The Dictionary of Human Geography (58 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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equilibrium
A state in which the forces mak ing for change are in balance. This concept is central to Neo classical economics, where a free market working perfectly is supposed to tend towards a state of equilibrium. If the forces of supply and demand for all goods and services and all Factors of production are balanced in such a way that all supply is consumed and all demand is met, and no participant(s) in the economy can derive any further income or satisfaction from doing any thing other than what is presently done, this would constitute a state of equilibrium which would be maintained until a change took place, response to which would eventually restore equilibrium. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suppose that, in a perfectly competitive economy in equilibrium, either the extraction of coal becomes more difficult or resources are depleted, and that the coal owners put up the price of coal so as to meet the rising cost of mining. As the consumption of coal is to some extent sensitive to its price, demand for coal is reduced. The mine owners may then find that they have coal unsold and reduce its price a little to get rid of it. Eventually, the balance of forces of supply and demand will be regained by these market adjustments, at a point at which the prevailing price just clears the stocks of coal supplied. Equilibrium will have been restored. This process may, of course, involve bringing back into balance other elements of the economy disturbed by change in the coal market; for example, if there is less coal pro duced than before, under the new state of equilibrium this may affect employment in mining, coal delivery and so on while if the new market price is higher, some customers may substitute other sources of fuel for coal. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In reality, an EcoNoMy will be in a process of perpetual adjustment to change. Equilibrium is an ideal state that is never achieved in practice but is helpful as a concept in the understanding of a market regulated economy (on which, see Plummer and (NEW PARAGRAPH) Sheppard, 2006; Fowler, 2007). A distinction is sometimes made between general equilib rium, which relates to the entire economy, and partial equilibrium, which refers to a single market or limited set of related activities. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Spatial equilibrium refers to balance in a spa tially disaggregated economy. Change in such a system can be spatially selective; the rise in the price of coal may be confined to a specific region, and restoration of equilibrium involves change and its repercussions working their way from place to place as well as from one market to another. The spatial version of neo classical economics suggests the equalization ofincome as a feature of spatial equilibrium, since regional disparities in wages should encourage labour to move to regions where wages are highest and/or capitaL to move to regions where wages are lowest until equality is achieved and no advan tage is to be obtained from further movement (see coNvergENce, regioNAL). Just as imper fection in market mechanisms can frustrate the achievement of equilibrium in general so, in geographical space, obstacles to the free mobil ity of labour, capital and so on impede adjust ment to wage and price differentials. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The concept of spatial equilibrium has been partly responsible for some misconceptions in regional development theory and planning practice. The terms ?equilibrium? and ?bal ance? have desirable connotations, and the idea of a self regulating space ecoNomy tend ing towards equalization of incomes encour ages a view that market mechanisms are capable of promoting more even development if planners somehow harness them to a public purpose. However, the tendency of market economies under capitaLism in reality is more one of concentration and centralization, char acterized by uNeveN deveLopmeNt and inequality of living standards, especially in the undeveloped world. dms (NEW PARAGRAPH)
e-social science
An approach to social sci ence research that takes advantage of powerful Networks of computers sharing resources and processing power. These are often compared to electricity grid systems: people generally do not mind where electricity is being generated; they just want to use its power. The same could be true of accessing a computational grid, be it for quantitative modelling and simu lation, or for more qualitative metHods (such as running online discussion groups). Origins of grid computing include the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence@Home pro ject, whereby signals from outer space are dis tributed to PC users to be analysed using spare (NEW PARAGRAPH) resources on their machines. A similar project, supported by the BBC, was used in 2006 to model climate change. Other developments of e social science in the UK have been stimu lated by a major research initiative in e science, with the Economic and Social Research Council establishing a National Centre for E Social Science at the University of Manchester (http://www.ncess.ac.uk/). There are links between e social science and geo computation. Geographers are involved in this work through the development of large scale simulation models (as in microsimulation), by ?grid enabling? spatial statistics (specifically geographically weighted regression) and the development of two and three dimensional virtual environ ments (cf. visualization). rj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) See www.ncess.ac.uk and http://www.bbc.co.uk/ sn/climateexperiment/ (NEW PARAGRAPH)
essentialism
