Progress report

Progress in Human Geography

2019, Vol. 43(5) 948–958
Geographies of production I: ª The Author(s) 2018
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Global production and uneven sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/0309132518760095
journals.sagepub.com/home/phg
development

Marion Werner
SUNY-Buffalo, New York, USA

Abstract
Serial crises in the global economy have spurred renewed debate over contemporary transformations in
geographies of uneven development. Global production network (GPN) studies have not been inured to this
trend; indeed, in both geography and development sociology, a variety of approaches have emerged to grasp
the multi-scaled, relational process of uneven development through the lens of global production. This
progress report parses three of these: firm-centric scholarship that increasingly incorporates disinvestment
and devaluation as an empirical ‘dark side’ to global production network participation; Marxist approaches
that explore the evolving relationship between global inequality and global production; and neo-Marxist
studies of regional conjunctures that highlight the constraints, contingencies and colonial legacies shaping
uneven development in both long-standing and new ways. While their epistemological differences and
normative assumptions are mostly incommensurable, more dialogue across these positions is nonetheless
warranted if scholars are to grasp the vicissitudes upending received patterns of uneven development and
portending uncertain futures.

Keywords
conjunctural analysis, disarticulations, global commodity chains, global production networks, uneven
development

I Introduction investigate the value, power and embeddedness

Uneven development is back on the agenda of
economic geography after several decades of
relative neglect. Since the 1990s, the sub-field
has been primarily animated by its explorations
of ‘the nodal, the near and the networked’, tak-
ing the field’s focus on ‘the sociospatial, the
systemic and the structural’ as a largely taken-
for-granted platform for the cultivation of vari-
ous heterodox concepts and conversations
(Peck, 2016: 307). Among the most prevalent
of the latter is the global production network
(GPN) framework, associated with the
Manchester-Singapore school. GPN scholars
of transactionally linked but geographically dis-
persed production arrangements. The geogra-
phy framework was developed in conversation
with development sociology’s research program
on global commodity chains and, later, global
value chains. A detailed discussion of the dif-
ferences between these heuristics can be found
elsewhere (e.g. Bair, 2009). Suffice it to say that
Corresponding author:
Marion Werner, Department of Geography, SUNY-Buffalo,
Buffalo, NY 14260, USA.
Email: wernerm@buffalo.edu
Werner
geographers have sought to foreground more
robust territorial and non-firm dimensions that
were given short shrift by their sociology coun-
terparts. Despite differences in emphasis, how-
ever, GPN and global value chain studies both
train their analytical gaze on the advantages that
accrue to firms and regions that leverage their
participation in transnational supply chains to
access higher value niches in the production
structure; this is what the literature calls eco-
nomic upgrading (focusing on firms) or strate-
gic coupling (with an eye to regions). Jennifer
Bair and I have summarized this predilection for
exploring the largely beneficial effects of link-
ing supplier firms and regions to contracting
chains coordinated by multinational corpora-
tions as an ‘inclusionary bias’ (Bair, 2011): this
bias clouds our understanding of the extent and
significance of the reproduction of low-value
positions as well as the constitutive exclusions
of firms, regions and workers that remain part
and parcel of network formation and restructur-
ing. To address this weakness, Bair and Werner
(2011), Bair et al. (2013), and McGrath (2017)
have developed the notion of ‘disarticulations’
to signal the re-working of the GPN framework
to center on uneven development. These authors
frame global production networks as both tem-
porarily stabilized outcomes of inherited pat-
terns of uneven development and contributors
to their ongoing formulation, especially as firms
and firm networks reorganize to adjust to vari-
ous pressures.
Current calls in the discipline to focus on new
geographies of uneven development have
emerged from multiple corners beyond GPN
studies, of course. They have been spurred, or
at least emboldened, by serial crises in the glo-
bal economy and a concomitant surge in related
debates in the social sciences, including geogra-
phical political economy (e.g. Sheppard, 2016;
Hudson, 2016; Peck, 2016; Dunford and Liu,
2017), urban and regional studies (Hadjimicha-
lis, 2011; Hadjimichalis and Hudson, 2013;
Phelps et al., 2018), international relations
949
(e.g. Callinicos and Rosenberg, 2008; Kiely,
2012; Rosenberg, 2010; Desai, 2015), and
development studies (e.g. Makki, 2015). Not
surprisingly then, uneven development is also
being take up more significantly in the analysis
of production networks beyond the initial cri-
tiques. As I discuss in more detail below, a
growing number of studies in sociology and
geography pay increasing attention to the
dynamics of uneven development, suggesting
a reformulation of the hitherto dominant
assumption of felicitous inclusion, and an ana-
lytical centering of workers, firms, and regions
that remain trapped in low-value positions or
excluded by heightened competition. How do
we make sense of this emerging trend in the
study of global production and how do we parse
the differences among the diverse range of
contributions?
