The 'relational turn' in economic geography

Abstract

For almost two decades, economic geography has become increasingly populated with texts concerned with the ways in which social interactions between economic agents have shaped the geography of economic performance. This literature has ranged from identifying the cultural norms or conventions underpinning social relations (Storper, 1995, 1997; Asheim and Isaksen, 1997; Cooke and Morgan, 1998) to documenting the geographic extent of these relations (Scott, 1988; Dicken et al., 2001; MacKinnon et al., 2002) to analysing how different socio-economic processes can generate similar landscapes of restructuring (e.g. Massey, 1984, 1995; Glasmeier, 2000). Likewise, it has looked to disciplines outside of economic geography, most notably economic sociology with Granovetter’s (1985) notion of embeddedness and Coleman’s (1988) social capital but also the work of institutional economists (e.g. Hodgson, 1988; Lundvall, 1988), to integrate the ‘social’ into economic analysis. As a whole, this tendency represents a theoretical orientation where actors and the dynamic processes of change and development engendered by their relations are central units of analysis – an orientation we term here a ‘relational turn’ in economic geography. In this introductory article, we take stock of the key attributes that constitute this ‘turn’ by examining the context in which it has emerged, and the implications that such a turn has for three analytical tensions: the structure agency debate, the macroversus micro-unit of analysis and the geographic scale of the analysis. The four papers included in this special theme issue speak to those tensions, and by so doing, contribute to our understanding of the present limitations and potentials of a relational approach as well as suggest new directions for research. Some of the key contributions (though most certainly, not all) are reviewed here.