Geography
Document Type
Article
Abstract
Over the last decade or so there has been an identifiable shift in the interests of many economic geographers towards a concern with practices: stabilized, routinized, or improvised social actions that constitute and reproduce economic space, and through and within which socioeconomic actors and communities embed knowledge, organize production activities, and interpret and derive meaning from the world. Although this shift has gained significant momentum its general theoretical significance remains somewhat unclear and the concept is vulnerable to criticisms that it is incoherent, too 'micro-scale' in emphasis, unable to provide valid links between everyday practices and higher-order phenomena (eg, institutions, class structures), and that, in some cases, it lacks a sound political economy. This paper argues that while it undoubtedly has limitations, the practice-oriented shift represents an ongoing development of a longstanding and heterodox field of social scientific interest from both within and beyond the subdiscipline. We first highlight the diverse strands of economic geography scholarship that have an explicit interest in practices and then propose an epistemological and methodological framework for a practice-oriented economic geography. The framework is based on the polemical argument that insight from both critical realist and actor-network perspectives can provide the basis to better demarcate practices in relation to their social and spatiotemporal dimensions. It goes on to outline a reformulated retroductive methodology to assess the impacts and theoretical significance of particular economic-geographical practices. The paper concludes that practice offers a potentially powerful, yet complementary, epistemological tool that can create conceptual space for the study of a wide range of socioeconomic and geographical phenomena. © The Author(s) 2010.
Publication Title
Progress in Human Geography
Publication Date
2011
Volume
35
Issue
3
First Page
366
Last Page
392
ISSN
0309-1325
DOI
10.1177/0309132510375585
Keywords
actor-network theory, critical realism, economic geography, epistemology, methodology, practice
Repository Citation
Jones, Andrew and Murphy, James T., "Theorizing practice in economic geography: Foundations, challenges, and possibilities" (2011). Geography. 411.
https://commons.clarku.edu/faculty_geography/411
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Copyright Conditions
Published source must be acknowledged with citation: Jones, Andrew, and James T. Murphy. "Theorizing practice in economic geography: Foundations, challenges, and possibilities." Progress in human geography 35.3 (2011): 366-392.