In the rest of this report, I examine three
approaches to uneven development in the global
production network literature in economic
geography and cognate fields. The first, ‘main-
stream’ position examines uneven development
as a contingent empirical outcome – a ‘dark
side’ – of the process of global market integra-
tion. The second and third positions that I
review share a broadly Marxist or neo-Marxist
orientation, including a theoretical commitment
to formulate uneven development in dialectical
terms and an embrace of a dynamic, integrated,
but nonetheless structured global economy. The
second position – global production networks as
conduits of unequal value distribution – theo-
rizes the mechanisms through which global pro-
duction arrangements reproduce global
inequality. The third position – global produc-
tion ‘without guarantees’ – adopts Gramscian
and/or feminist frameworks to historicize sub-
national regional experiences of global produc-
tion network incorporation. All three positions
offer rich accounts of actually existing pro-
cesses of restructuring of the global economy,
albeit differing significantly in their theoretical
commitments and normative assumptions.
950
Despite these differences, more dialogue across
these positions is warranted if we are to leverage
the relatively powerful perspective that produc-
tion network studies afford to grasp the vicissi-
tudes upending received patterns of uneven
development and portending uncertain futures.
II Exploring the ‘dark side’ of global
production
In their recent book, Coe and Yeung seek to
transform GPN from a heuristic, explanatory
framework to a dynamic theory (dubbed GPN
2.0) that will ‘enhance the ability of GPN think-
ing to contribute to explanations of patterns of
uneven territorial development in the global
economy’ (2015: 22). Keeping with a firm-
centric focus, the authors identify firm-level
organizational strategies (e.g. intra-firm coordi-
nation versus inter-firm control) as the proxi-
mate dependent variable of what they call
competitive dynamics (e.g. financial discipline
and downward cost pressures). Their principal
goal is to determine how the interaction
between competitive dynamics and firm-level
strategies leads to given outcomes for ‘strategic
coupling’, a term that signals the prospects for
regions plugged into GPNs via goods or ser-
vices suppliers to improve their economic con-
dition. In thinking about uneven development,
the shift from a static equilibrium view of the
firm-GPN nexus to what the authors call ‘value
capture trajectories’ is moderately useful if one
accepts the overall premise. ‘Trajectories’ refer
to the wide range of methods that firms employ
to ‘capture’ more or less value (as surplus above
costs and normal profits, see below) over time.
Built into this notion of trajectories are the vag-
aries of growth and decline, indicative of a wide
range of possible outcomes of a firm’s partici-
pation in global production networks. Coe and
Yeung scale up these trajectories to sub-national
regions to identify three modes of strategic cou-
pling and, drawing on evolutionary economic
geography, to emphasize territorial change over
Progress in Human Geography 43(5)
time. Extending the timescale allows the
authors to account better for variation not only
in the traditional remit of GPN studies (i.e.
‘inclusion’, or how regions initially link to
GPNs), but also in how these modes of linkage
can shape outcomes, including negative ones
such as heightened intra-regional inequality and
lock-in to low-value, dependent positions in
networks (see also Coe and Hess, 2011).
Coe and Yeung’s revision forms part of a
broader effort within mainstream GPN and cog-
nate studies in sociology to address the dark side
of participation in global supply chains. Sociol-
ogists, for example, have developed a parallel
dimension to economic upgrading that they call
social upgrading, which examines how the
changes in what a firm does or the process of
doing it affects the rights and entitlements of
workers (Barrientos et al., 2011). This shift
towards including worker-based dimensions is
informed in part by large-scale transformations
of supply chains in the last decade that have
made supplier participation generally more
complex and ultimately more restrictive (Ger-
effi, 2014). In studying how suppliers are adapt-
ing and learning under these highly competitive
conditions, a number of empirical studies con-
clude that economic upgrading, which secures
suppliers’ continued participation in a restruc-
tured production network, often does not trans-
late into better outcomes for workers.