The doctrine that holds that it is possible to distinguish between the essen tial and non essential aspects of objects or phenomena. Fuss (1989, p. xi) defines it as ?a belief in the real, true essences of things, the invariable and fixed properties which define the ??whatness?? of a given entity?. Essentialism is usually used as a pejorative term, but it is important to distinguish at least three different senses: (NEW PARAGRAPH) Epistemological essentialism is related to foundationalism, and proposes that the aim of investigation is to discover the true nature or essence of things, and to describe these by way of categorical defin itions (see also epistemology). Essential ism in this sense assumes that essences are unchanging, that objects have single es sences and that it is possible to gain certain knowledge ofthese essences. Rorty (1979) repudiates this sense of essentialism, argu ing that it depends on a correspondence theory of truth that offsets reality and representation. In contrast to a picture of objects with intrinsic qualities, he affirms an ontology of contingent relations that go ?all the way down? (see pragmatism). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Philosophical critiques of essentialism have been invoked to question the valid ity of explanatory social theories and methodologies (see also philosophy). The argument here is that any claim that X is a cause of Y is equivalent to, or founded on, essentialism in sense (1) above. However, the argument that so cial phenomena have relatively stable, durable features, and that these might be ascribed some degree of causal power, is not necessarily essentialist or determinist at all. Social science meth odologies and explanation tend to be faUibilistic, rather than claiming to estab lish absolute truth about facts or absolute foundations to knowledge. (NEW PARAGRAPH) A third sense of essentialism is derived from critiques of the idea that racial, eth nic, sexual or gender identities are premised on unifying, shared dimensions of experience, embodiment or social pos ition. Criticism of essentialism is here associated with the claim that identities and norms are relational, socially con structed and historically contingent. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Anti essentialist perspectives often run together these three senses, claiming that vari ous harms or risks of essentialism in sense (3) are legitimized by epistemological essentialism (NEW PARAGRAPH) and notions of explanatory causality (2). (NEW PARAGRAPH) In human geography, essentialism became an explicit focus of debates alongside debates about postmodernism. An influential refer ence point was the anti essentialist marxism of Resnick and Wolff (1987), according to whom any causal account of social processes is inherently suspect. They propose instead a notion of overdetermination, derived from Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, which they define as the mutual constitution of each process by all others. This anti essentialist view of causality seems to imply that in order to be able to say anything meaningful about the relationships between processes, one must be able to provide a complete account of all existing relationships relevant to the case at hand. The anti essentialist response to this problem is to select arbitrary entry points, such as class or gender, into the totality of social processes, claiming a pragmatist justification for this theoretical strategy. What is being con fused here is the reasonable claim that one might not want to presume in advance the existence of a necessary causal relationship with the idea that one can legitimately proffer tentative, partial, empirically grounded, and theoretically justified claims about causal rela tionships in the course of ongoing, fallibilistic enquiry. (NEW PARAGRAPH) If the grand philosophical claims made on behalf of anti essentialism in geography do not stand up to serious scrutiny, then anti essentialist perspectives have nonetheless been a boon to forms of social constructionist and relational theorizing in the discipline. The strong political impulse behind anti essentialism has factored in issues of gender, race, culture and the like alongside the predom inant focus on economic processes and class (Gibson Graham, 2006b [1996]). However, there has not been much explicit geographical conceptualization from this anti essentialist perspective, despite the fact that Althusser?s original critique of essentialism in Marxism was oriented by an innovative attempt to think through the non coincident temporalities of different processes (Althusser and Balibar, 1970, pp. 94 118). The potential herein for theorizing spatiality in a fully conjunctural and relational fashion has, however, been pursued by Massey (2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Discussions of essentialism in geography have become stuck in easy juxtapositions of ?bad? essentialism and ?good? social construc tionism. There is a tendency to conflate cultural essentialism with biological reduc tionism, causal explanation with epistemo logical foundationalism; and to affirm simplistic notions of constructed realities and contingent knowledge claims (Sedgwick, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . Anti essentialism presents a false choice between knowledge with certain guar antees and knowledge with nothing to back it up other than arbitrary persuasive force. In contrast, recent treatments of theories of prac tice suggest a reorientation of theoretical energy away from essentialist definitions of fundamental, ontological qualities, towards a greater appreciation of the ways in which con cepts accrete overlapping degrees of family resemblance without ever converging around a finite number of criteria. cb (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Hacking (1999); Sayer (1997). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
