消费社会下商业地理研究的新取向

二十世纪二、三十年代以来，在实证主义和行为主义的影响下，商业地理学研究多聚焦于空间结构与边界、商业活动的区位与业态、商业活动中人的行为等经典领域。九十年代之后，网络经济的快速发展和大数据的应用，使实体商业与电子购物的关系、消费者行为的空间分析等主题，成为新的研究焦点，并积极推动商业地理在研究内容和研究方法上的革新。伴随着消费力量在现代社会的崛起，商业地理所关注的商业空间和活动，不仅被消费地理从社会文化的视角进行诠释，而且在主题上扩展至更为多元的消费实践和社会关系网络。人本主义、新马克思主义、结构主义等流派的思想，也被广泛用于消费空间的解读。在一个更为广阔的社会背景和更贴近日常生活的框架下，商业地理将不局限于对物质层面的关注，而是处于一个更加开放的知识体系之中。

THE PROGRESS AND PROSPECT OF COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY IN THE CONTEXT OF CONSUMPTION SOCIETY

Since the 1920s and 30s, with the influence of positivism and behaviorism, the focus of commercial geography has revolved around such issues as spatial structure and boundary of commercial activities, location and types of commercial industries, and the impacts of consumer behaviors. Resulting from the rapid development of internet economy and the application of big data since the 1990s, new issues, such as the relationship between physical and online shopping, and the spatial analysis on consumer behavior, have been emerging and profoundly facilitated the theoretical and methodological transitions of commercial geography. The rising power of consumption in modern society has further entailed the adoption of new perspectives, e.g. the socio-cultural perspective from consumption geography, to interpret commercial space and activities, and the extension to include more diverse consumption practices and social relation networks. The theories and explanations derived from humanism, neo-Marxism and structuralism are also widely applied to better understand the consumption space. Situated in an increasingly complicated social context and with a tendency to pay more attention to daily life, the research of commercial geography is no longer confined to the material aspects, but is turning into a more open system of knowledge advancement. This paper summarizes the ongoing scholarly enquiries in commercial geography. Based on a brief review of the traditional research of commercial geography, the strands of literature to identify the new change in response to the growth of ecommerce, to apply new technic and methodologies which provide a more comprehensive and systematic understanding, and to explore new analytical perspectives in a dramatically changing social context are evaluated.