Article

Making (more) sense of political-economic geographies

of continuity and change: Dialoguing across ontological
divides
Progress in Human Geography, February 5, 2014; pp. 26–46

Krisztina Varro´
Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Abstract

In view of persisting and multiple ‘crises’, coming to grips with sociospatial change is one of the key
tasks in geographical political economy today. However, to date, philosophical misunderstandings
and the related lack of productive scholarly exchange has prevented this task from being
satisfyingly addressed. In this paper, I discuss the Cultural Political Economy approach and
discourse theory in order to expose some key misunderstandings and to argue in favour of more
philosophical awareness. By setting up a dialogue between the two approaches, I aim to
demonstrate the benefits of a constructive engagement between perspectives rooted in
ontologically different positions.

Keywords
Cultural Political Economy, discourse, discourse theory, geographical political economy, ontology

I Introduction

Since the onset of the economic crisis in 2008 there has been an increasing attention in
geographical political economy to the question of how we can account for continuity and
change in the spatial patterns of ‘neoliberal globalization’. Relatedly, a key concern has
been how critical analytical perspectives can actively contribute to transforming
sociospatial realities (see, for example, Castree, 2010; Peck et al., 2009). These efforts to
study the spaces of neoliberalism as a ‘living dead’ ideology (Peck et al., 2009: 112) have
touched upon the same fundamental questions as did the study of neoliberalism as an
ascendant ideology from the late 1970s, such as: how to think the link between the
ideational and material, objectivity and subjectivity, and the general and the particular?
Back then, the pressing need to come to grips with profound restructuring processes
prompted a thorough re-engagement with these and other conceptual binaries. This led to
a significantly new round of culturalization and spatialization of political economy, to a
cultural and spatial turn (Soja, 1999). Inspired by feminist and ‘post-prefixed’ (Sheppard,
2011) thought, political economy became more concerned with aspects of politics, agency
and identity, as well as the processual and spatially particular character of socio-economic
change. At the same time, the welcome diversification of scholarly perspectives implied

1
disagreement concerning the question of ‘how far this cultural [and spatial] emphasis
should go’ (Soja, 1999: 70), without abandoning the ‘traditional concerns’ of political
economy such as uneven development, social exclusion and poverty (Martin and Sunley,
2001; Ray and Sayer, 1999).

This question has continued to haunt geographical political economy to date. However,
after the antagonistic exchanges of the 1990s between adherents of (a more traditional)
Marxist political economy and proponents of poststructuralist approaches (see Sheppard,
2011), recently more conciliatory voices appeared asking for ‘a collaborative, open-minded
spirit’, and stressing the urgency to exploit the persisting divergence of theoretical,
conceptual and methodological choices (Brenner et al., 2011: 227; see also Sheppard,
2008). This explicit embracement of diversity and divergence echoes, in fact, remarks on
the need to come to terms with the multiplicity of ontologies
(Thrift in Merriman et al., 2012) and to move towards ‘engaged pluralism’ (Barnes and
Sheppard, 2010) in (subfields of) human geography.

Yet accounts of how to actually proceed towards more productive dialogues in

geographical political economy and of what concrete benefits such dialogues would bring
are still rather absent. My aim in this paper is to (start) fill(ing) this gap by exposing what I
believe to be a (if not the) main obstacle to scholarly dialogue: a lack of philosophical
awareness. The key argument I advance is that we need to be more aware of the
diverging metaphilosophical assumptions in which different scholarly perspectives are
anchored. We need to do so not in order to ‘freeze’ them and to authoritatively demarcate
scholarly positions (see Sheppard in Merriman et al., 2012), but to fully appreciate the
‘kinds’ of insights that perspectives based on diverging assumptions (tend to) offer. On this
basis, it becomes possible to make perspectives dialogue across ontological divides
whereby the strengths of each approach are accentuated in order to highlight and reflect
on the challenges facing the other. Divergences will thus not be eliminated, but a more
constructive exchange can take place, helping to make more sense of political-economic
geographies of continuity and change.

