Editorial : Constructing an evolutionary economic geography 1 . Taking evolution seriously in economic geography

Editorial: Constructing an evolutionary economic geography 1. Taking evolution seriously in economic geography Change is one of capitalism's constants. As a mode of economic organization, capitalism never stands still. Its central imperative—the search for profit and wealth creation— drives a perpetual process of economic flux. Every day new firms, new products, new technologies, new industries and new jobs are added to the economy, whilst old firms, products, technologies, industries and jobs disappear. Joseph Schumpeter once famously described this constant flux as a process of 'creative destruction' that 'incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one' (1942, 82). The economy, in other words, evolves. Traditionally, economists have not accorded much attention to this issue: in mainstream theory, for example, any notion of dynamics is limited to the ineluctable movement of an abstract economy, in abstract time, to some ex ante equilibrium state, regardless of where it started from. But over the past two decades or so a new evolutionary economics has emerged that seeks to understand precisely how the real economy evolves through real time (see, for example, To be sure, the rush of enthusiasm to adopt an 'evolutionary perspective' has tended to produce a plethora of self-declared approaches—a 'massive hybridization of theory,' as Dopfer and Potts (2004a, 195) put it—rather than a single coherent body of concepts and methods. Nevertheless, although the field of evolutionary economics is still without 'stabilized shared meaning' (Klaes, 2004), and remains somewhat embryonic, some basic principles do seem to be crystallizing. According to Witt (2003, 2006), the key focus of evolutionary economics is on the processes and mechanisms by which the economy self-transforms itself from within. Thus theories on economic evolution have to satisfy three basic requirements: they must be dynamical; they must deal with irreversible processes; and they must cover the generation and impact of novelty as the ultimate source of self-transformation. The first criterion rules out any kind of static analysis, whilst the second rules out all 'dynamical' theories that describe stationary states or equilibrium movements. Rather, in the context of evolutionary economics, dynamical refers to such features as emergence, convergence, divergence and other irregular patterns and trajectories that are rooted in real historical time. However, as Witt emphasizes, the third criterion of novelty—its generation and its role in economic transformation—is crucial to any theory of economic evolution. It is the creative capacity of …