Geography Reference
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on time-space convergence described the rising transport velocities that
brought places together, and that centered on time-space compression spoke
directly to the economic and perceptual dimensions of this process, the
notion of time-space distanciation referred to the interactions among people
as social relations di
erentially embodied these dimensions. Giddens (1987:
174) observes that “Time-space convergence provides, then, a dramatic index
of the phenomenon of which it is by now barely possible to speak without
relapsing into cliché—the shrinking world. But lying behind time-space con-
vergence there is the more di
ff
use, but profoundly important, phenomenon
of the increasingly precise coordination of the time-space sequencing of
social life.”
Giddens's views have been subjected to considerable critique. His notion of
regionalization, or the uneven e
ff
ects of time-space distanciation, has been
criticized on several grounds, including its nebulous view of spatial scale and
locale (see Urry 1991). Thrift (1996b) notes four
ff
flaws in structuration theory:
it overemphasizes the individual and underemphasizes his/her social context,
it su
fl
ers from an inadequate account of culture and the unconscious, and it
neglects questions of ethnicity and gender. Despite these shortcomings, he
asserts that it o
ff
ers an escape from the “opposition between grand theories
and knowledges and the local, situated theories and knowledges that are now
so much in vogue” (p. 61). Despite such objections, structuration theory was
widely successful in portraying societies as situated social practices rather
than outcomes of universal laws, that is, as contingent, path-dependent con-
stellations of power and knowledge, embedding them in historical time rather
than abstract time (Storper 1988).
ff
Time-space compression and world-systems theory
A fourth approach that socialized the understanding of time-space compres-
sion was world-systems theory,
first articulated by Wallerstein (1974, 1979),
an approach that is useful in raising the question, among many, of how
Western forms of time and space came to be universalized worldwide. The
origins of this perspective lay in the
Annales
school of historians initiated by
Marc Bloch and made famous by Ferdinand Braudel (1979). In explicitly
adopting a worldwide perspective on capitalism, world-systems theory is
emphatic that places can only be understood through their interactions with
one another (cf. Chase-Dunn 1989; Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997): hence, all
regions are interconnected, they never exist in isolation from one another, and
it is only possible to understand one time-space context with reference to
others. While this approach takes as its point of departure the historical
advent of capitalism, later modi
fi
cations and extensions included its applica-
tion to precapitalist societies (Frank and Gills 1993; Chase-Dunn and Hall
1997). In all contexts, places are inevitably part of a network of places
because social relations stretch across regions, so that the consequences to
action invariably spiral out from one place to another. World-systems theory
fi
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