Economic Geography

Turbulence and challenge
Economic geography, then, has been marked over its postwar history by a great
susceptibility to turbulence. A notable recent sign of this tendency is the various
‘turns’ that the field is said to have taken or to be about to take. A cursory count
A perspective of economic geography
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reveals an empirical turn (Smith 1987), an interpretative turn (Imrie et al. 1996),
a normative turn (Sayer and Storper 1997), a cultural turn (Crang 1997), a policy
turn (Martin 2001), and a relational turn (Boggs and Rantisi 2003), among others.
In some instances, the proclamation of these turns has been no more than 
an attempt to test the waters. In others, it has registered some real underlying
tendency in geographic research. Today, the field is subject to particularly strong
contestation from two main sources. One of these lies largely outside geography
proper and is being energetically pushed by economists under the rubric of a 
new geographical economics. It represents a major professional challenge to
economic geographers by reason of its threatened appropriation and theoretical
transformation of significant parts of the field. The other is represented by the
cultural turn that comes in significant degree from within geography itself, but
also reflects the wider politicization of cultural issues and the rise of concerns
about identity in contemporary society. The cultural turn represents a very differ-
ent kind of challenge to economic geography on account of its efforts to
promote within the field a more highly developed consciousness of the role of
culture in the eventuation of economic practices. Much of the rest of this chap-
ter is concerned with investigating the nature of this current conjuncture in the
light of the arguments already marshalled.