The political construction of scale

Abstract

Geographic scale, referring to the nested hierarchy of bounded spaces of differing size, such as the local, regional, national and global, is a familiar and taken-for-granted concept for political geographers and political analysts. In much contemporary analysis of political organization and action, geographic scale is treated simply as different levels of analysis (from local to global) in which the investigation of political processes is set. Recently this notion of geographic scale as an unproblematic, pre-given and fixed hierarchy of bounded spaces has been challenged. Geographers have shown that the geographic scale at which, for example, economic activities and political authority are constituted, is not fixed but periodically transformed (Smith and Dennis, 1987; Herod, 1991). Attention has been drawn to the relations between, and influences of, processes operating at different geographic scales (such as the local and global), and how they interact to produce incentives and motives for political action (Miller, 1994). Alternatively, geographers have sought to illustrate aspects of the construction of scale by drawing attention to what are essentially rhetorical stances of political actors. For example, Jonas (1994) discusses the attempt by a multinational corporation headquartered in Worcester, Massachusetts, to portray itself as a local operation attached to the local community in order to create support for its resistance of a takeover bid by a conglomerate with British headquarters. The common ground of this body of research is that geographic scale is conceptualized as socially constructed rather than ontologically pre-given, and that the geographic scales constructed are themselves implicated in the constitution of social, economic and political