On economic geography's “movers” to business and management schools: A response from outside “the project”

Introduction

A feminist would look at the problem of reconstructing geography by asking political questions about “the project.” Who would participate in defining this project? What questions are being subordinated to others? Why? Which daily life experiences constitute the material for theory? How are these experiences represented?

In this collective response to James et al.’s (2018a) Royal Geographical Society (RGS) report (hereafter referred to as the RGS report) – and the responses from many senior economic geographers – we return to Christopherson (1989) to critically assess what is changing in economic geography within and beyond the UK and why this matters for both economic geography specifically and human geography more broadly. We pay particular attention to how economic geography and the movement to business and management (B&M) schools are narrated, seeing these as part of a broader “political struggle over whose theories will have validity and significance in geography” (Christopherson, 1989: 84). Although nearly 30 years have passed since it was written, Christopherson’s critique of the practices of theory-making, methods, and inclusivity in human geography is still relevant for thinking about economic geography today. It challenges us to consider how the framing of “the project” – the active construction of shared intellectual and methodological agendas – affects the future of the subdiscipline.

Part of our motivation for engaging in this exchange is that the report claims that the migration to B&M schools jeopardizes the future of economic geography as a subdiscipline, especially as it is practiced within geography departments. James et al. (2018a: 27) worry that “it is increasingly hard … to see where the next generation [of economic geographers] will come from.” We are five early-career scholars who could be understood as human geographers undertaking research on what the RGS report authors and many of their respondents categorize as the “geographies of economies,” as opposed to scholars involved in researching “proper noun” economic geography (see Foster et al., 2007). Upon reading the RGS report and some of its responses, it strikes us that the theories, literatures, methods, and labor market conditions in which we tread, and that we see as central to the present and future of the subdiscipline, are addressed very peripherally. This is despite the fact that three of the five of us have academic posts in “economic geography” that most of us have either served on the boards of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) or RGS Economic Geography Research Groups, and/or have received awards from those entities. Three of us host an annual AAG happy hour for women in economic geography, and many of the points presented here began as conversations at the 2016 Summer Institute in Economic Geography. We want to draw attention to these positionalities, following Christopherson’s observations in the epigraph, to push for greater attention toward how we as geographers construct theory, how we construct boundaries, and how that affects our conceptualizations of the future of disciplines.

In what follows we revisit the RGS report and the resultant exchanges in Environment and Planning A (EPA). We make our points by way of three questions: What is economic geography’s core and who can claim to narrate it? What are the geographies of contemporary economic geography? And how do the structural conditions in which economic geography is practiced affect the conclusions drawn in many responses to the RGS report? To close, we reflect on the potential of what might be left behind amid an exodus of UK economic geographers to B&M schools. The report and some of the responses appear to be interested in a return to past paradigms and conditions. We argue, instead, for a greater acknowledgment of the existing flourishing of theory-building and practice that is right now taking place through the rich work of feminist, cultural, and postcolonial economic geographers (e.g., Werner et al., 2017), which is often not explicitly “owned” as economic geography. For us, this work represents a promising route to sustaining the subdiscipline.

Economic geography’s “core”: which scholars, which scholarship?

We have two central concerns about the framing of economic geography in the RGS report. First is James et al.’s (2018a) reticence in specifying precisely who or what is being lost with the movement to B&M, and second is how they categorize what is inside and outside economic geography proper. To be clear here, we are not questioning James et al.’s sampling techniques, nor contesting the patterns they identify, which we agree are troubling. The phenomenon of “movers” to B&M is worthy of attention and reflection, and we are interested in the debates it has elicited precisely because of the implications of this labor market transition for the future of economic geography – inside and outside of the UK – more broadly.

First, the question of what, exactly, is being lost. James et al. (2018a: 30) claim in the discussion of their findings that “economic geography in the UK context was demonstrably larger, more vibrant, more coherent, and more relevant in previous eras, most notably in the 1980s and 1990s.” They see a loss of “‘big picture,’ systematic accounts, underpinned by analytically strong geographical political economy” in favor of “tendencies to focus on individual places, regions and case studies [that] have seemingly weakened the wider analytical purchase of EG” (James et al., 2018a: 28). In his reply, Barnes (2018) refers to UK economic geography as “failing,” “declining,” and “falling”; Martin (2018) writes that it is in danger of being “watered down” and “diluted.”

