The social construction of scale

Fruitful new avenues of theorization and research have been opened by recent writings on the production of geographical scale. However, this outpouring of research on scale production and on rescaling processes has been accompanied by a notable analytical blunting of the concept of geographical scale as it has been blended unreflexively into other core geographical concepts such as place, locality, territory and space. This essay explores this methodological danger: first, through a critical reading of Sallie Marston's (2000) recent article in this journal on 'The social construction of scale'; second, through a critical examination of the influential notion of a politics 'of ' scale. A concluding section suggests that our theoretical grasp of geographical scale could be significantly advanced if scaling processes are distinguished more precisely from other major dimensions of sociospatial structuration under capitalism. Eleven methodological hypotheses for confronting this task are then proposed.

2008

In the past two decades human geographers have intensely theorized scale, and extended claims that it is a foundational element of geographic theory. Yet attendant with this move has been a growing concern that scale has become an unwieldy concept laden with multiple, contradictory and problematic meanings. I share that concern, and argue that a similar debate about the usefulness of `identity' as a conceptual category in social science offers instructive insights. Paralleling recent critiques of identity categories such as nation and race, I view the conceptual confusion surrounding scale — and scale politics — as, in part, the consequence of failing to make a clear distinction between scale as a category of practice and category of analysis. In adopting scale as a category of analysis geographers tend to reify it as a fundamental ontological entity, thereby treating a social category employed in the practice of sociospatial politics as a central theoretical tool. I argue that this analytical manoeuvre is neither helpful nor necessary, and outline its consequences in analyses of the politics of scale. Finally, I sketch the altered contours of a research programme for the politics of scale if we take this injunction seriously — both in terms of how we theorize scale as a category of practice and what becomes the focus of scale politics research.

Handbook on the Geographies of Regions and Territories

The Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2024

Entrada na The Encyclopedia of Human Geography

Political Geography, 1997

Geographic scale, referring to the nested hierarchy of bounded spaces of differing size, such as the local, regional, national and global, is a familiar and taken-for-granted concept for political geographers and political analysts. In much contemporary analysis of political organization and action, geographic scale is treated simply as different levels of analysis (from local to global) in which the investigation of political processes is set. Recently this

Neil Brenner's response (this issue) to 'The social construction of scale' raises a host of excellent points that might, as he intends, help focus and refine the blossoming discussion of geographical scale. His larger argument, that the popularity of scale theories has led to a certain 'analytical blunting' of this sharply defined concept and that scale is increasingly conflated with broader discussions of space, is surely correct. Yet two aspects of Brenner's response are troubling: first, the idiosyncratic genealogy of scale theories he wishes to assert; and second, the refusal of feminist arguments about the scale of the household. Both moves compound and exemplify rather than resolve the problem he identifies. In the hope of sharpening the analytical debate, therefore, we would like to offer a brief sympathetic critique of these two foundations of Brenner's approach to scale theory. Our argument is that the analytical blunting of scale can best be countered through the constant reinvention of scale theory ahead of the fetishist juggernaut. For exactly this reason the original article insisted on the constitutive but largely unheralded role of social reproduction and consumption, in conjunction with social production, in the production of geographical scale. It seems to us that Brenner's commitment to a politics of scale is, following Lefebvre, only 'spacedeep'.

Review of International Political Economy, 2009

Territory, Politics, Governance, 2013

A number of recent contributions have been critical of those theorizations of scale and territory that emerged in the last two decades. They have argued, variably, that a de-centered world of flows and networks, whether a recent phenomenon or something that is in the nature of space relations, trumps the assumptions of verticality, centricity and fixity that are, in their view, central to those theorizations. They define their view of space as relational in contrast to what they believe to be the non-relational view embedded in concepts of scale and territory. These critiques have been met, in turn, by a number of ripostes which argue, essentially, that there is no contradiction between relational views of space and the concepts of scale and territory. In both the critiques and the rebuttals, though, there is a curious refusal to seriously engage with concrete social relations; relations that make scale and territory and pace the rebuttals, necessary features of spatial organization rather than contingent ones.

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2005

The concept of scale in human geography has been profoundly transformed over the past 20 years. And yet, despite the insights that both empirical and theoretical research on scale have generated, there is today no consensus on what is meant by the term or how it should be operationalized. In this paper we critique the dominant – hierarchical– conception of scale, arguing it presents a number of problems that cannot be overcome simply by adding on to or integrating with network theorizing. We thereby propose to eliminate scale as a concept in human geography. In its place we offer a different ontology, one that so flattens scale as to render the concept unnecessary.We conclude by addressing some of the political implications of a human geography without scale.