Increasing evidence suggests that shifts to more
technologically-intensive export production is
associated with reductions in the proportion of
female workers (e.g. Barrientos, 2014; Kucera
and Tajani, 2014; Greenstein and Anderson,
2017), for example. As firms respond to
pressures to undertake more complex functions,
processes or higher value products, and to meet
intensified cost-capability pressures (that is, to do
more for less), they adjust by creating more fine-
grained stratifications among their workforces,
between permanent and temporary employment
in garment manufacturing (Plank et al., 2012;
Rossi, 2013) or between permanent and
Werner
seasonal workers in export horticulture (Alford
et al., 2017). As I have discussed at length
elsewhere (Werner, 2016a), studies of dark
sides of economic upgrading and strategic
coupling can offer an empirically-grounded
perspective on new geographies of uneven
development if read with an eye to them.
III Global production networks
as conduits of unequal value
distribution
Firm-centered approaches to global production
– and the dark sides that they might reveal –
nonetheless suffer from key limitations that hin-
der the analytical project of understanding
long-standing and emerging geographies of
uneven development through the study of glo-
bal production. Uneven development framed as
a ‘dark side’ generally presumes that these
arrangements are outcomes of firms or firms
in regional contexts. Leaving to one side other
limitations that follow from firm-centrism (e.g.
limited attention to labor, the state and geopo-
litics), the principal problem with this approach
for my purposes here is a failure to engage with
macro-scale questions of global inequality. Coe
and Yeung, for example, reject hierarchy in the
global economy even as they acknowledge that
structural inequality exists (2015: 179). In so
doing, the possibility to marshal the rich
empirics and analysis of GPNs into a dynamic,
spatiotemporal understanding of a globally
integrated and dynamically structured global
economy is lost. Mainstream production net-
work studies tend to dismiss macro-
geographies of uneven development out of hand
as a form of rigid structuralism that necessarily
reduces actors and places to their functions in
the global hierarchy. As a result, the main-
stream scholarship pays little heed to the ways
that structural hierarchy conditions the possibi-
lities for firms and regions. Empirical questions
that are sidelined as a result include, for exam-
ple, how might regions or firms that benefit
951
from higher value functions and more auton-
omy in the network affect the possibilities for
other regions or firms to occupy the same posi-
tionality? Or, the converse: do firms or regions
locked in to ‘low-value’ (i.e. highly competi-
tive) functions make it possible for other firms
or regions to be linked in more ‘value adding’
ways?
In this section, I turn to literature on global
production that places macro-scale geographies
of uneven development at the center of its
inquiry. Much of this work emerges out of, or
in close conversation with, the world-systems
tradition. World-systems scholars Hopkins and
Wallerstein (1977, 1986) coined the term ‘com-
modity chain’ to disrupt nation-centered
accounts of development and, in particular,
modernization theory and its attendant ideas of
sequentialist stages of development. Instead,
they proposed the study of linked sets of activ-
ities – from inputs to production and consump-
tion – organized transnationally. In this
tradition, returns are created (and destroyed)
and distributed via these chains or networks.
The value characteristics of the economic activ-
ities that make up the chain are not static, more-
over (Arrighi and Drangel, 1986). They stem
from capitalist strategies, supported by states, to
distance themselves from highly competitive
functions – thus accruing above average profits
from (semi)monopolized ones – through orga-
nizational (e.g. outsourcing), technological (e.g.
innovation) and, with the support of states, legal
(e.g. intellectual property rights, trade regula-
tions) strategies. The main point is that core and
peripheral positions in the world-system con-
centrate core-like and peripheral-like functions.
These attributes do not correspond to particular
activities (e.g. assembly or resource extraction),
but instead reflect the degree of monopolization
of the activity and thus the possibility to earn
above-average returns. Arrighi and Drangel’s
classic work (1986) identified a resulting
tri-modal hierarchy to the global economy
(core, semi-periphery, and periphery) as a
952
relatively stable, if dynamically configured,
structure. In an early dialogue with geography,
Peter Taylor (1988) offered a ‘supportive note’
to this approach by demonstrating that the tri-
modal distribution was even more robust if one
used finer-grained spatial units (i.e., using a
subnational rather than a national areal base).
Obviously, this ground is well-worn, but I
repeat it here because a new generation of com-
modity chain studies seeks to recuperate the
basic project in order to grasp the reproduction
of spatial hierarchy in today’s global economy
via the study of production networks (Bair,
2005, 2009, 2014).
Let me briefly highlight a few key contribu-
tions. Much of this literature seeks to marshal
the study of global production to better under-
stand observed patterns of global inequality.
