Regulating ‘the firm’ and sociocultural practices in industrial geography II

In my first progress report (Yeung, 2000a) I concluded that a more pluralistic industrial geography in recent years has gone beyond conventional economic issues by incorporating some ‘new’ economic knowledges and by providing good glimpses of alternative worlds of industrial change. This incorporation relates to the introduction of social and cultural understandings of conventional economic issues to enable a better appreciation of ‘the economy’ as we know it. Some observers may argue, however, that this kind of industrial geography has diverted our attention away from the concerns of mainstream economics and regional science, and that this trend is in itself dangerous because industrial geography has become less concerned with ‘industrial’ issues. Reflecting certain general theoretical developments in economics, the ‘firm’ has been a contested analytical category in industrial geography. Much neoclassical industrial geography takes the firm as a self-contained and homogeneous ‘black box’ capable of producing economic outcomes in space. This conception of the firm is clearly evident in the ‘geography of enterprise’ approach that was preoccupied with the locational and behavioural patterns of the firm in space. This approach viewed the firm as an unproblematic category. The emergence of a radical approach in the 1970s and 1980s led to a major theoretical and empirical reorientation of research in industrial geography. This radical literature subsumed the firm under dominant capitalist class relations such that capital’s logic explains the spatial behaviour of the firm. Put in their historical contexts, these different perspectives on the firm have served the purposes of industrial geography well by analysing the spatial organization of the firm. In this report, I aim to show that the idea of bringing the social and the cultural into Progress in Human Geography 25,2 (2001) pp. 293–302