Context sensitivity and economic-geographic (re)theorising

Abstract

Drawing upon critical realism and the literature on theorising in social sciences, this article contributes to the understanding of theorising in economic geography by highlighting the role of context throughout the theory development process. By critically reviewing two key concepts in economic geography—related variety and knowledge bases—from a critical realist theory development perspective, scholars’ sensitivity to local context through the whole theorising process is examined. We argue that the particular strength of economic geography with regard to advancing theory lies in the continuous application of concepts and theories (that is, generalities) within new contexts (that is, confrontation with new particularities).

De‐Centering in Practice: Governance through Co‐ordination in Spanish Economic Geography

“…The regional approach, so deeply rooted in the Spanish geographical mindset, does not fit at all with the single-argument paper where energy is devoted to theoretical development and only stylised facts (Clark, 1998) are discussed. Yet, we feel much closer to Gibson-Graham's (2014) claim for weak theory and thick description: careful accounts of the contexts where economic processes happen and economic actors interact should not be downplayed as second-tier geographical knowledge (Gong & Hassink, 2020) if the geographical de-centering of EG is more than a sort of ethnographic curiosity. To be honest, while reading canonical EG case studies about foreign places, I often miss more flesh around the article's theoretical/conceptual bones, and I keep wondering what is really going on up there.…”

“…Spanish EG has opened its own path mostly by importing theories/concepts and checking them against the empirical world in long-term coordinated projects. If understanding of contexts is an essential step in the re-theorising process (Gong & Hassink, 2020) that gives theories explanatory power in different geographical settings, the Spanish way-of-EG is worthy of merit.…”

Rethinking the role of local knowledge networks in territorial innovation models

“…At first sight, this emerging deficit masquerades as another manifestation of the longlasting conflict in (geographical) research of identifying generalisable mechanisms (quasi-universal mechanisms related to local knowledge networks), on the one hand, and their incomparableness due to context-specificity on the other (Cox and Evenhuis 2020;Gong and Hassink 2020). However, nothing could be further from the truth, as several contributions in this special issue show.…”

Retheorizing industrial–institutional coevolution: a multidimensional perspective

“…Following Gong and Hassink (2020), theory-building in economic geography in a critical-realist perspective (Sayer, 1992(Sayer, , 2000 attempts to achieve abstraction from context, or what Bathelt and Glückler (2003, p. 128) call 'de-contextualization', through repeated retheorizing that makes concepts applicable to a wider range of contexts. Gong and Hassink (2020, p. 482) explicitly refer to coevolution as a concept that has not yet been successfully retheorized as it 'still lacks enough context-sensitive empirical research to adapt it well and convincingly to questions in economic geography'.…”