The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Economic Geography

This most recent Companion to Economic Geography is an impressive reminder of the diverse, restless nature of economic geography in meeting its mandate to describe, explain and shape the remarkable (and changing) geographic diversity of the global economy and its integration. Thus, the search for new framings, turns, methods, interdisciplinary connections, spaces and scalarities, elaborations or revisions of (post-this, neo-that) previous conceptualizations, and the incorporation of marginalized voices or places largely defines the spirit and purpose of the new Companion, along with a more proselytizing ambition. The editors are keenly aware of economic geography’s fragmentation, including its unsure ‘estranged’ connections with economics, and they offer Companion as a plea for ‘an engaged and critical pluralism’ (p. 2) that is loosely tied together by acknowledgment of Marxism’s influence on the subject. The basic dimensions of the new Companion, compared with the earlier version (SHEPPARD and BARNES, 2000), confirm economic geography’s restlessness. Thus, the new edition has three editors, has expanded from thirty to thirty-nine chapters (plus six editorial introductions), and from 536 to 646 pages, while most contributors (excepting five or six) are new. Indeed,Companion has its own distinctive rationale and structure, organized around three major sections on trajectories, spatialities and boundaries, with the twentyfour-chapter spatialities section subdivided into three parts (accumulation and value, regulation and governance, and embodiment and identity). In general, the book seeks to capture the key issues in economic geography that have emerged since the year 2000, a significant contribution being to highlight the work of many relatively new scholars. The invitation to contributors to add personal signatures on their articles enlightens and enlivens methodological choices they have pursued. As long recognized, theorizing in economic geography is derivative and eclectic, and research organized around the elaboration of a plethora of middle-range or auxiliary concepts that connect with varying precision to different paradigmatic foundations. The editors forcefully argue, however, that ‘Like it not, Anglophone economic geography remains a postMarxist subdiscipline haunted by Marx’, in which ‘David Harvey remains a profoundly influential figure’ (p. 11). Indeed, the editors’ hopes for constructive engagement among pluralistic perspectives entail the implication if not insistence that any pursuit of economic geography needs to reveal where it stands, for or against (or somewhere between), in relation to Marxism and especially Harvey. Happily, the contributors of Companion are neither ghosts nor haunted and, both with and on occasion without reference to Marxism and Harvey, they successfully elaborate the diversity, imagination and significance of a large swath of economic geography over the past decade with insight and passion. If the book is long, the individual chapters are relatively short and punchy. The ‘Trajectories’ section has reviews of economic geography as a whole and specific topics and perspectives. With respect to broader statements, three Marxist-inspired (or related) fascinating reflections, framings and advisories by Walker, Gibson-Graham and Mann begin the book. On a personal note, my present departmental colleague Geoff Mann’s ebullient, detective story-inspired argument for economic geographers to consider themselves more generally as Marxist political economists, and that economic geography is at least a good home for such a responsibility, recalls a starker message by my former colleague, Michael E. Eliot Hurst (ELIOT HURST, 1980), that Marxism was helping to ‘de-define’ economic geography. On more specific themes, Bakker and Hall provide well-balanced reviews of recent research trends respectively linking economic geography with the environment and the economic geography of finance; while chapters by Yeung and Werner bring important, if different, messages from the experience of ‘peripheral’ (nonWestern, core) countries to economic geography’s attention. Meanwhile, O’Neill’s ‘rediscovery’ of corporate geography with a Marxist coating provides an interesting case study, even if the coat is rather loose fitting, and the conclusion that multinational corporations (MNCs) are firmly embedded and dominate market structures in capitalist economies is scarcely new. The huge section on ‘Spatialities’ is, needless to say, extremely diverse, and chapters vary considerably in their focus and readability. Well-structured, insightful Regional Studies, 2013