INSTITUTIONS , SOCIAL RELATIONS AND SPACE : THE LIMITS TO INSTITUTIONALISM IN ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

Copyright This online paper may be cited in line with the usual academic conventions. You may also download it for your own personal use. This paper must not be published elsewhere (e.g. mailing lists, bulletin boards etc.) without the author's explicit permission Please note that : • it is a draft; • if you cite, copy or quote this paper you must include this copyright note; • this paper must not be used for commercial purposes or gain in any way; • you should observe the conventions of academic citation in a version of the following form: Abstract Economic geographers are increasingly drawing upon the work of institutional economists in constructing accounts of local and regional economic development. In this context, institutional perspectives have been used to open up a 'third way' between the orthodoxies of neo-classical economics and Marxist political economy. In this paper, we assess the development of institutionalist perspectives as deployed in economic geography. Whilst generally supportive of the notion that the economy is socially embedded and economic life therefore path-dependent and context-specific (Amin, 1999), we are concerned at the tendency to essentialise the region as a key scale of economic organisation, thereby neglecting the contested nature of regional development processes. At the same time, we argue that institutional work has failed to consider how regional development pathways are shaped by wider processes of uneven development and political-economic regulation. These limitations point to the continuing need for critical perspectives on regional development that are sensitive to issues of power, scale and unevenness. In trying to reinsert 'the political' into regional development thought, the paper seeks to connect institutionalist insights to recent political economy approaches that stress the dynamic and relational nature of space and scale. Whilst inevitably encountering some conceptual and methodological problems, such a theoretical synthesis could combine sensitivities to difference, contingency and specificity with a stronger appreciation of wider social conflicts and inequalities.

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