[Section 2 was cut out to shorten the article]

III Cultural Political Economy and discourse theory: towards a

dialogue across ontological divides

1 Cultural Political Economy

The foundations of the ‘Lancaster strand’ of Cultural Political Economy were laid down in
the 1990s, among others through Sayer’s work on the cultural turn in sociology and
geography (Ray and Sayer, 1999), Fairclough’s writings on discourse analysis (e.g.
Fairclough, 1995) and Jessop’s (1990) framework of neo- Gramscian, strategic-relational

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state theory. While in line with these various sources, CPE still sees itself as a pluralist
project (Jessop, 2010), united by the common concern to reinvigorate classical political
economy, Jessop and Sum have taken the lead to turn CPE into a well-identifiable, distinct
research agenda (Jessop, 2004a; Jessop and Sum, 2001, 2006). Accordingly, the
following summary of CPE’s main objectives and assumptions will mostly rely on their
work.

A key concept of CPE is that of ‘semiosis’, referring to the intersubjective production of

meaning (verbally and otherwise) through complexity reduction (Jessop, 2004a).
Committed to critical realism and its distinction between social construals and social
constructions, i.e. ‘between making a mental construction of the world and materially
constructing something’ (Sayer, 2004: 7), CPE distinguishes between the semiotic and the
extra-semiotic. CPE has been mainly concerned with how some economic imaginaries,
from the wide variety of imaginaries available, become selected and retained (i.e.
institutionalized) (Jessop and Oosterlynck, 2008). A key postulation in this regard – again
in line with critical realist thinking – is that the effectiveness of an economic imaginary
depends on how it ‘correspond[s] to the properties of the materials (including social
phenomena such as actors and institutions) used to construct social reality’ (Jessop,
2004a: 164). These processes of institutionalization are contingently necessary: contingent
because imaginaries become solidified through the accidental interaction of multiple
causal chains, and necessary as this interaction in a definite context has necessary effects
(Jessop, 1990).

CPE holds on to a ‘primary concern with the materiality of capitalism, its structural
contradictions and its associated strategic dilemmas’ (Jessop and Sum, 2001: 99). This
concern is grounded in a specific understanding of the link between Marxist thought and
critical realism. Marx was ‘a major precursor both philosophically and in substantive
theoretical terms’ of critical realism (Jessop, 2005: 40). Accordingly, CPE’s focus has been
more specifically on the stabilization of specific spatiotemporal fixes (Jessop and
Oosterlynck, 2008). In order to account for these in a more nuanced way, CPE has called
for ‘a creative synthesis’ of various disciplinary perspectives (Jessop and Sum, 2001). A
key example of such a synthesis has been the incorporation of (neo) Foucauldian and
(neo) Gramscian insights, based on the argument that these help to shed light on how
economic imaginaries become hegemonic, and who and what are involved in this process
(Jessop, 2007, 2008; Sum, 2009). Revealing the socially constructed nature of political-
economic phenomena this way, CPE implies both Ideologiekritik, i.e. the uncovering of
ideal and material interests behind meaning systems, as well as Herrschaftskritik, i.e. the
exposure of how particular meaning systems become hegemonic (Jessop, 2010; Jessop
and Oosterlynck, 2008).

As to concrete CPE applications, Jessop’s (2004a) seminal article introducing CPE offers
an analysis of ‘the knowledge-based economy’ as a master discourse for accumulation
strategies that relies on a complex network of practices across diverse systems and scales
of action. In a similar manner, Sum (2009) examines the hegemonic status of the

3
discourse of competitiveness and how that has involved ‘the circulation and suturing of
heterogeneous knowledging technologies and apparatuses . . .across different scales and
sites’ (p. 198).

