Economic Geography

Foreword
‘The real duty of the ... [economic geographer] ... is not ... [just] ... to explain our
sorry reality, but to improve it’ (Lösch 1954: 4). I use this paraphrased quota-
tion from a no longer fashionable ‘location theorist’ for four reasons. First, it was
primarily because of Lösch’s book, The Economics of Location (introduced to me
as an undergraduate in the early 1960s by David M. Smith), that I became an
economic geographer. What attracted me to his complex book – and it seemed
very complex indeed for somebody fed on the indigestible descriptive texts of
traditional economic geography that constituted the conventional diet of economic
geography courses – was that its heavy theoretical orientation was combined with
the deep sense of social concern. The purpose of any academic discipline worth its
salt must be to try to improve the world in which we live: to engage with real
problems, to ‘get our hands dirty’ in Amy Glasmeier’s words. Of course, the kind
of theoretical approach espoused by Lösch soon became outmoded and displaced,
as several of the contributors to this volume explain, by a succession of alternative
approaches, each being heralded as the new orthodoxy by its adherents. But the
normative question of ‘what ought to be’ – as well as ‘what is’ – should still be
at the centre of our concerns as economic geographers.
The second reason I refer to Lösch here is that his approach first made me
appreciate the importance of theoretically-informed empirical research. His book
was surprisingly rich in a wide range of empirical materials at different spatial
scales. Of course, I no longer espouse the particular theoretical framework of the
economic location theorists but that is not the point. We need to develop theo-
ries to help us make sense of the world and those theories need to be firmly
grounded. Today economic geographers engage in far more diverse theoretical
explanations than in the 1960s and I am sure this is a good thing. The world 
is far too complex to be captured by a single over-arching theoretical frame-
work. As Ray Hudson argues, ‘the economic geographies of the late modern
capitalist world are too complex and nuanced to be explicable in terms of one 
all-encompassing theoretical position’.
The diversity of contemporary economic geography is – or should be – a
strength, not a weakness (see Ann Markusen’s and Eric Sheppard’s chapters).
But we do need to build theories; mere description is not enough. Such theories
need to be able to incorporate the complex, and highly unequal, power-laden

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interactions between the multifarious sets of actors, agents and institutions that
constitute economies and the ways in which these stretch across a continuum 
of geographical scales and, at the same time, inter-penetrate ‘territories’. In my
own view, such theorizations should include a strong focus on the relationalities
of situated networks. As Katherine Mitchell points out, ‘thinking in terms of
networks forces us to theorize socioeconomic processes as intertwined and 
mutually constitutive’. But we must always remember that such networks are 
not independent of the macro-structural frameworks within which they are
embedded and with which they continuously engage in dialectical interaction.
We are all, to a large degree, involved in ‘political economy’.
On the other hand, we also need careful, robust, well-designed empirical
research. We need, in other words, to focus not only on processes but also on
outcomes. And we need to do so using techniques appropriate to the task, whether
these are qualitative or quantitative or a mix of the two. But both our theories
and our empirical work need to avoid the ethnocentrism that is characteristic of
most economic–geographical research, embedded as it tends to be in the western
(especially Anglo-American) industrialized countries (see Henry Yeung’s chapter).
We also need to broaden our investigative horizons in terms of the phenomena
we study. Some kinds of economic activity attract a disproportionate amount of
our attention; others are virtually ignored or, at best, under-researched. There are
significant ‘silences’. Much of the work continues to be heavily productionist, with
very little real integration of processes of consumption in our analyses. Within
manufacturing, there continues to be a narrow focus on a few specific sectors 
and a neglect of others. A similar criticism can be made of work on services. 
We know a lot about financial services, for example, but logistical services are
virtually ignored. Agriculture continues to be given inadequate attention within
economic geography, despite the fact that this sector employs vast numbers of
people in developing countries and is one of the most sensitive issues in current
globalization debates. In a related vein, few economic geographers today research
natural resources and far too few economic geographers have developed a seri-
ous engagement with environmental issues. Of course, there are honourable
exceptions in all of these cases – many of them represented in this book – but 
I think the overall criticism is justified.
Third, my engagement with Lösch in the 1960s first took me beyond the
boundaries of geography and into the realms of another social science: econom-
ics. There is much lively debate today about whether, and how, economic geog-
raphers should engage with economists. I go along with the view of several
contributors to this book that economic geography must engage with econom-
ics, but that is ‘never sufficient’ (Richard Walker). We need to engage in produc-
tive dialogue with all the relevant disciplines, but to do so in ways that build
upon economic geography’s own strengths. Eric Sheppard writes of creating
‘trading zones’ between different disciplinary approaches and I very much agree
with that. But an academic discipline’s success in trading depends on its own
internal strength and distinctive identity. Without a strong disciplinary core,
there would be little to trade with others. There is always the danger of economic
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Foreword

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Foreword
xv
geography (indeed of geography as a whole) being swallowed up. One of
economic geography’s undoubted strengths, as Ann Markusen points out, is its
synthesizing abilities across the social and natural sciences.
But while we undoubtedly need to engage productively with non-geographers
we also need to engage more with other sub-fields within geography itself. Most
obviously this is true of the long-standing human-physical divide, one that is so
self-evidently debilitating in the context of global environmental problems. But
it is also true, for example, of the lack of real connections between economic
geographers and development geographers. In such an uneven world – and of
the need to improve our ‘sorry reality’ – this is not just stupid, it is bordering on
the criminal.
My fourth reason for recalling Lösch is that it reminds us of the importance
of having a real sense and understanding of the history of economic geography
as a distinctive sub-field within geography and within the social sciences in
general. Economic geography, like geography as a whole, has a history of ignor-
ing its history; of not just discarding theoretical frameworks or methodologies
but of writing them completely out of the script. As both Susan Hanson and 
Ann Markusen point out, this is very short-sighted. We need to know where we
come from; we need to understand why approaches have changed. As Susan
Hanson argues: ‘we draw upon the past to envision the future . . . The ease with
which authors fail to link their own work to earlier work . . . simply does not
make sense to me because it means that much of value is needlessly discredited,
submerged and lost . . . a look at the history of this field provokes a call for greater
ecumenism, for more willingness to see the connections across the decades, and
for the enduring tolerance that making those connections should foster.’
The chapters in this book exemplify each of these concerns. They provide valu-
able and stimulating perspectives on how and why economic geographers do
what they do in ways that demonstrate the values that economic geographers can
bring to explaining and helping to improve the lives of people and communities
wherever they are. It is a challenging agenda but one that must be grasped. As
Lösch said, that is our ‘real duty’.
Peter Dicken
University of Manchester, UK

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