Despite the championing of network extension
to new places and actors and subsequent
‘upgrading’ in the mainstream literature,
dynamic but durable inequalities persist. Thus,
the aspirational, catch-up type underpinnings of
the mainstream literature are discarded for a
more sobering look at how production network
restructuring relates to the reproduction of glo-
bal income inequality. In an early contribution,
Arrighi et al. (2003) demonstrated that the con-
vergence in industrialization in the late 20th
century had not yielded an attendant conver-
gence in incomes; instead, the relative value
of manufacturing had decreased as core regions
had benefited from more monopolized activities
(such as R&D) and accumulated resources,
especially financial and political ones, that had
shielded these areas, relative to others, from the
destructive phase of capitalist restructuring.
Brewer (2011) extends these basic insights to
critique the clear disconnect between the notion
of generalizable upgrading and durable sys-
temic patterns of inequality, parsing the com-
plex debates on income polarization and
connecting these to commodity chain studies.
Mahutga (2014) uses trade data to compare the
positional power of countries in the well-studied
Progress in Human Geography 43(5)
auto and garment commodity chains and finds
that participation in these chains increases
polarization within the world-system, albeit not
in the same way. He argues that stratification in
the global economy linked to production net-
work participation thus requires sector-specific
analysis. The question of the actual morphology
of global hierarchy is again being hotly debated
in the world-systems tradition and extending
from it. Karataşli (2017), squarely in that tradi-
tion, has recently extended the Arrighi and
Drangel contribution to posit a contemporary
‘quadri-modal’ distribution. Collections by
Bond and Garcia (2015) and Wallerstein et al.
(2015) consider this question directly in the con-
text of the rise of the so-called BRICS. And
Hudson (2016) has offered the provocation of
a ‘new’ New International Division of Labor,
reflecting similar upheavals in the structure of
the global economy.
At the heart of Marxist debates over the
world-systems approach has long been the onto-
logical status of value posited as a form of
Schumpeterian rent (i.e. above-average profits
due to monopoly over a relatively scarce asset)
in the latter, in contrast to Marx’s original
notion of surplus value, which reflects relations
of production between capital and labor. The
distinction reveals both theoretical commit-
ments and empirical emphasis. Neil Smith and
David Harvey both sided with the orthodox
position in early work on uneven development;
Smith (2008 [1984]: 289), in particular, dis-
missed world-systems theory for its position
on value. Beyond the particularities of the value
definition (see Arrighi, 2007, for an excellent
synthesis), however, what has unified Marxist
global production studies within and beyond the
world-systems tradition is an understanding of
the global economy – and the states and produc-
tion networks that constitute it – as a (variously)
complex totality. Thus, for Starosta, in perhaps
the most orthodox proposal, the forms of pro-
duction networks are expressions of the unfold-
ing of the law of value wherein all capitals are,
Werner
in principle, subject to the general rate of profit:
deviation from that rate – in the form of either
export suppliers, national industries, or multi-
national corporations – is not explained by
monopoly control (or lack thereof), but rather
place-specific social relations that permit capi-
tals (i.e. firms) to survive at a lower rate of profit
(such as non-market subsidies to social repro-
duction) (Starosta, 2010; Fitzsimons and Star-
osta, 2017; see also Purcell et al., 2016). Selwyn
(2015) offers a mixed approach that hinges
Schumpeterian rents to class relations: after all,
the impetus to innovate and the possibility to
implement such changes is determined in some
part by the power of the working class. Building
on the insights of agrarian and world-systems
scholar Farshad Araghi (2003), Selwyn argues
that the goal of production network analysis
should be to understand how ‘the form and
intensity of the exploitation of labour in differ-
ent parts of the globe, and the systems of devel-
opment that are based upon them, are
dialectically inter-related’ (2015: 258).
