Theorizing practice in economic geography: Foundations, challenges, and possibilities

By Andrew Jones, James T. Murphy. 2011

229 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Over the last decade or so there has been an identifiable shift in the interests of many economic geographers towards a concern with practices: stabilized, routinized, or improvised social actions that constitute and reproduce economic space, and through and within which socioeconomic actors and communities embed knowledge, organize production activities, and interpret and derive meaning from the world. Although this shift has gained significant momentum its general theoretical significance remains somewhat unclear and the concept is vulnerable to criticisms that it is incoherent, too ‘micro-scale’ in emphasis, unable to provide valid links between everyday practices and higher-order phenomena (eg, institutions, class structures), and that, in some cases, it lacks a sound political economy. This paper argues that while it undoubtedly has limitations, the practice-oriented shift represents an ongoing development of a longstanding and heterodox field of social scientific interest from both within and beyond the subdiscipline. We first highlight the diverse strands of economic geography scholarship that have an explicit interest in practices and then propose an epistemological and methodological framework for a practice-oriented economic geography. The framework is based on the polemical argument that insight from both critical realist and actor-network perspectives can provide the basis to better demarcate practices in relation to their social and spatiotemporal dimensions. It goes on to outline a reformulated retroductive methodology to assess the impacts and theoretical significance of particular economic-geographical practices. The paper concludes that practice offers a potentially powerful, yet complementary, epistemological tool that can create conceptual space for the study of a wide range of socioeconomic and geographical phenomena.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science, Urban Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7fe0716b97c25d8fc7795c342990b008b0f6f7e7

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Citations in the corpus

Geographies of money and finance II (2012, background): “Jones and Murphy (2010a) label this ‘practiceorientated research’ in which practice is understood as ‘contextually situated social processes where agents and structures co-constitute one another’ (Jones and Murphy, 2010b: 303).”
Transnational linkages in sustainability experiments:A typology and the case of solar photovoltaic energy in India (2015, background): “Third, a growing body of literature explores the micro-level of transitions by moving away from the classical structure-agency dichotomy, and explores the practices that make (or break) transition processes (Shove et al., 2012; Jones and Murphy, 2011).”
For Polanyian Economic Geographies (2013, methodology): “This said, the full implications of the notion of the socially constructed economy have yet to be confronted, for all its tacit support across the subdiscipline (cf Jones and Murphy, 2011; Vidal and Peck, 2012).”
Institutional change in economic geography (2014, methodology): “This approach draws on a similar understanding and agenda as the practice approach (Jones and Murphy, 2010).”
Integrating Finance into Global Production Networks (2014, background): “While the authors believe that a quantitative approach is necessary to measure and track value in GPNs, a more sociological approach that uses economic practices as an empirical lens would also offer valuable and complementary insights (JONES and MURPHY, 2011).”