Structure, Agency, and Context: The Contributions of Geography to World-Systems Analysis |
| |
| Authors: | Colin Flint Fred M Shelley |
| |
| Institution: | Assistant professor of international affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research interests are in world-systems analysis, political geography, and spatial statistics. He is the authorkoauthor of articles on the electoral geography of Nazi party vote and English nationalism. At present he is working on the conceptualization of the institutions of the capitalist world-economy as geographic scales and the rise of extremist organizations in the United States within the context of global economic restructuring.;Associate professor and graduate studies coordinator in the Department of Geography and Planning at Southwest Texas State University. He has taught at the Universities of Oklahoma, Southern California, and Iowa, and Florida State. His major research interests include political and electoral geography, resource and environmental policy, and the political geographyof the United States in the world economy. He is the author of over one hundred publications in Scientific American, Political Geography, Western Political Quarterly, Water Resources Bulletin, and Urban Geography;. He is review editor of Political Geography and Social Science Quarterly and a former president of the Political Geography Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers. |
| |
| Abstract: | The interaction of geography and world-systems theory has created two groups of work. The first body of work uses world-systems theory as its theoretical framework with minor levels of critique or change. The second body of work attempts to inform world- systems theory by explicitly including a geographical perspective. Human geographers attracted to world-systems theory provide a perspective that highlights the role of agency in what is widely perceived to be a rigid structuralist approach. Key geographical concepts of region and place are viewed as social constructs created within an overarching context of structural imperatives. By conceptualizing places, states, and the macroregions of core, semiperiphery, and periphery as geographical scales, the role of agency in creating and maintaining the important structures and institutions of the capitalist world-economy, such as hegemony, is illustrated. The geographer's interest in the creation of geographical scales results in analysis of the dynamism of the contemporary world-system. |
| |
| Keywords: | |
|
|
