Decline and fall?

James et al.’s Exchanges commentary is chilling, provoking in me at least existential angst. The discipline to which I have devoted the best years of my academic life could on the evidence of what’s happening in the UK be on the cusp of extinction. All my efforts over the last 35 years to champion the merits of economic geography, to be a “fanboy” (Barnes and Christophers, 2018: 2), might in the end have been in vain as the discipline now unravels, potentially deep sixing. I thought of the ending of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s (1967) novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. At its conclusion, the last surviving member of the Buendía family is reading an ancient prophetic text about the history of his family. As he comes to the last sentence that anticipates his own demise, he dies. The text ends at the same moment he does. I feel that especially acutely given that with Brett Christophers I just published a textbook about economic geography, Economic Geography: A Critical Introduction (Barnes and Christophers, 2018). My existential fear is that as student readers at least in the UK get to the end of our textbook, economic geography will no longer exist. It will be a textbook without a corresponding academic subject, and hence no textbook at all.

I should have known that this might happen. In our economic geography volume, we write about the conditions of existence for all academic subjects. We say, “the sustainability of any discipline … depends on a set of social relationships embedded within both the institutional structure in which the discipline sits and those structures that are found in outside institutions that buttress it” (Barnes and Christophers, 2018: 78). As a warning about what could unfold when the institutional structures no longer hold, we give the example of a related field, regional science. Seemingly born fully formed just after Second World War from the head of its prodigious founder, Walter Isard, regional science went on a tear from the mid-1950s until the late 1970s with burgeoning membership and internationalization of its branches. During this period, it was supported institutionally by different kinds of allies, such as other disciplines, including economic geography; by an Ivy League university, the University of Pennsylvania; by governments, philanthropies, and non-profits which all provided large sums of money to grease its financial wheels; and by talented, energetic individuals like Allen Scott, who taught regional science, and Michael Dear and Doreen Massey, who studied it. But within less than a decade, it all fell apart. I remember attending the 1986 North American Regional Science annual meeting in Columbus, Ohio. Everything was normal. But nine years later, regional science was on life-support. Regional science’s allies rapidly abandoned it. Economic geography moved on to other approaches; Penn closed the Department; funders no longer provided grants; and talented, energetic economic geographers no longer sought employment or study. It was the end of regional science as we knew it.

Will it also be the end of economic geography as we knew it, at least in the UK? Maybe. There are differences compared to regional science, however. Economic geography is larger, and more geographically diffuse than regional science ever was. Consequently, and if this is any comfort, economic geography’s decline will be slower, ending more with a whimper rather than a bang. The reasons for economic geography’s fall are also different. Regional science failed in part because it went past its intellectual expiry date. The discipline was designed instrumentally as a set of strategic tools to analyze and solve the problems of a burgeoning US economy during the immediate post-war period. That economy was marked by growing industrial urbanization, Fordist manufacturing, and Keynesian-style economic planning carried out at the local, regional, and national scales. Within that context regional science functioned brilliantly. But from the late 1970s, the context changed. Regional science did not, however. The discipline remained stuck in the aspic jelly of the earlier period, ignoring the new realities of changing spatial urban forms and employment, deindustrialization and industrial restructuring, and the death of the Keynesian planning state. Because regional science failed to keep up with the changed present, it began to suffer repeated desertions from former allies, culminating in its collapse. In contrast, the high-water mark of economic geography was precisely that period when regional science began experiencing its troubles. Economic geography was almost uncanny in its instinct in correctly identifying important new trends for theorization and empirical inquiry. Hence, Allen Scott’s writings on the new metropolitan economy and its spatial form, or Doreen Massey’s on regional deindustrialization and industrial restructuring, or Jamie Peck’s on neoliberalism. The one accusation one could never make of economic geography is that it was, or is, stuck in aspic.

Why is it failing then? One answer might be that economic geography thrives only during crisis. That is what connects the works of Scott, Massey, and Peck; they were all responses to crisis. In this interpretation, the problem is that there have not been recent crises severe enough to galvanize the discipline. That can’t be entirely right, however. The October 2008 banking crisis nearly put paid to capitalism as a whole, the ultimate crisis. Even the usually unflappable former Governor of the Bank of Canada, Mark Carney, said, “the world was 36 hours away from financial Armageddon.” If ever there was a sufficiently grave crisis to make economic geography’s star shine more brightly, that should have been it. But it didn’t. It seems to have had the reverse effect in the UK.

So, the problem is not that there is a shortage of interesting and notable economic geographical events going on out in the world. If anything, we are overwhelmed with them. Just read the Financial Times, or the business supplements of any serious newspaper. Everyday there is an avalanche of interesting economic geographical issues to dig into. Rather, the problem is internal not external. Here James et al., think one of the problems is the absence of a central disciplinary core to economic geography. This produces fission, with economic geographers flung hither and yon to the outer periphery of the subject, becoming isolated, ripe for picking off by business schools in the UK. Even when times were good for economic geography, there was never an essential core to the discipline, however. Economic geography was never defined by an essential subject matter, set of methods, or theories. Whenever there were attempts to produce a monocentric discipline, they were resisted (Barnes and Christophers, 2018, ch. 3). Consequently, I don’t believe asserting a core to the discipline as a strategy to save it is feasible. Moreover, so far, the problems of economic geography have been confined to the UK, along with the concomitant “Economic Geography Diaspora” to British Business and Management Schools (James et al., 2018: 1). This suggests that the issue may well be peculiarly British, bound up with the institutional structure found only in that country, and therefore not amenable to solution by asserting a universal core to the discipline.

James et al.’s other suggestion that economic geography’s problem is due to changes that have gone on in the wider discipline of human geography resonates more, although again it reflects the distinctive British experience. Their argument is that the move within human geography over almost the last two decades to a “cultural” perspective has lured potential graduate students away from the discipline, starving economic geography of the necessary young blood of renewal. I think there is something to that argument, but it makes economic geography too passive, too much of a victim. Economic geography wanted to be part of the cultural turn too. That movement during the late 1990s produced some wonderful monographs like Linda McDowell’s (1997) Capital Culture, or Erica Schoenberger’s Cultural Crisis of the Firm, or J. K. Gibson-Graham’s brilliant and culturally infused theorization of post-capitalism in The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It). There was nothing wrong with economic geographers trying to be more cultural. The problem was that it wasn’t sustained. If it had, it might have become more of a venue to which some of those later especially British graduate students interested in things cultural could have been channeled. To do that required a willingness to keep the conversation going. Maybe that was where the problem lay; that economic geographers already had too fixed a notion of the economic, which then made engaging in that conversation too difficult. If so, it makes the suggestion by James et al., of locating a core to the discipline even more problematic, putting a fence around the subject. In effect, that was the problem that beset regional science. It defined its core and mandate too narrowly, leading as in Edward Gibbon’s account of the Roman Empire to decline and fall. That hasn’t happened yet to economic geography, although clearly the current state of the discipline in the UK is parlous, on the verge of acute crisis. There is still time to do something I believe. It is not to raise the drawbridge, however. Rather, it needs to be lowered father; to let in the multitude that is contemporary human geography.