The restructuring debate

Societies do not usually present themselves to us with their workings exposed. We have to make an effort to make sense of the world, and we do this by adopting a particular approach. An approach imposes some order on our investigations, determining how we carve up reality into bits, and what kind of theories are built to explain what we find. A good approach will direct attention systematically to relevant features, and call forth theories which can justly claim to be scientific. ¹ The restructuring debate in human geography is concerned with a particular approach, increasingly influential over the last decade.