ethics
That part of pHiLosopHy concerned with the worthiness of human actions and of systems of belief regarding what people ought or ought not to do. Questions regarding our duties, obligations and responsibilities fall within the purview of ethics. While there is no universal agreement regarding which of our acts are subject to moral evaluation and argument, the actions that affect the well being of other human beings, ourselves and/or non human beings, within our midst or distant from us, are most pertinent. Ethics concerns not only the actions of individual people but social, economic and political structures and arrangements that also affect human and non human beings. In this sense, ethics and social justice are intrinsically related to each other, if they are separable at all. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The study of ethics may be descriptive or normative, or may fall into the category of meta ethics (see Smith, D.M., 1994a). The purpose of descriptive ethics is to understand what people actually do, and what they actu ally believe, with regard to rigHts, wrongs, duties and so on; it is not necessarily con cerned with evaluating those actions and beliefs. Within normative ethics, the goal is to develop arguments or justifications for acting in particular ways and not others; normative ethics wishes to settle moral dilemmas by applying some theoretical argument to a par ticular case; for example, whether the US war in Iraq meets the criteria for a ?just war? (cf. NorMAtive THEory). Meta ethics has a broader provenance than either of these; it is the field that takes on questions pertaining to the eth ical as such; that is, it takes up the issue of what sort of territory ethics should cover. Examples of meta ethical questions include the following: What actions call for ethical judgement? (I should exercise more fre quently, but it is probably not an ethical mat ter if I do not.) What entities should be given moral consideration at all? (It would not be ethical to kick a dog for the fun of it, but I need not worry about kicking a soccer ball.) Can there be any moral universals? (Some people would argue that every society gives special consideration to the needy, but what counts specifically as a need may differ from one soci ety to another.) Can moral views be objective or only subjective? (There are some philo sophers who have argued there are verifiable moral facts in more or less the same way there are objective, scientific facts.) (NEW PARAGRAPH) Moral philosophers, in asking why a particular act, decision or belief is ethical, typ ically distinguish between consequentialist and deontological notions of ethics (Smith, D.M., 1994a). Consequentialism argues that an act (or decision or belief) must be judged against its consequences. The process is one of weighing the probable effects of one course of action as opposed to others. One makes the choice on the basis of the morally best effects. A best effect, for example, might be that the greatest good is brought to the greatest number of people: utiLitariaNism, in other words, is a consequentialist theory of ethics. Deontological theories of ethics evaluate actions on their own merits, independent of their con sequences. They see duties and obligations as inherently good; even if a different course of action would bring pleasure to a great many people. Thus, a deontological theorist might encourage me to give preference to the care of my own sick child over the care of other chiL dren elsewhere, even if those resources might go further in another part of the world. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Geographers? concern with ethics and vaL ues is long standing (Kropotkin, 1885; Sauer, 1956). To a degree, the fit between geog raphy and ethics is an intuitive one, without necessarily saying anything about what kind of norms have emerged or in whose favour they work. The field?s attention to cultural differ ences between places and peoples attunes it to the fact of differing systems of values in those pLaces, but also to the prospects for cosmo poLitanism (see Popke, 2007). Likewise, geographers? interest in interactions and fLows (of people, commodities, ideas, capital) between places has made the issue offair inter actions and distributions a natural one to think about. The same could be said regarding the discipline?s focus on nature society relation ships: debates over the proper stance towards the environment, towards access to land, water and other natural resources, and towards the distribution of environmental risks and hazards are central to contempor ary environmentaLism. Also, the propensity of places, regions, states and other territorial arenas to be marked off from one another by boundaries material, symbolic or both has led to questions of who is included and who is excluded, and to what extent these determin ations are ethically justifiable (Sibley, 1995; Creswell, 1996). Geography, as Sack (1997) has argued, would seem to be intrinsically morally significant and so one need not look far to see that geographers have thought so, for better and worse, for centuries (e.g. Livingstone, 1992). (NEW PARAGRAPH) What makes recent work in human geog raphy significant is the willingness to tap moral and political thought more directly and exten sively than in the past. This willingness is of a piece with the emergence of alternative rad icaL, feminist, Queer and criticaL human geographies in the past 30 years. Two reasons for greater attention to moral and political thought may be ventured. First, the social revolutions of the post Second World War period (e.g. movements for political independ ence, civil rights, gender parity, peace and security, sexual liberation) came to have an enormous impact on geography, eventually leading to disciplinary