze the people who were providing this information. I’m very comfortable with large-scale political economy and the ‘logic of capital’; the structure is my natural home. I knew I needed to talk with these guys, and to know enough about them personally to interpret the information they provided, but I didn’t feel that I needed to think about them particularly. But what I had learned in investigating the structure (e.g., how competition works to produce particular social and geographical outcomes) is that firms often make hideous mistakes even though they apparently inhabit the high ground of capitalist rationality. So it wasn’t quite enough to get at what the strategy was and the plausible structural explanation behind it. In effect, the failure of strategy forced me to look more closely at the strategists and how they and their strategies are produced.

This meant taking on the capitalists as individuals and as a class simultaneously, which was confusing and hard to work out. I turned to culture and identity as a way of managing this inquiry – as a way of thinking through it without going insane. They functioned for me as meso-level categories and conceptual anchors that connected the big structural dynamics (competition, production, investment, accumulation) with how a particular class of agents operated within those dynamics in a particular conjuncture.

So the first version of the work centred on the question ‘why do firms work this way?’ and answered it by saying ‘their behaviour is driven by how competition works in these industries; the competitive strategy forces them to behave in ways that seem to be at odds with purely production-related considerations such as labour costs’. The second version of the work is about the same thing – what firms do and why – but in a different register. It tries to explain where competitive strategy comes from and acknowledges that it does not derive solely from analyzing how markets work in particular industries. What I gained through this shift, I think, is a richer notion of competition among firms, of intra-class competition and the problems and opportunities this creates for firms and workers alike.

But being fixated on the firm as the unit of analysis, competition as the central problem and strategy and culture as the source of movement in the system, also removes many important dynamics from my field of vision. I don’t, for example, ‘see’ gender, labour strategies, or places. These are no small lacunae, and I would feel worse about them were it not for the fact that other people see them extremely well. The question, I suppose, is whether my way of seeing can be brought sufficiently into alignment with theirs that we can achieve real depth of field.

Politics and objectivity

Can a confessed leftist be rigorous, honest and fair as a researcher? I believe so. The politics help you identify the important questions, but they can’t tell you what the answers are. In my experience, leftist academics are, in general, much more attuned to how their politics shape the questions they are interested in than their mainstream colleagues who cling to the notion that their research is ‘value neutral’. So on the whole, I think we’re ahead of the game.

Here one might ask: can I seriously believe that politics, questions, theory and methods – hence answers – are not deeply connected? I have to acknowledge that the answers I’m likely to arrive at in my research are not somehow quarantined from the rest of me. My politics inform my theoretical approach, out of which the method really grows. So the kind of results I am able to get are unavoidably shaped by this research gestalt. Simple honesty can keep me from fixing the results to accord with my preferences or political commitments. But with the best will in the world, I cannot erase myself from the process. Nor would I want to. However, what I do want is to make sense out of the world and in order to do that, one is bound to be as critical and self-critical as one has the capacity to be. This means, one hopes, wishful thinking is kept to a minimum. Or perhaps I’m entirely wrong about this and should just say, to paraphrase a famous US Secretary of Defense, you work with the self you have, not the self you wish you had.

Do the politics enable me to ask questions that wouldn’t otherwise emerge?¹ Certainly a commitment to a political-economic ontology and epistemology, which for me is essential to being a leftist, opens up a characteristic set of questions that are not available or particularly interesting to mainstream economists. Rather than an obsession with how scarce resources are allocated by anonymous individual decision-makers, I am obsessed with how resources are produced and distributed in society, who controls them, what they do with them, why they do that, and how it affects everyone else. In a nutshell, I want to know about the creation, distribution and use of wealth and social power and how this is connected with how values concerning, for example, social justice and the environment are constructed and operationalized. There are more ways of getting at those questions than being exactly the kind of leftist/political economist that I am. Within this context, however, they are not only available but unavoidable.

Having said that, a political economic approach generally treats social power as a structural artefact, at least in reference to the ruling classes. It is more interested in the lived experience of power from the point of view of workers, and, plausibly, communities, racial and ethnic groups and women: those who are generally on the weaker end of power-laden relationships and who have to work at countering, resisting, deflecting or otherwise preserving themselves from the powerful. In my own work, however, I was focused on what the powerful were doing and why, and, because this wasn’t so easy to work out, it led eventually to an interest in how the powerful thought about their world and about themselves – in short, how their actual power was linked to their identities, their interpretation of information, and their strategies. This kind of question doesn’t, I think, automatically arise in a classic political-economic analysis, but it does plausibly arise in the context of the kind of political history I’ve been describing. The particular left politics of the USA in the 1970s were in fact quite involved with the question of who these people (‘the best and the brightest’) were and what they thought they were doing. The policies of the war in Vietnam were located in a social type – Ivy League whiz kids and technocrats – and closely identified with particular people – McNamara, Bundy, Colby, Kissinger, etc. It seems likely that this helped me find the path from corporate strategy to culture, via questions of power and identity.

Interlude: the work of mentors

There were plenty of reasons to doubt my career potential in academic life, quite apart from the fact that it took me so long to notice that I was having an academic career. Being a leftist, a qualitative researcher and a woman are not the first three indicators of success that leap to mind. In any case, most of us aren’t so incredibly brilliant that the system just bows do...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Methods Matter:Transformations in Economic Geography
• Section 1: Position and Method: Producing Economic Geographies
• Section 2: Politicizing Method: Activating Economic Geographies
• Section 3: Quantity and Quality: Beyond Dualist Economic Geographies
• Section 4: Boundary Crossings: Mobilizing Economic Geographies
• References
• Index