What A Difference The Place

Antipode 19:3, 1987, p . 354-363
ISSN 0066 4812

Debates and Reports
WHAT A DIFFERENCE THE PLACE
MAKES: THE NEW STRUCTURALISM
OF LOCALITY
ALLAN COCHRANET
The last few years have seen the rise of a ’new geography’,
coming out of a Marxist or - perhaps more accurately - political
economy tradition, but with an emphasis on the importance of
place and a belief that ”places are becomingless alike than in the
1960s a nd 1950s” (Duncan and Goodwin, 1985: 230). The ’new
geography’ has been associated with the rise of a form of realism
(particularly associated with Sayer, 1984) as a philosophy of t he
social sciences, and of geography in particular. The distinction
between necessary and contingent relations which is so important
to realism has been presented as a means ofacknowledging the
uniqueness of different places, without giving up the idea that
their development also reflects the interaction of general
processes. As a result geography can no longer be seen as the
Cinderella subject of the social sciences, borrowing most of its
methods and ideas from other disciplines. Instead it is able to
make its own claims that social, economic and political processescannot be discussed without being informed by geographical
analysis.
But the responses to the ’new geography’ have not been universally favourable. There have been two principal criticisms. One
has been the claim that, for all its apparent novelty, the ‘new
geography’ has not effectively broken with the underlying
orthodoxies of the ’old’ Althusserian, structural, Marxism.
Althusser has beenrejected, but only in favour of an apparently
more flexible version of structuralism, in which it is agreed in
principle that actors are important, but in practice it is difficult to
discover what their importance is. Theoretical categories, it is
argued, are still imposed on actual social movements in such a
way that the internal dynamic of the movements is obscured
t Faculty of SocialSciences, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes.

THE NEW STRUCTURALISM OF LOCALITY 355

rather than explored. This is essentially the argument put forward
by Saunders and Williams (1986). They criticise the tendency ”of
researchers to ’code’ social findings onto a pre-existing theoretical
system and to interpet social observations in accordance with
prevailing political programmes.In our view,” they continue,
“the break with Althusserianism has not broken these tendencies
but refined them. Our methods today are more subtle, our
theories are more flexible, and our concepts are less all-embracing,
but the orthodoxy which informs our work - in our teaching, our
research, our writing, and our debates - is still essentially the same.
This orthodoxy prevents us addressingnew ideas or responding
openly to fresh empirical insights” (Saunders and Williams, 1986:
399). As a way out of this ‘orthodoxy’ we are advised to give more
serious attention to the ideas of the ’new right’ and to return to
more detailed case studies.
The second criticism of the ‘new geography’ has been equally
sharp, but takes almost exactly the opposite line. It has starts from
the viewthat the increased focus on localities and places has
encouraged a retreat from theory - and from Marxist theory, in particular - towards a concentration on the collection of empirical data
stressing the uniqueness of individual places. Harvey (forthcoming) has argued that this shift reflects the retreat of academic
Marxism in the face of attack from the ‘new right’ in government.
And, in Antipode, Neil Smith (1987: 403) sharply criticises realism,
which “taught us to distinguish between necessary and contingent relations, leading ultimately to the proposition that
abstract theory pertains to necessary relations while concrete
geographical patterns are the product of contingent relations and
are hardly accessible to abstract theory.’’ As a result, he argues,
theory and empirical...