Economic Geography

A Critical Introduction

Trevor J. Barnes, Brett Christophers

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781118874288
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences physiques
• Subtopic: Géographie

This volume in the celebrated Critical Introductions to Geography series introduces readers to the vibrant discipline of economic geography. The authors provide an original definition of the discipline, and they make a strong case for its vital importance in understanding the dynamic interconnections, movements, and emerging trends shaping our globalized world.

Economic Geography addresses the key theories and methods that form the basis of the discipline, and describes its "communities of practice" and relations to related fields including economics and sociology. Numerous illustrative examples explore how economic geographers examine the world and how and why the discipline takes the forms it does, demonstrating the critical value of economic geography to making sense of globalization, uneven development, money and finance, urbanization, environmental change, and industrial and technological transformation.

Engaging and thought-provoking, Economic Geography: A Critical Introduction is the ideal resource for students studying across a range of subject areas, as well as the general reader with an interest in world affairs and economics.

Chapter 1
Why Economic Geography Is Good For You

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1. 1.1 Introduction
2. 1.2 “May You Live in Interesting Times”: Economic Geography’s World
3. 1.3 Being Critical: In What Sense a “Critical” Introduction to Economic Geography?
4. 1.4 Outline of the Book
5. 1.5 Conclusion

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1.1 Introduction

One of the great, albeit controversial, episodes of the American National Public Radio show This American Life was “Mr Daisey and the Apple factory” (first aired January 6, 2012). It was at the time the most downloaded single episode of the show ever with close to 900,000 downloads.¹ Hosted by Ira Glass and produced by WBEZ Chicago, This American Life presents each week one or more stories based on some particular theme. Glass did not make explicit the theme for the week of “Mr Daisey and the Apple factory,” but there was absolutely no doubt it was economic geography. The episode demonstrated both the fundamental importance of the subject, and, given the download figures, the potential public interest in the subject. It showed why economic geography was good for you, the theme of this introductory chapter.

Mr Daisey is a self‐described technology geek. As he said on the show: “of all the kinds of technology that I love in the world, I love the technology that comes from Apple the most, because I am an Apple aficionado. I’m an Apple partisan. I’m an Apple fanboy. I’m a worshiper in the cult of Mac” (This American Life 2012). For fun and relaxation Mr Daisey will strip his MacBook Pro into its 43 component pieces, clean them with compressed air, and put them back together again. One day he was reading a website dedicated to Apple products, and came across a post from someone who, when they turned on their just‐bought iPhone, found four pictures on it that had been taken at the factory where it was made. The pictures had obviously been taken to test the device but had not been erased. Those pictures became for Mr Daisey his economic geographic “aha” moment. As he put it, “until I saw those pictures, it was only then I realized, I had never thought, ever, in a dedicated way, about how [Apple products] were made” (This American Life 2012). Mr Daisey did some preliminary inquiries and discovered that the pictures were taken in the Foxconn plant in Shenzhen in Southern China, just outside of Hong Kong. He continues:

the most amazing thing is, almost no one in America knows its name. Isn’t that remarkable? That there’s a city where almost all of our crap comes from, and no one knows its name? I mean, we think we do know where our crap comes from. We’re not ignorant. We think our crap comes from China. Right? Kind of a generalized way. China.

But it doesn’t come from China. It comes from Shenzhen. It’s a city. It’s a place.

(This American Life 2012)

In raising these questions, Mr Daisey was beginning to do economic geography. He was asking where something was produced, why it was produced there and not somewhere else, and how and why it geographically moved from that place to Mr Daisey’s place, America. All of these issues are fundamentally economic geographic, requiring Mr Daisey to begin to acquire economic geographic knowledge. And like any aspiring economic geographer, after gathering preliminary facts at home, Mr Daisey went on to do fieldwork, to visit China, to go to Shenzhen, to the city, to the place. He began to interview people, visiting the Foxconn factory (or at least standing outside of it).

As he found out more about the lives of the people who made Apple products (which he had originally figured were “made by robots”), Mr Daisey was increasingly unsettled.² Economic geography turned out not to be as soothing as stripping down the 43 component parts of his MacBook Pro and cleaning them with compressed air. Still, Mr Daisey came to believe that knowing where all one’s “crap” comes from, assembled from across the four corners of the world, and the conditions under which it is produced, was something that as a citizen of the world one ought to know. He began to appreciate why economic geography was good for him. We believe too that the discipline is good for you. Although we are less smitten with our computerized devices than Mr Daisey, we are smitten with economic geography. We are economic geography aficionados, economic geography partisans, and economic geography fanboys. There is no economic geography cult (as far as we know), but if there were, we would worship at its altar.

