Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
agency specii cs I mean the actions individuals engage in and the frames they adopt when
they make sense of the past, orient themselves to the future, and construct the present in
light of the contingencies of the moment. Because the structural contexts of action and
interpretation are themselves temporal (relational) i elds, agency is 'analytically situated
within the l ow of time' (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998, p. 963) and thus inherently evolu-
tionary. The challenge for evolutionary analysis is to explain the evolution of structures
that enable individuals not only to act but to act
meaningfully
.
The most interesting aspects of human geography are probably those that are modii ed,
prevented, enforced, or weakened by individuals who plan, improvise, reiterate, imitate,
communicate, or forget. As agentic activities and orientations, these aspects should be
at the core of an understanding of clusters as structurally and behaviorally complex
socio-economic systems in which intentionality is everything and little is left to chance.
However, many cluster researchers working from an evolutionary perspective have
taken a rather distant view of agency. Complexity theorists emphasize the importance of
diversity among elements of a complex adaptive system but they normally have little to
say about how exactly the system self-organizes to enable 'symmetry-breaking', the con-
struction of a 'spontaneous order', or the reproduction of a 'deep structure'. Population
ecologists emphasize context in terms of the cultural and material properties of resource
environments but are relatively insensitive to the micro-level processes and mechanisms
by which environments are enacted and populations are maintained as meaningful social
units. Co-evolutionary thinking tries to correct for this oversight by noting the l uidity of
boundaries between levels of action, but it is relatively silent on exactly how cross-level
connections are made and adjusted to, for example, prevent dissipative structures from
turning into chaotic structures. What is needed for a more comprehensive evolutionary
explanation is an understanding of how agents in the system interact with exogenous
forces to ensure the survival of the emergent order, or to push for a new order.
I suggest that a better understanding of these issues calls for a more i ne-grained and
temporally sensitive analysis of human agency. The social-evolutionary perspective
outlined below puts agency at the center of the analysis, using the general Darwinian
principles of variation, selection, and retention to explain the direction and speed with
which a complex entity, such as a cluster of individuals and organizations, evolves. The
Darwinist algorithm
3
treats current structures as the outcome of an evolutionary process
made possible by the competitive selection of heritable variations and the transmission
of selected variations to future generations. The social-evolutionary perspective takes
human intentionality seriously, without imposing essentialist assumptions concerning
human nature. For evolution to work, one need not assume, for example, that humans
are predisposed, genetically or otherwise, to engage in specii c behaviors such as trust-
based cooperation or self-interested competition.
3. Basic components of the social-evolutionary approach
Evolution is not a linear and expedient optimization process but a context-dependent
and typically l awed process of adaptation to local contingencies, involving human
agents who are intentional but limited in their capacities. The question of whether indi-
viduals are mindlessly or mindfully intentional is of interest to evolutionary theorists
more at higher levels of analysis, where actors are seen as entities strategically engaged
in collaboration, rivalry, identity building, and the like. Of the evolutionary perspectives
