Theorizing Economic Geographies

Material Economic Geographies

(Christian Berndt)
The starting point of this ongoing theoretical endeavor is the observation that explanations in the social sciences often do not explain anything at all. What happens instead is the mobilization of conceptual black boxes as final objects, that is, entities that are taken for granted and are rarely reflected upon. Within the subdiscipline of Economic Geography there are many examples, as a rule shared with other disciplines, such as the market, the firm, the value chain, labor and so on. For some time now a transdisciplinary movement has emerged whose representatives take issue with this approach. Rather than starting with an imagination of our world as a mosaic of clearly limited and demarcated pre-given entities (economy, society, state, market, firm, individual subject etc.), the key question is to understand the processes and operations that qualify persons, organizations or things as being “economic”. Regardless of their intellectual background, contributions look at the rationalities, frames of action and technologies which render things, behaviors and processes “economic”. Conceptualized as being the result of multifaceted processes of economization, shared understandings of what it is to be “economic” are always precarious and therefore open to contestation. (Discussion Paper (PDF, 71 Kb)) 

 

Systems theory in Geography

(Pascal Goeke)

http://www.systemtheoretische-geographie.de/