The purpose of this book is to try to persuade you to join us in our admiration of economic geography. We want to convince you that knowing something about the subject is essential to living in the twenty‐first century. Virtually everyone now on the planet, together numbering a total of more than 7 billion people, is a global citizen whether they like it or not. The changes to the economy over the past 40 years, as it has become globalized, affecting so many people in so many different ways, are economic and also fundamentally geographical. Accordingly, economic geography is relevant not just as a background setting, but to understand why economic change occurs at all. It enters into the very frame of that change, its skeletal structure. And what is bred in the bone comes out in the marrow. We don’t mean to exaggerate our claim. There are large swathes of life with which economic geography does not deal. But those with which it does are nut and bolt issues; they hold together the scaffolding on which much contemporary social and cultural life is constructed: from the clothes you wear, to the food you eat, to the music you hear, to the videos you watch, to the schools you attend, and even to the university classes you take. It is our belief that if you fail to understand that scaffolding, you fail to understand one of the bases of contemporary social and cultural life itself. You fail to understand your own life and the lives of others around you both far and near.

The rest of this chapter pursues these larger themes and in doing so introduces our book. The chapter is divided into three unequally sized sections. The first and longest, continuing from Mr Daisey, argues that there is something about the present juncture – right now – that makes the study of economic geography especially important and pressing. We present the argument in two parts. First, we set out the leading features of the present moment, and contend that they uncannily fit with the interests and conceptual framework of economic geography. It is the right discipline for right now and right here. Second, we suggest that suitability is a result of economic geography having remade itself as an intellectual project over the last 40 years. During that period, it has become increasingly open‐minded, with an ability to roll with change, yet it still retains a memory of the past, possessing a broad, catholic base of knowledge, as well as an ability to synthesize and link across seemingly yawning subject divides. These qualities, along with its ingrained spatial awareness, have given economic geography enormous purchase in understanding the present.

The second section discusses the meaning and implications of the subtitle of our book, A Critical Introduction. We clarify what it means to think critically, and in particular, what it means to think critically about the discipline of economic geography. We adopt two strategies. The first is to try to get behind or beneath the discipline, and not to accept it at face value. It involves asking why things are done as they are, as well as what decisions were taken in the past that now determine the economic geographic knowledge we listen to in lecture halls and read in journals and books like this one. This also frequently necessitates examining internal disciplinary processes and external contextual historical factors. The second is to provide critical evaluations of different types of economic geography. This means not sitting on the fence. Instead, we try, where appropriate, to take a position, to say what we think is working well in the discipline (and why) and what is not.

The last section of this chapter sets out the structure and argument of the rest of the book, which is divided into two main parts. The first is concerned with economic geography as a discipline, the second with economic geography’s examination of a changing economic geographic world. In both cases, we aspire to live up to our book’s subtitle and to be critical in both senses just described.

1.2 “May You Live in Interesting Times”: Economic Geography’s World

1.2.1 Interesting times

“May you live in interesting times” is often termed “the Chinese curse.” There is no evidence that this expression was Chinese, or that it was a curse, however. Contemporary economic geographers certainly live in interesting times, though. Further, those times have been propitious for the discipline rather than a curse, raising its stature and profile. Here are six features that have made the times interesting for economic geography, bearing on the subject, lending themselves to its disciplinary analysis.

• First, and going directly to Mr Daisey and the Apple factory, is pervasive globalization, a fundamentally economically geographic phenomenon. Economic geography inheres in globalization’s very definition; it is part of the term’s conceptual furniture. By globalization we mean the ever‐increasing economic geographic integration of the world as measured by the movements across national borders of: (i) goods, services, and capital; (ii) labor (people); (iii) knowledge and information (communication); and (iv) cultural goods and activities – sports, cuisines, electronic games, films, music, TV shows, and so on.
  Globalization goes back a long way, of course. The Ancient Greek poet Homer (that is, if he ever existed!) was writing about globalization as early as around 800 BCE in his epic poem The Odyssey. It featured the soldier and sailor Odysseus and his spectacular global travels (at least global for 800 BCE), involving murderous Cyclops, enchanting and beautiful but deadly temptress Sirens, and evil sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis (Figure 1.1). Globalization is enormously long‐standing, but over the last 30 years or so there has been a quantitative shift in its pace and range, and a qualitative shift in its form. Since 1980 there has been a tenfold growth in the value of world trade in goods and services (US$2.4 trillion in 1980 versus US$23.3 trillion in 2013 in constant dollars); a more than twenty fold increase in the value of the stock of global foreign direct investment (a little over US$1 trillion in 1980 and more than US$22 trillion in 2013); a more than doubling in the number of foreign workers now employed across the world (currently about 3% of the entire world’s population); a fiftyfold increase between 1980 and 2008 in the number of minutes that US telephone subscribers spend annually making international calls; and a substantial increase i...