ABSTRACT
Key theoretical debates in political and economic geography have highlighted the significance of relationality and the constitution of economic objects and spaces of governance (Peck 2004; Yeung 2005; Gibson-Graham 2006). The hard-wired relational categories of political economy have come under challenge from a language of new ‘state spaces’ or ‘economic spaces’ (Leyshon et al. 2003; Peck 2002). This language offers opportunities to develop post-structural political economies that challenge mainstream economic geography (Le Heron 2006). In such terms, spaces of governance are configurations of economic relations and activities, politically inspired representations of them, and institutions of governance; and scale is a construct (Sheppard and McMaster 2004). They are not pre-formed but coalesce and are shaped into assemblages such as ‘the economy’ – a construct of social, political and economic processes in the mid-twentieth century (Mitchell 2002). Apparently foundational categories are constructs for knowing and managing economic and social relations. They are produced discursively and by a ‘politics of calculation’ and associated practices, measurements, and boundary setting. In this chapter, I focus attention on the ways in which industry is being reworked in these terms.
