Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

As part of a widespread engagement with contemporary cultural and social theory, many economic geographers are abandoning the search for analytical or “general” explanations of the processes determining the evolution of the economic landscape in favor of contextual or “local” explanations that are designed to take account of the complex construction of societal processes. In the wake of this broadly defined social and cultural turn in economic geography, it is now conventional to conceive of the modeling tradition as part of an historical legacy resulting from a particular set of cultural and institutional practices that constituted the quantitative and theoretical revolution of the 1960s (Cloke et al., 1991; Barnes, this volume). This historical moment consisted of a distinctive set of presuppositions about the way in which the social world is constructed (ontology) and how we know that social world (epistemology). It is commonly supposed that, within the modeling tradition, the objective is to account for observed patterns of spatial economic activity using mathematical models and quantification. In addition, these mathematical models should be grounded in the competitive economic processes that operate between individual producers and consumers.The supposition that we should employ mathematical models and quantification to reveal the spatial configuration of the economic landscape ... log in or subscribe to read full text