Following the initial emphasis on economic imaginaries, lately CPE has increasingly been
applied to examine the spatial aspects of neoliberal capital accumulation and state
regulation. Jessop (2012), for example, introduced the notion of ‘spatial imaginaries’ in
order to address the question as to how regions (or other spaces) are being constructed
as objects of intervention, and how particular imaginaries are selected and instituted.
Oosterlynck and González (2013), in their study of the geographical variation of urban
policy responses to the financial-economic crisis, propose to link CPE with work on
neoliberalism as a ‘variegated’ (i.e. spatially polymorphous) phenomenon (see Brenner et
al., 2010), in order to examine how this variation is being (re)produced discursively. On the
whole, these recent developments can be seen as the continuation of earlier efforts to
‘spatialize’ Jessop’s strategic-relational approach to the state. At the same time, they are
complementary to recent theorizations concerning the multidimensional (territorial, place-
based, scalar and networked) character of sociospatial relations (Jessop et al., 2008), and
the ‘compossibility’ of spatial forms of governance (Jones and Jessop, 2010) under
neoliberal capitalism.

2 Discourse theory

Discourse theory is the more commonly known designation of the Ideology and Discourse
Analysis Programme in the Department of Government at the University of Essex. It was
established by Ernesto Laclau in 1985 after the publication of Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, a book he co-authored with Chantal
Mouffe (Glynos and Howarth, 2007). Hegemony and Socialist Strategy aimed to set both a
political and a theoretical agenda: the former to address the apparent impasse of
conventional leftist politics focusing on ‘the working class’ 2005), the latter to deal with the
perceived crisis of Marxist theorizing, especially its class reductionism and economic
determinism. Laclau and Mouffe (2001) propose to re-read Marxist categories through the
insights of poststructural thought, notably the work of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan and
Michel Foucault. The resulting ‘post-Marxist’ approach is a radical reinterpretation of
Gramsci’s notion of hegemony where hegemony is no longer conceived as a strictly class
practice, but as the principle of the construction of meaning in general (Martin, 2002).
Thus, according to Laclau and Mouffe, all social identities become partially fixed through
hegemonic practices of articulation. This fixation (or closure of meanings) occurs in terms
of equivalence or difference (Torfing, 2005), and results in discourses (or discursive
formations), understood as differential systems of temporarily solidified meanings.
Importantly, these systems of meanings are not limited to the cognitive-ideational realm.
Drawing on Wittgenstein’s view of the indissoluble totality [of] both language and . . .
actions (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 108), Laclau and Mouffe view discourses as
encompassing meaning and practice.

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From the above it follows that for Laclau and Mouffe ‘the notion of the social [is] conceived
as discursive space’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001); there is no non- or extra-discursive realm
of the social. Furthermore, given that relations between equivalence and difference are
undecidable, discourses embody a fundamentally temporary closure of meanings. Laclau
and Mouffe thus assume ‘the incomplete and open character of the social’ (p. 134). This
assumption is actually key to their notion of ‘the political’ that is taken to constitute the
social (p. xiv); discourses are the manifestations of political decisions. Changes in
discourses are conceptualized as ‘dislocation’, as moments when hegemonic systems of
meanings are confronted with events that they cannot explain or ‘domesticate’. This opens
the terrain for political struggles and the articulation of new discourses (Torfing, 2005).
This conception of change is grounded in the assumption of the ‘split’ subject, i.e. the idea
that because structures (discourses) are constitutively incomplete the subject is
incomplete (or ‘lacking’) too. Subjects develop political subjectivities once they can no
longer ‘go on’ in their routinized fashion (Glynos and Howarth, 2008).

As Laclau has admittedly seen himself more as a political ontologist (Laclau, 2004) and
Mouffe has been above all concerned with elaborating an ethico-political stance on radical
and plural democracy, their highly abstract work still needed to be rendered more
accessible to make a difference in social scientific research. This task has been
undertaken by their (former) students and colleagues at Essex, resulting in a series of very
illuminating books that have actually established poststructuralist discourse theory
(hereafter DT) as a distinctive approach (e.g. Glynos and Howarth, 2007). Discourse
theory is seen as both an ontological stance and a problem-driven approach focusing on
the reproduction and transformation of hegemonic orders and practices. Glynos and
Howarth (2007) in particular have greatly contributed to the practical applicability of
discourse theory by elaborating a framework of critical explanation in terms of three types
of logics: social, political and fantasmatic. Social logics help to characterize the rules
structuring and governing social practices in different contexts. Political logics enable us to
make sense of how social relations are being challenged and re-formed. Finally, the
concept of fantasmatic logics captures the ideological dimension of social relations and
how modes of enjoyment conceal the radical contingency of social reality. By speaking of
logics, Glynos and Howarth (2007) wish to avoid the connotations of subject-
independence that is suggested by talk of causal mechanisms. At the same time, they
wish to maintain the insight that not everything is reducible to the contextualized self-
interpretations of subjects.