As McGrath has recently reminded the read-
ers of Progress, following in the tradition of
Elson’s (1979) classic intervention, the concep-
tualization of macro-scale geographies of
inequality benefit from a critical, heterodox,
politically-attuned approach to the question of
value (McGrath, 2017). Towards such an endea-
vor, Werner (2016a), Argent (2017), McGrath
(2017) and Ouma (2015) have brought ques-
tions of value transfer, dispossession and appro-
priation more centrally into the geography
literature on production networks. Recent work
by Quentin and Campling adds an additional
valence to this effort by exploring what they call
‘global inequality chains’ that reflect the inter-
action between global production networks, on
the one hand, and ‘global wealth chains’, on the
other. The latter refers to the increasingly com-
plex mechanisms marshaled by global corpora-
tions to capture surplus by avoiding tax
liabilities using strategies of offshore incorpora-
tion and transfer pricing (Quentin and
953
Campling, 2018; see also Seabrooke and
Wigan, 2017; Bassens and Van Meeteren,
2015). World cities scholars are also uncovering
how financial nodes and the producer services
that concentrate within them contribute to the
unequal transfer of value. Parnreiter, for exam-
ple, looks at the direct role of law firms in this
process via intellectual property rights claims
and labor regulation arbitrage (2017; see also
Brown et al., 2010). Although sharing similar
objects of analysis with the mainstream GPN
literature here (cf. Coe et al., 2014), these
latter studies insist that the specifics of finan-
cial, fiscal, or extra-economic forms of appro-
priation and dispossession are understood
within the context of global hierarchy as a con-
crete abstraction.
IV Global production ‘without
guarantees’
There are of course significant dangers to
macro-scale analyses of uneven development.
An immediate drawback of global inequality
chains can be their reliance on income inequal-
ity as a measure (and attendant data problems
plus the invisibility of unpaid labor and other
measures of well-being). Beyond the empirics,
scholarship on uneven development must avoid
the pitfalls of ‘encompassing comparison’, an
approach that presumes that the ‘whole’ or total-
ity governs its parts (McMichael, 1990). If we
understand global hierarchy to be a complex
totality, the latter must not be mistaken for a
totalizing account wherein the multiple, partic-
ular arrangements of capitalist accumulation are
reduced to their parts in the system. Nor should
this critique, however, be grounds for dismissal
of totality altogether in favor of unprincipled
appeals to geographic polycentricity and hetero-
geneous causality as is so often the case in the
mainstream literature. We can instead seize
upon open non-teleological understandings of
dialectical relations (Hart, 2016) wherein ‘total-
ity is a conceptual procedure, rather than an
954
empirical or conceptual premise . . . in which the
whole is discovered through the analysis of the
mutual conditioning parts’ (McMichael, 1990:
391; see also Friedman, 2016).
In this final section, then, I focus on studies of
global production that contribute to our under-
standing of uneven development as a complex
totality through the study of regional conjunc-
tures. Variously inspired by Gramsci, Hall, and
Massey, this work sees ‘the region’ as a process,
‘a product of interrelations . . . constituted
through interactions’ (Massey, 1999: 2), as an
indeterminate multiplicity made through and in
turn remaking social relations at multiple scales.
The most explicit attempts to redefine the global
production literature through this lens in geo-
graphy include Pickles and Smith (with multiple
co-authors) (2015) and Werner (2016a). In their
study of the post-Soviet apparel economy,
Pickles and Smith discuss the divergent out-
comes of transforming textile and garment firms
in post-Soviet states, formerly state-protected
industries, into export platforms for the Eur-
opean Union (EU) market. Combined with EU
accession and sectoral trade liberalization, the
authors trace related processes of firm restruc-
turing and geographical shifts in the context of
serial crises. The result is neither a uniform race
to the bottom nor robust and generalized
upgrading (indeed the term does not contem-
plate the initial ‘downgrading’ of state-
sponsored industry), but rather significant var-
iegation, including novel East–East geographies
of uneven development as Slovak garment firms
sub-contract ‘unskilled’ work to Ukrainian sub-
contractors. Articulation, rather than evolution,
signals the contested and contingent, yet also
structured and conditioned, outcomes of this
process. The parallels with my research on
restructuring and regional disinvestment in the
Dominican garment industry are striking
despite the distinct contexts. My work traces
how the legacies of colonialism – or what I call
coloniality (following the work of Anibal Qui-
jano and Silvia Federici) – shape contemporary
Progress in Human Geography 43(5)
outcomes in overdetermined ways. In particu-
lar, domestic firms adjust to global pressures
through large-scale layoffs, while marshaling a
particular regional culture tied to small-scale
export tobacco in order to minimize class con-
flicts. There are important differences with the
Eastern European case, but also some fascinat-
ing similarities: in particular, the emergence of
South–South subcontracting networks between
the Dominican Republic and Haiti that serve a
similar function to the East–East networks
described by Pickles and Smith.
The region as ‘conjuncture’ offers consider-
able promise for reconstructing the complex
totality of uneven development. This approach
is often mobilized in the interdisciplinary tradi-
tion of agrarian studies, a tradition that has long
served as a sympathetic but critical fellow tra-
veler of the world-systems project (see e.g.