Many people interviewed by James et al. (2018a) – and several of the respondents to the RGS report – display nostalgia for the “good old days” of UK economic geography. Despite the contemporary popularity of an “engaged pluralist” approach to economic geography (Barnes and Sheppard, 2010), at various points in their commentaries on UK economic geography, James et al. (2018b), Barnes (2018), Leyshon (2018), and Martin (2018) yearn for a return to the economic geography of the 1980s and 1990s. Martin’s (2018) use of the term “emasculated” to contrast contemporary economic geography with its “traditional” past, as well as Rodriguez-Pose’s (2018: 1) suggestion that economic geographers can magnify their power and visibility through “colonizing other disciplines” (emphasis in original), invite reflection on what else coincided with 1980s and 1990s economic geography – namely an unwillingness to take seriously the insights of feminist, cultural, and postcolonial economic geographies (see Deutsche, 1991; Massey, 1991). Clearly, additional reflection is needed on the past for which we are invited to be nostalgic. Though we are concerned that UK geography departments are losing economic geographers to B&M – and that their posts in geography departments are not being replaced – surely the response should not be a turn back toward the perspectives, and their associated masculinisms, that were so effectively critiqued by feminist economic geographers in the 1980s and 1990s. Whether the “losses” of contemporary UK economic geography are a tragedy or a potential opening is a question of one’s positionality.

Feminist economic geography provides one example of the importance of positionality for interpreting the shifting nature of economic geography in the UK and elsewhere. In terms of our second point – regarding what appears to be inside and outside of definitions of economic geography – James et al.’s description of the areas in which economic geography is strong, as well as what is absent, shows a marked contrast with the 2016 EPA theme issue on feminism and economic geography. That issue highlights a contemporary flourishing of research on the social, cultural, racialized, and gendered dimensions of economic geography (see MacLeavy et al., 2016). The authors emphasize the interrelationship between gender and race and their relation to capital, as well as concepts like social reproduction, and the space of the body and of the home as sites essential to the accumulation of capital (Larner, 2016; Smith, 2016). They highlight the function of race in the global economy, arguing that concepts like uneven development and the international division of labor (both of which are flagged by James et al. as core concerns to which economic geography should return) cannot be adequately conceptualized without thinking through the historical and contemporaneous reality of the racialization of work (Hierofani, 2016).

Yet race and gender barely appear in James et al.’s (2018b: 2) framing of economic geography today, ² and perhaps only loosely as “gender work and employment, cultural economy,” and “retail and consumption.” One of James et al.’s (2018a: 25–26, 11) interviewees suggested that business schools are “economic geography departments in a parallel universe that never went through the ‘cultural turn,’” and “other respondents felt that their field of study had been squeezed out by the cultural turn.” ³ Martin (2018: 2) describes the cultural turn as marginalizing and suggests that cultural and social geographers “claim” to cover economic geography issues but do so in an “anti-economics” way. Cumbers (2018) describes “traditional” economic geography as “sidelined” by the cultural turn. Barnes (2018) goes as far as to say that the cultural turn was not sustained past the mid-1990s. ⁴ Portrayed in these ways, feminist, cultural, and postcolonial economic geographers are not acknowledged as pushing the boundaries of the project in new and necessary directions. Instead, as McDowell (2016) warns in the 2016 EPA exchange, we may simply be “talking to ourselves.”

To their credit, James et al. nowhere state explicitly that they blame the cultural turn for the movement of economic geographers to B&M schools; several of their respective research trajectories have a clear allegiance to the cultural turn’s epistemological tenets and exploratory frameworks. Yet, the pre-cultural phase of economic geography continues to lurk in the background of the RGS report as somewhat of an ideal. This is underscored by the fact that the report, as well as some of the responses (as noted in the introduction), construct a dualism between “proper noun” “Economic Geographers” and “human geographers who maintain interests in geographies of economies more broadly defined” (James et al., 2018: 30, 2). The latter implies that an adjacent but distinctive body of work exists in the discipline of geography, which considers the economy but which should be viewed as distinct from the subdiscipline of economic geography. Alongside the long shadow of 1980s intellectual agendas then, we propose some reflection upon the geographies of the subdiscipline itself.