3 On not becoming lost in ‘metaphysical language games’: a brief detour to

the philosophy of science

Impasses in scholarly debates can thus be avoided if we attend more carefully to what a
particular approach intends to achieve with a (set of) concept(s) within its own (ontological)
frame of reference. However, a mere reassertion of philosophical pluralism can easily be
accused of relativism and of not enabling a conception of scientific progress (see, Bassett,
1999). The key question is actually how (if at all) apparently contradictory perspectives

5
such as CPE and DT can find a common ground without this leading to one perspective
subsuming the other.

Laclau and Bhaskar’s (1998) debate on the relation between scientific discourses and
reality convincingly indicates the futility of discussions between critical realism and
discourse theory (and thus also between CPE and DT) on the metaphysical level. In that
debate, it becomes clear that neither approach can acknowledge the other without
subsuming it under its own view of scientific inquiry. Discourse theory can recognize
critical realism ‘only’ as one of the possible (phenomenologically rooted) world-views;
critical realism can accept discourse theory ‘only’ as one of the competing, referential
accounts of reality. Bhaskar seems to be right that those opposing realism also assume a
reality ‘out there’, for in order to recognize other perspectives and their assumptions one
necessarily has to assume that these perspectives are referring to ‘the same’,
independently existing world (Ronen, 1998). However, although discourse theorists do not
deny that there is a ‘world out there’, they reject the subject-object dualism implied by
realists’ above referential argument (Laclau and Mouffe, 1987: 85). Furthermore, they do
not accept the realist view that the world has one certain shape (Torfing, 2005).

On the whole, Laclau and Bhaskar’s debate is a manifestation of the broader

disagreement between realist and ‘non-realist’ perspectives on ‘reality’, ‘world’ and
‘reference’ that are rooted in diverging metaphysical commitments. Assuming that there is
no ‘meta-meta-theoretical neutral position’ (Furlong and Marsh, 2007) from which the
realist/‘non-realist’ opposition could be resolved, I would like to suggest that instead of
speaking in terms of ‘the metaphysical language game of ontology’ (Kivinen and Piiroinen,
2006: 307), proponents of CPE and DT should rather engage in ‘social scientific language
games’ (p. 319) that are geared to addressing shared real-world concerns.

Given the attachment of both strands to antifoundationalism and anti-empiricism, as well

as to the idea of the fallibility of scientific knowledge, we have good reasons to assume
that proponents of CPE and DT are willing to participate in such a broader scientific
language game. In fact, Jessop and Sum (2010) have noted that CPE’s links to critical
realism should not be overemphasized; from the part of DT, Torfing (1999) has suggested
that, despite their ontological divergence, Jessop’s strategic-relational approach and
discourse theory could be combined. More recently, DT scholars have called for inter-
approach conversations among discourse-analytical approaches by ‘refocusing the debate
around common problem areas’ (Glynos et al., 2009: 6–7).

Such a problem-oriented approach appears workable in the case of CPE and DT as they
share an interest in accounting for the (re)production of hegemonic social practices – even
if this interest has not always been framed in spatial terms. Against this background, the
next subsection draws the contours of a dialogue between CPE and DT on the topical
issue of whether and how urban governance practices have been transformed in the
course of the current financial-economic crisis (cf. Oosterlynck and González, 2013). As

6
will be shown, such a dialogue not only helps in pinpointing aspects of complementarity, it
also fosters mutual learning by exposing the prevailing weaknesses of each approach.