moves against a geog raphy in service to the status quo. One could say, as Harvey (1972) did, that real world social revolutions extended into the academy, where the struggle for disciplinary space ensued (cf. Blunt and Wills, 2000). The strug gle for new disciplinary spaces within geog raphy involved delving into literatures on politics and ethics (e.g. Harvey, 1973). Second, debates among these alternative geog raphies have been fuelled by a similar sort of exploration, as proponents of various persua sions (say marxism or feminism) have sought to make their cases to each other, or despite each other (cf. Harvey, 1992). In any event, the past thirty years has seen something of a ?moral turn? in the geographical literature. A particularly strong indication of this turn is the publication of surveys of moral philosophy written specifically for geographical audiences (e.g. Smith, D.M., 1994a; cf. Low and Gleeson, 1998). Smith?s efforts in particular may be viewed as a search for common ground in the struggle for greater eQuaLity globally and locally. Although his contributions are to all three fields of ethics (descriptive, normative and meta ethics), the main thrust of his work is to see through the many differences in moral theory towards an argument (deontological) for ?the more equal the better? at every geo graphical scaLe. Another indication of the moral turn is the elaboration of moral argu ments and concepts for purposes of advancing specific issues of concern to geographers. Examples include arguments for why the wel fare of distant strangers should matter (Corbridge, 1993b; but cf. Barnett and Land, 2007); ?care? as a ethical political practice, and the notion of ?responsibility? within a globalizing world (Brown, 2004; Massey 2004; Lawson, 2007; Popke, 2007); the appli cation of theories of ethics to a wide range of geographical topics from place and self, to deveLopment practice and climate change (Whatmore, 1997; Proctor and Smith, 1999a; Smith, 2000a); and a burgeoning interest in the ethics of activism and research practices (Lynn and Pulido, 2003). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The moral turn in geography has been strengthened by a continuing effort to reach into new literatures. The adoption of feminist ethics and geographical reworkings of the ethical positions taken by a number of post structuralist thinkers are good examples. Although hardly new, feminist ethics shapes the uptake of ethics in geography in important ways. Standpoint epistemoLogies, which are embraced by a number of strands of femi nism, emphasize the embodied and therefore partial quality of knowledge (as against disem bodied universal ?truths?), including partiality of moral convictions meaning that moral systems are always systems that come from somewhere, that somewhere often being a privileged, masculine sphere (e.g. the state, the church) (see also situated kNowLEdge). At the same time, a feminist geographical per spective, because of its concern for social just ice and the righting of wrongs, may argue explicitly in favour of partial, as opposed to impartial, decisions regarding distribution of scarce resources thus the enormous influ ence in the geography of the 1990s of philoso pher Iris Marion Young?s work on group rights (as opposed to individual rights) (Young, 1990a). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Feminist standpoint epistemologies share with post structuraLism a scepticism towards, or even wholesale rejection of, the notion of universal truths, including the idea of universally applicable moral principles (see uNiversaLism). For this reason, the ethical and the moral are sometimes distinguished from each other, as when Cornell (1995, p. 78) states: ?The ethical as I define it is not a system of behavioral rules, nor a system of positive standards [morality] by which to jus tify disapproval of others. It is, rather, an atti tude towards what is other to oneself.? This shying away from the enunciation of rules and opting instead to cultivate a considered reFELexivity (although the difference between the two can be overdrawn) is what has drawn some geographers towards thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Jean Luc Nancy. The aim is to develop an ethics that is responsible to the need for openness and difference, as against an ethics built upon foundational, universal certainties (see Popke, 2003; see also Gibson Graham, 2003). Whether an ethics can properly be built upon the notion of human rigHts, for example, is a case in point. Extending from the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben, Donna Haraway, Baruch Spinoza and others, a con cept of ?posthumanism? has emerged in recent years in human geography and elsewhere that challenges the boundaries and the identity of the human subject upon which the idea of human rights relies (see Braun, 2004a). The specific interest in post structuralism as a resource for ethics and geography should not necessarily be construed as a radical break: it is, instead, a tool or tools for grappling with what it means to think and act in terms of relationality and in alliance with struggles for a better world. At the same time, it should be noted that there are streams of ethical thought relatively untapped by human geographers. (NEW PARAGRAPH) These would include ethical systems beyond the Judeo Christian legacy (see Esteva and Prakash, 1998), as well as the thought of ?Western? thinkers, such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Alain Badiou, for whom responsibility to the ?other? is not the objective of ethics (cf. Dewsbury, 2007). gHe (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Badiou (2001); Smith, D.M. (1994a); Whatmore (NEW PARAGRAPH) (1997). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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