变革中的西方经济地理学:制度、文化、关系与尺度转向

1980年代以来,在社会科学日益走向多元化和"后现代主义"的背景下,西方经济地理学开始了一个前所未有的急剧变动时期,无论是研究的主要论题,还是研究的内容、理论和方法以及表述的方式与风格,均经历并正在经历深刻的变革。与上一世纪50-60年代的"计量和理论革命"和70- 80年代的"马克思主义转向"相比,这次变革不仅发生在方法论和认识论层面,而且许多也发生在本体论层面,它使西方经济地理学的视角走向了高度的多样化和复杂化。本文在分析这次变革的起点:马克思主义转向及其批判的基础上,从制度转向、文化转向、关系转向、尺度转向4个相互交织的方面,系统勾勒了西方经济地理学理论视角变动的主线,讨论了这些视角变动的方向、成因、意义和局限性。

WESTERN ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY IN TRANSFORMATION:INSITITUTIONAL, CULTURAL, RELATIONAL AND SCALAR TURNS

Since the foundation as a formal sub-discipline in geography, western economic geography has always concerned on the spatial nature of economic activities:regional synthesis, difference and differentiation. But how to describe, explain and regulate the space and place of economic activities has made a great transformation with the changes of the development of capitalism practices and the mainstream perspectives of western social sciences. Over the second half of the twentieth century, western economic geography is characterized by many twists and turns of substantive focus and sudden changes of theoretical mood. Since the 1980s, there have been some enormous intellectual transformation and rapid growth in western economic geography as the results responsive to the great changes in external economic conditions, to the unfolding of political events, to the post-modernism philosophies, and to the play of professional ambitions and rivalries. Compared to the 'quantitative and theoretical revolution' in 1950s and 1960s and the "Marxism turn" in the 1970s and early 1980s, this transformation has not only happened on the methodology and epistemology but also happened on the ontology, which has made the analytical perspectives and substantive focus of western economic geography much more diversified and complicated and has increasingly reshaped the nature of the sub-discipline and connected it to wider discourses within the social sciences. This paper analyses this transformation in four dimensions:institutional turn, cultural turn, relational turn and scalar turn. Through the institutional, cultural, relational and scalar turns, western economic geography has been making a great progress and becoming a new paradigm named as "new economic geographies" in which more attention has been paid to socio-cultural practices and institutional foundations of economic geographies and performances. Although this great transformation, especially the cultural turn, in certain senses, saved western economic geography from what might otherwise have been a musty oblivion, and made this sub-discipline revival and alive, and attracted highly attention from western other social sciences, however, western economic geography is also at a critical intellectual turning point. How to deal with the relationship between it and other social sciences especially "mainstream economics" and "heterodox economic knowledge" is very important to its further development.