4 CPE and DT in dialogue: towards complementary explanation and mutual

learning

In order to explore complementarities we need to reconsider first the ‘kinds’ of insights that
CPE and DT tend to offer. Of course, differences in this respect are rooted in the diverging
‘original’ motivations of critical realism and discourse theory. This is nicely captured by
Willmott (2005), according to whom critical realists ‘approach their subject matter primarily
as ‘‘scientists’’ who intend to retroduce the operation of generative mechanisms’;
discourse theorists in turn regard themselves as ‘‘‘politicians’’ . . . who conceive of their
subject matter, including themselves, as radically political’ (p. 762, emphasis added).
To be sure, CPE should not be equated with critical realism (see Jessop and Sum, 2010)
and, due to recent developments (especially Glynos and Howarth, 2007), DT has moved
from being ‘just’ an ontology to a more fully-fledged framework of social scientific inquiry.
Furthermore, as argued above, it is counterproductive to contrast CPE and DT at the
meta-theoretical level. Nonetheless, by keeping this divergence of orientation between
critical realism and discourse theory in mind, it becomes easier to discern some
differences of emphasis in CPE- and DT informed work, respectively.
To begin with, we can recognize that CPE scholars remain primarily interested in exposing
the structural mechanisms that help some practices institutionalize rather than others. To
this end, they make use of concepts such as ‘emergence’, ‘sedimentation’ and ‘structural
selectivities’ (see Jessop, 2010). Discourse theorists, while they certainly do not deny the
role of structural conditions, have not been concerned to offer a systematic account of
these. Instead, they tend to put more emphasis on the radical contingency (Howarth,
2010) and ‘the political ‘‘origin’’’ (Torfing, 1999: 70) of all social institutions.
This is certainly also acknowledged by CPE, but DT shows more explicit attention towards
the ‘endless series of de facto decisions, which result from a myriad of decentred strategic
actions undertaken by political agents aiming to forge a hegemonic discourse’ (Torfing,
2005: 15). Relatedly, discourse theorists are more sensitive to recognizing (the potential
for) ‘radical acts of institution’ (Howarth, 2010: 309, emphasis in original).
A difference is also manifest in CPE’s and DT’s view of agency. CPE conceives of agents
as strategic actors who make sense of the world ‘through complexity reduction’. This view
purposively aims at ‘counterbalanc[ing] preoccupations with affect’ (Jones, 2008: 394) that
are seen as potentially compromising the identification of causal structural forces. DT’s
notion of ‘fantasmatic logics’ in turn, referring to ‘the different types of ‘‘enjoyment’’
subjects procure in . . . believing things they do’ (Howarth, 2010: 326), wishes to capture
exactly this affective dimension. DT’s grounding in Heideggerian ontology and in
Wittgensteinian philosophy implies a further significant difference vis-a`-vis that of CPE.
From a Heideggerian perspective, human action should be seen as a skillful coping and
practical engagement with the environment.

