Towards a Relational Economic Geography: Old Wine in New Bottles?

Recent theoretical and empirical advances in economic geography have contributed to the emergence of what might be termed a “relational turn” that focuses primarily on the ways in which socio-spatial relations of actors are intertwined with processes of economic changes at various geographical scales – global, local, or glocal. This mapping of actororiented “relational geometries” fundamentally challenges the neoclassical economic geography in which economic actors are atomized in order to ascribe causal power to abstract spatial regularities in economic processes. A relational economic geography, however, places at its forefront crucial explanatory power in socio-spatial relations among such actors as individuals, firms, institutions, and other nonhuman actants. To a significant extent, this relational turn in economic geography is associated with the rise of “new economic geographies” in which more attention has been paid to socio-cultural practices and institutional foundations of economic geographies and performances. In this paper, I aim to survey critically the antecedents and key frameworks in this relational economic geography and to develop some conceptual categories in order to steer this “relational turn” towards the ontological level. I argue that existing analyses of socio-spatial relations crosscutting different territorial formations and geographical scales have not paid sufficient attention to how power is inscribed and works itself out in relational geometries. By theorizing different effects of power and types of relational geometries, this paper identifies different configurations of power and governance in relational geometries that in turn explain their causal effects in producing concrete/spatial outcomes. Some implications for research methodology and empirical studies are addressed in the concluding section. Keyword: relational geometries, power, actors, socio-spatial relations, economic geography.