Mintz, 1977; cf. Coronil, 1996). Agrarian stud-
ies has much to offer the study of production
network restructuring in the Global South since
the debates over agrarian change have long
wrestled with the constitutive complexities of
transition (from the [in]famous ‘articulation of
modes of production’ debates onward) and dis-
posed of any Eurocentric attachment to the
inevitability of expanded wage relations. Gill
Hart’s Disabling Globalization (2002), which
grounded itself in studies of agrarian change
to understand divergent but related outcomes
of Taiwanese FDI in the South African garment
industry, is an excellent example of this
approach, foreshadowing a number of the
insights in Pickles and Smith. Tania Li’s
(2014) book on the articulation of forest dwell-
ers into the global cacao chain offers a recent
sustained engagement with conjunctural
approaches to agrarian change. Her revisit eth-
nography highlights a recurring theme in South-
east Asian studies of export commodity
production: small suppliers (be they peasants
or swidden agriculturalists, indigenous or
migrant) may accede to capitalist relations of
labor and property even in the absence of
Werner
corporate-driven or state-driven dispossession
(see also Hall, 2012).
Conjunctural analysis of global production
feels particularly urgent in the current period.
As Gramsci wrote (of his place and time but
easily applied to ours), the ruling class has ‘lost
its consensus’; it dominates but no longer leads.
‘The crisis consists,’ he continued, ‘precisely in
the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot
be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of
morbid symptoms appear’ (1971: 275–6). The
dogged insistence that the globalization of pro-
duction would be a rising tide that lifts all boats
has proven to be patently false; instead some
boats are lifted while others sink (and, if I may,
rising tides as a positive metaphor seems par-
ticularly ill-suited to the anthropo/capitalo-
cene). What conjunctural analysis offers in
this context is an attention to cultural forma-
tions and an attendant openness to political out-
comes, not as unbridled contingency but rather
as a mix of both conditioned and indeterminate
forces. The study of outcomes will only be
strengthened if we turn our lens as much to the
new geographies of restructuring in the Global
South as to the legacies of serial disinvestment
in the historically peripheralized regions of the
Global North. I am not suggesting that the same
studies incorporate all of these moving parts,
but rather, expanding upon Ramamurthy’s
(2004) call for a feminist commodity chain
analysis, that we continue to trouble the false
binary that global production networks link
producers in the Global South to consumers in
the Global North. For Ramamurthy, and many
others, this has meant interrogating the subjec-
tivities of Global South workers in and beyond
capitalist production as they experience
‘adverse incorporation’ (Phillips, 2011) and
iterative or permanent exclusion (recent work
includes, e.g., Dutta, 2016; Prentice, 2016;
Sum, 2017; Gago, 2017). Future work might
take these insights from the Global South and
trouble the class- and gender-based assump-
tions of the ‘consuming’ Global North in order
955
to develop stronger dialogue with those who
study the seemingly interminable tide of disin-
vestment, and associated social malaise, that
continues to grip rustbelts 40 years on from the
introduction of the ‘first’ New International
Division of Labor (e.g. Smith, 2015; Smith and
Winders, 2017).
V Conclusion
My intention in this report has not been to offer
a comprehensive review of the literature, but
rather to parse different approaches to under-
standing the multi-scaled, relational process of
uneven development through the lens of global
production. Global production ‘without guaran-
tees’ – a conjunctural analysis that historicizes
regional change and centers questions of social
relations without presuming what these will
look like – offers a useful corrective to macro-
scale approaches, but neither should the latter be
rejected. Moreover, the boundaries between all
three approaches sketched out here – the (still
relatively heterodox) mainstream literature, and
Marxist and neo-Marxist approaches – are not
hard and fast. Clear epistemological differences
remain; and while we are well served by recog-
nizing that these different approaches, and the
distinct priorities that they reflect, are incom-
mensurable, they are also not zero sum. In the
best scenario of engaged pluralism (Barnes and
Sheppard, 2010), much can be learned by navi-
gating between these approaches, and holding
them in productive tension, if we are to gain a
handle on the relatively fast-moving, rapidly
transforming geographies of uneven develop-
ment in our time.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Jim Glassman and Jenn Bair for
reading a draft of this essay and to Christian Berndt
for his patience and support. The usual disclaimers
apply.
956
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of inter-
est with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following
financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: This report arises from
research funded by the Regional Studies Association
(#70677).
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