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In accordance with Heidegger, Wittgenstein also argues that meaning is produced by
human beings in the course of their specific activities (see Simonsen, 2007). Accordingly,
DT is more attuned to capture the (‘messily’) practical dimension of agency.
Ultimately, CPE and DT’s different takes on issues of structure-agency and subject-object
relations imply a different approach to spatiality. It should be noted here that neither
proponents of CPE nor those of DT have devoted much explicit attention to theorizing
‘space’ (for the former, see Jessop, 2004b; Jessop et al., 2008; for the latter, see Howarth,
2006). Nonetheless, from their sparse remarks it is possible to sketch the contours of their
understanding of space. CPE (-near) scholars assume (similarly to DT scholars) the
multiple, constructed and perspectival character of spatiality, but tend to discuss it
primarily in terms of relatively entrenched ‘given’ spatial (territorial, scalar, networked or
place-based) forms (see Jessop et al., 2008). From this perspective, challenges of spatial
(re)ordering appear as a tension between different spatial forms, such as that between the
(state) logic of territory and the (capital) logic of flows (Jessop, 2012). Discourse theorists
in turn wish to go beyond these (what they consider) ‘ontical categories’ of spaces
(Howarth, 2006). Unlike CPE (-near) scholars, they do not ascribe to the Hegelian dialectic
of the ‘spatial turn’, but propose to equate space with social space, i.e. society, and define
spatialization as attempts to establish a hegemonic fixing of meanings. Furthermore, the
significance of space is held to be ‘relative to the projects and practices of subjects’
(Howarth, 2006: 116).
Having briefly inventoried the key tendencies of CPE- and DT-informed accounts, let us
now consider how a dialogue between the two approaches could contribute to a fuller
account of a concrete issue, that of whether and how urban governance practices have
been transformed in the course of the current financial economic crisis. Set next to each
other, it is apparent that CPE has a more sophisticated vocabulary to grasp processes of
structuration in terms of selective institutionalization. In the case of DT, while the
introduction of the notions of social, political and fantasmatic logics is surely an
advancement, the threefold use of the term ‘logics’ suggests that we have to deal with
three dimensions of ‘equal standing’. Furthermore, given its aspiration for larger-scale (but
not totalizing) truths on contemporary urban change, a CPE perspective is more apt to
explore the systemic reproduction of family resemblances among urban governance
practices ‘beyond’ the local scale. A good example of this is Oosterlynck and Gonzalez’s
(2013) analysis of how transnational sites of policy discourse, such as those linked to the
OECD or the EU, play a key role in framing urban policy responses to the crisis.
A discourse-theoretical approach seems to offer, as yet, few (if any) clues as to how we
can grasp the interconnectedness and interdependence of local governance practices. At
the same time, DT helps to highlight the limitations stemming from CPE’s focus on path-
dependent macro-level economic selectivities and on the global hegemony of
neoliberalism (e.g. Jessop, 2010; Oosterlynck, 2012; Oosterlynck and Gonza´lez, 2013).
To be sure, CPE scholars recurrently caution from regarding neoliberalism as a monolithic
force, and refer to the multiple (non-economic) selectivities at work, as well as to the
significance of narrative appeal in securing public consent (e.g. Jessop, 2010;
Oosterlynck, 2012; Oosterlynck and Gonzalez, 2013). However – and this becomes
especially clear in juxtaposition to DT – these aspects are eventually rather neglected in

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CPE-informed work, both conceptually and empirically. DT asserts namely that ‘any fully
fledged explanans contains a plurality of different kinds of logics’ where none is subsumed
under higher-order laws or abstractions (Howarth, 2005: 326, emphasis in original).
Rather, concrete events and processes are explained in terms of the articulation of
multiple social logics that brings about a modification in each of those logics. This more
open-ended attitude of DT enables us to appreciate the structuring effect of those broader
‘long-term rhythms of socio-cultural change’ (Barnett, 2005: 10) on urban policies that are
not straightforwardly reducible to neoliberalism’. Furthermore, it also allows us to take
better into account the locally particular structuring aspects of ‘inherited institutional
landscapes’ (Brenner et al., 2010). On the whole, instead of tying down commonalities
among urban governance practices to one aspect, DT helps to consider the multiple
dimensions of commonalities across spatial scales. This is especially relevant if we want to
duly consider non-capitalist cases or cases of transition to capitalism. But DT should not be
mistaken for emphasizing the contingency and hybridity of local trajectories at the expense
of institutional frameworks (in the broad sense) of ‘extra-local’ scope (see Peck et al.,
2009). Actually, DT also allows giving a more nuanced account of how such frameworks
become instituted and continue to exert influence. This latter aspect is of special relevance
given the widely observed paradox that ‘crisis conditions [have been] leading to more of
the same rather than a sharp turn away from the neoliberal path’ (Castree, 2010: 206). DT
helps in coming to grips with this paradox through its concept of fantasmatic logics that
captures the organization and shaping of (individual and collective) desire without having
recourse – as CPE tends to do –to notions of manipulation and ideological deception,
which presuppose a demarcation between true and falsity (Howarth, 2010). For DT, the
key role of fantasy is not simply to evoke a false picture of the world, but to suppress
aspects of challenge and contestation so that the subject experiences the contradictions of
everyday life ‘as an accepted and smooth way of ‘‘going on’’’ (p. 322). This perspective
could deliver useful insights concerning, among others, the stubborn persistence of the
‘perverse metaphors’ of the city as a unified actor and component of globalization
(Marcuse, 2005) that continue to frame urban governance practices worldwide.
Furthermore and more generally, DT could help ‘repopulate’ CPE’s useful but strikingly
agentless mappings of the strategic, macro-level terrains of governance by offering in-
depth, ethnographic accounts of the ‘worlds’ and motivations of subjects (see Howarth,
2005), including not only ‘powerful actors’ but also policy officials and ordinary people. By
doing so, DT could finally also encourage CPE to join efforts to reflect more explicitly on
methodological issues (Howarth, 2005; Torfing, 2005), to which CPE has not devoted
much attention to date.