UK centricity and the geographies of economic geography

Rodriguez-Pose (2018: 2) suggests that concerns over the decline of British economic geography represent an “exercise in nostalgia” for a past era of UK dominance, as the dynamic core of economic geography relocates to other parts of Europe, Canada, or Asia. And while this exchange and the RGS report are explicitly focused on the UK, this growing multi-polarity of economic geography seems to have had little influence on how the field is understood by many of its longstanding members. Cumbers (2018: 7) acknowledges this in his response, stating that economic geography “remains too male, pale and stale” and “a largely western-centric endeavor.” James et al. (2018a) and their respondents frequently slip between assessments of economic geography in the UK versus economic geography globally. This slippage speaks to a historically outsized influence of both British economic geography and senior scholars over the subdiscipline that continues today. In addition, some of the prescriptions for economic geography raised in the RGS report and resultant exchanges display a parochial outlook, focused on UK policy (peculiar given the emphasis on general theories), and an agenda shaped around an industrial, masculine, unionized economy that has all but vanished in Britain. But even at the height of Fordism, this was only ever a partial account of the economy in places like the UK, with even less application across most of the world (Pollard, 2013; Pollard et al., 2009).

The authors of the report recognize this latter fact, drawing parallels between economic geography and work on comparative urbanisms (James et al., 2018b) as a means of highlighting how British economic geographers need to shift their gaze from the local to the global, with particular emphasis on the Global South. Yet they end this line of thinking by suggesting broadening the empirical foci of the field while simultaneously deriding work that is focused on “individual places, regions, and case studies” as “weaken[ing] the wider analytical purchase of economic geography” (James et al., 2018b: 28). Here, we ask, what does the prioritization of certain types of scholarship say about what – and where – James et al. (2018b) and their interlocutors associate with their “proper noun” form of economic geography? Regionally specific case-study research is most likely to be conducted by early-career scholars and graduate students, while the construction of grand theory tends to fall to senior scholars who are already well-respected and highly cited. It seems that one requires an extant “place” in the discipline before one can theorize on a global scale. If the aim is to reinvigorate economic geography by welcoming a new generation of scholars into the field, then we should not demean the type of work that these individuals are most well equipped and actively encouraged to undertake. This may necessitate leaving behind the idea that there could exist an orthodoxy about “who can speak with authority about the geographies of the economy” (James et al., 2018a: 25).

A broader conception of economic geography – and where it takes place – may enable us to recognize the strengths of the field and appreciate that it is not as limited as many narratives and curricula imply. This in turn could help encourage British departments to support economic geography and stem reductions in staffing. At the same time, however, we need to engage further in vital self-reflection and action on the subdiscipline’s limited geographical base and colonial legacies.

One recent indication of what may indeed be a broadening, rather than contraction, of economic geography was the inaugural financial geography spring school held in Brussels in May 2018 by the global FinGeo Network. Of 48 participants and keynotes, 11 came from British geography departments (all but two as academic staff rather than students). Several of these participants had backgrounds in other disciplines before moving into geography, and a further six participants came from UK business schools, economics departments, and other fields. Their research covered “not just the financial crisis” (Martin, 2018: 3), but also different perspectives on financial centers and real estate (Robin and Brill, 2018), inequality and welfare (Di Feliciantonio, 2016), migrant remittances and uneven development (Datta, 2017; Karwowski and Stockhammer, 2017), among other themes. Here, then, economic geography is drawing people in from other disciplines rather than losing them, as James et al. (2018a) suggest. Other promising examples of UK research centers turning out and supporting a new generation of scholars who identify with economic geography include the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Sheffield and the Critical Finance Group within the Politics and International Studies Department at the University of Warwick.

What of those places, though, that lack what James et al. (2018a: 7) term a “critical mass” of four or five economic geographers, which James et al. say is necessary in order to maintain a vibrant intellectual culture, attract large grants, and sustain teaching? We suggest that the absence of colleagues within the same specialism may actually be conducive to closer engagement with related subdisciplines or other fields – indeed it is at these intersections that some of the most innovative work takes place. For example, several of the commentaries on the RGS report cited Brexit as an issue calling out for more intensive analysis by economic geographers. Yet is it possible to explain the referendum and its implications without insights from political and cultural geography? Indeed, the economic implications of Brexit are perhaps far less clear and more unpredictable than some of its geopolitical ones, and to frame Brexit as an economic issue alone might be to misrepresent the EU as a trading union rather than the far more complex supra-national entity that it is. Work in this area is therefore a prime example of the potential value of a more open form of economic geography.

Structures of practice: the labor and institutional context of economic geography

Across the RGS report and exchanges, several authors express concerns that a perceived lack of prestige or sense of the waning significance of economic geography within geography departments is driving the exodus to B&M schools. The RGS report highlights various push and pull factors: interviewees’ perceptions that economic geography is not taken seriously on campuses, that economic geographers are not being valued, and that B&M departments offer superior workplace conditions and funding opportunities.

