WESTERN ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY IN TRANSFORMATION: INSITITUTIONAL, CULTURAL, RELATIONAL AND SCALAR TURNS
MIAO Chang-hong
Research Center of Yellow River Civilization and Sustainable Development, Institute of Regional Development and Planning, Henan University, Kaifeng 475001, China
Abstract：Since the foundation as a formal sub-discipline in geography, western economic geography has always concerned on the spatial nature of economic activities:regional synthesis, difference and differentiation. But how to describe, explain and regulate the space and place of economic activities has made a great transformation with the changes of the development of capitalism practices and the mainstream perspectives of western social sciences. Over the second half of the twentieth century, western economic geography is characterized by many twists and turns of substantive focus and sudden changes of theoretical mood. Since the 1980s, there have been some enormous intellectual transformation and rapid growth in western economic geography as the results responsive to the great changes in external economic conditions, to the unfolding of political events, to the post-modernism philosophies, and to the play of professional ambitions and rivalries. Compared to the 'quantitative and theoretical revolution' in 1950s and 1960s and the "Marxism turn" in the 1970s and early 1980s, this transformation has not only happened on the methodology and epistemology but also happened on the ontology, which has made the analytical perspectives and substantive focus of western economic geography much more diversified and complicated and has increasingly reshaped the nature of the sub-discipline and connected it to wider discourses within the social sciences. This paper analyses this transformation in four dimensions:institutional turn, cultural turn, relational turn and scalar turn. Through the institutional, cultural, relational and scalar turns, western economic geography has been making a great progress and becoming a new paradigm named as "new economic geographies" in which more attention has been paid to socio-cultural practices and institutional foundations of economic geographies and performances. Although this great transformation, especially the cultural turn, in certain senses, saved western economic geography from what might otherwise have been a musty oblivion, and made this sub-discipline revival and alive, and attracted highly attention from western other social sciences, however, western economic geography is also at a critical intellectual turning point. How to deal with the relationship between it and other social sciences especially "mainstream economics" and "heterodox economic knowledge" is very important to its further development.
