Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Boggs, 2003; Bode, 2001; Boschma, 2004, 2005; Cooke and Morgan, 1998; Fuchs and
Shapira, 2005; Gertler, 2005; Grabher, 1993; Hassink, 2005a and 2005b; Kenney and
von Burg, 2001; Storper, 1995, 1997). Such economic-geographic studies employing the
concept of path dependence rel ect a growing interest in the historical dynamics of eco-
nomic landscapes, a realisation that to understand geographically uneven development,
in all of its manifestations, it is necessary to create a space for history.
In one sense, of course, this recognition of the importance of history by economic
geographers is not entirely new. The notion of 'cumulative causation', which is closely
related to path dependence ideas, enjoyed some degree of popularity within the disci-
pline in the 1970s, though unfortunately it has since largely slipped from visibility. Much
Marxist economic geography in the 1980s was concerned to explain uneven regional
development as an historical process. For example, Massey's (1984) important work on
the spatial divisions of labour was founded on the argument that the economic landscape
inherits the legacies of its past development and that these legacies exert an inl uence on
its present and future development. And David Harvey's central aim was (and still is)
to explain uneven regional development as a historical process driven by capitalism's
episodic phases of accumulation and crisis, as a dialectic between preserving the values
of past commitments made at a particular place and time, and devaluing them to open
up fresh room for accumulation at some future point in time (Harvey, 1982, 1985, 2006;
see also Smith, 1984). But the recent 'evolutionary turn' in economic geography is dis-
tinctive in that it draws its inspiration explicitly from evolutionary ideas and concepts,
from evolutionary economics, universal Darwinism and even complexity theory, rather
than from the meta-narrative of Marxist political economy (see, for example, Boschma
and Frenken, 2006; Essletzbichler and Rigby, 2007; Martin and Sunley, 2007). It is
within this embryonic subi eld of evolutionary economic geography that the concept of
path dependence has been accorded particular theoretical and empirical signii cance.
Of especial interest is the question of whether and to what extent the evolution of the
economic landscape is a path-dependent process, whether the mechanisms that make for
path dependence have a quintessentially local dimension in their form and operation,
and thus whether, in this sense, path dependence can be seen as a process or ef ect that
is locally contingent and locally emergent, and hence to a large extent 'place dependent'
(Martin and Sunley, 2006).
However, as we argued in our previous conspectus of the concept (Martin and Sunley,
2006), despite the increasing use of path dependence terminology and notions by eco-
nomic geographers, there has been little extensive or detailed discussion of what the
ontology called for by Scott might look like. In fact, economic geographers have tended
to apply the concept of path dependence as if it is self-evident and wholly unproblematic.
As Glasmeier (2000, pp. 269-70) complained, in economic geography the concept of:
path dependence is often invoked uncritically as an explanation for a particular industrial [and,
we might add, regional] experience. Usually lying behind the notion of path dependence is a
series of factors that together add up to a directional bias. Just exactly what provokes path
dependency is rarely communicated, however; this often erroneously leads to uni-dimensional
invocations of the term.
We would go further and suggest that the very idea of 'path-dependent economic evolu-
tion' as advocated by Scott is itself in need of careful interpretation and conceptualisation