While we are sympathetic to the authors’ concerns about the labor market and institutional factors that are driving the “movers,” several issues related to the structural context of hiring and the academic labor market in the UK warrant further consideration. Cumbers (2018) rightly acknowledges that the context of the academic labor market and the metrics that influence hiring decisions, including the Research Excellence Framework (REF), are under-examined in the RGS report. One significant gap is a lack of attention to how the REF impact and audit criteria likely influence departments’ hiring decisions by, for example, encouraging departments to hire scholars with high citation counts (Mott and Cockayne, 2017). Staffing concerns, then, might be better understood not as a generalized condition of a decreasing supply of economic geographers, but rather as a problem with how audit metrics lead a small group of scholars to be in high demand. As such, Leyshon’s (2018) anecdote about attempting to recruit a candidate who immediately received a counter offer from his or her current employer does not, to us at least, indicate a shortage of economic geographers (which occludes the glut of PhDs clamoring for an academic post), but rather indicates the problem with a labor market in which departments compete to attract members of a small pool of A-list scholars who already have permanent and full-time positions at other universities.

Moreover, the report acknowledges the “casualisation of early career posts” (James et al., 2018a: 13) but could better connect this trend to how the REF perpetuates the precarity of “institutions, departments and individuals” that “can’t scrap for any crumbs dropped from the high table” (Cumbers, 2018: 5). Rather than normalize economic geographers’ motivations for moving to B&M schools, as Rodriguez-Pose seems to do when he characterizes the move of colleagues into B&M schools as a rational choice made by unconstrained actors, the stakes of this trend might be better articulated in terms of remuneration inequality across the university – spurred on by entrepreneurial funding mechanisms that pool resources to income-generating departments while starving the rest. Indeed, economic geography’s longstanding research strengths in labor geographies and uneven development would be well-applied to the conditions of work and knowledge production in the discipline itself. What is the broader context that made it possible for the movers to go, and relatedly, who did not or could not leave, and why?

As for those who could leave, we might reverse engineer James et al.’s (2018a) findings to yield two clues: the fact that the top two journals in economic geography are highly ranked on the Association of Business Schools list – making it possible for economic geographers who publish in these journals to be legible to B&M schools in a way that colleagues publishing elsewhere are not – and the fact that economic geographers with research agendas focused on firms and clusters/innovations are most likely to move (James et al., 2018a: 25). But instead of acknowledging this partiality, the move of this particular subset of economic geographers to B&M is taken as an alarming trend for the subdiscipline as a whole. The authors also fail to mention the relative privilege enjoyed by economic geographers who are able to consider moving in the first place; colleagues in other parts of human geography might welcome an expanded opportunity for mobility and affiliation with well-resourced schools beyond their home discipline.

While James et al. (2018a: 25) warn that “more critical/normative approaches get squeezed out” in the move to B&M over the long term, they do not offer evidence for this, making the assumption that as economic geographers move to B&M, nothing resembling what they recognize as economic geography will remain in departments of geography. But who is not making this migration? The RGS report notes that 20% of the movers are women. What percentage of those who remain are women? What sorts of scholarship about the economy remains behind in geography departments, and how might we evaluate the potential for its future?

Conclusion

James et al. (2018a: 30) close their report with two interlinked questions: “What kind of economic geography do we want, and how do we want to get there?” As early-career scholars who exist both inside and outside of the project, we have a vested interest in the consensus that emerges around these questions. As an alternative to doom and gloom prognostications for the future of economic geography, we suggest asking what the field might look like if it is driven by those purportedly left behind in the migration to B&M schools. Indeed, none of the initial contributions to this debate entertained the possibility of a renewed and rearticulated subdiscipline oriented around the economic geographers that remain. Instead of spending more energy rehearsing these well-worn conversations about the downfall or inevitable flagging of the subdiscipline, we suggest economic geographers’ efforts would be better spent highlighting the innovative research that is already energizing the subfield. We suspect we are not the only ones who occupy multiple subject positions – those critical scholars who would be left behind as a result of continued business school migrations likely have complicated disciplinary identities and may be members of other subfields including feminist geography, queer geography, labor geography, digital geography, urban geography, and political ecology, to name just some possibilities. Where might it lead if we allow the collective interest of such scholars in “geographies of economies” to cross-pollinate and enliven a new generation of economic geography?