IV Towards engaged pluralism in geographical political economy –

concluding remarks
The aim of this paper was to demonstrate how we could move towards a (more)
productive engagement with pluralism in geographical political economy. I argued that
greater philosophical awareness is vital to such a move as it helps to better recognize the
motivations and assumptions of diverging approaches, as well as the kinds of insights they
offer. Importantly, engaged pluralism does not ‘mean agreement, let alone convergence’

9
(Barnes and Sheppard, 2010: 209). As the dialogue between CPE and discourse theory
illustrated, differences between critical realist, Marxist-informed research agendas and
poststructuralist lines of inquiry will not (cannot) become erased.
The former will remain principally concerned with accounting for the geographically
variegated institutions through which the contradiction fraught dynamics of capitalism are
regulated.
The latter will continue to focus on how various kinds of institutions ‘become’ (hegemonic)
through discourse and performance.
Nonetheless, by showing (more) ‘willingness to listen and to take seriously other people’s
ideas’ (Barnes and Sheppard, 2010: 209), we can avoid the impasses that have
characterized previous debates in geographical political economy, and explore the
potentials of mutual learning and complementarity. Crucially, we can move beyond the
prevailing view of complementarity, generally expressed from a critical realist and/or
Marxist informed position that seems to regard that position offering the bedrock of an
encompassing explanation and sees poststructuralist inclined research supplying useful
additional insights on aspects of subjectivity and context (e.g. Brenner et al., 2011; Jessop,
2007). This view unduly reduces different perspectives (actually also the one from which it
is proposed) to their inclinations. Relatedly, it mistakenly suggests that different
perspectives can be largely assigned to one side of the structure/agency, global/local,
explanation/interpretation binary oppositions (see, for example, Dixon and Jones, 2004) –
ignoring that each perspective itself comprises a distinct (albeit sometimes implicit) set of
propositions concerning both sides of these (and other) binaries.
From the above it follows that attempts to categorize approaches – including the tables
presented in this paper – might be helpful only as a starting point, for they make
approaches appear as distinct and complete totalities. However, approaches rooted in
different ontologies are actually being shaped in relation to each other (Sheppard, 2008).
Furthermore, as asserted by their advocates, they are ‘under construction’ (Jessop and
Sum, 2010: 449) and ‘not . . . fully-fledged’ (Glynos and Howarth, 2007: 215). Proponents
of diverging perspectives should thus steer clear of metaphysical debates and explore the
possibilities of ‘relational improvement’ by addressing shared concrete concerns. The
problematization of forms of governance that perpetuate uneven development, social
exclusion and poverty (i.e. the ‘traditional concerns’ of political economy) do already figure
central to both critical realist/Marxist-informed research agendas and poststructuralist lines
of inquiry. The resolute attention of the former to the (re)production of entrenched forms of
capitalist regulation, and the aptitude of the latter for highlighting how these (and other
institutional) forms have achieved and retained hegemony in and through practice should
be recognized as a source of productive tension. It is by constructively engaging with this
tension that we will be able to make more sense of political-economic geographies of
continuity and change.

10