ABSTRACT
Over the last few years, ‘progress’ in human geography has been marked by repeated calls for a convergence between ‘the economic’ and ‘the cultural’.
that such a move would make in practice). There is, however, a growing number of examples of the kind of work I have in mind. A promising start was made in the early 1980s with Sharon Zukin’s study of the intersection of culture and capital in the creation of New York City’s real-estate market for luxury ‘loft living’, an approach she has subsequently elaborated in relation to the wider ‘cultures of cities’, including the key mediating role of the ‘critical infrastructure’ in the city’s public culture of museums and restaurants [see p. 431]. Similar lines of enquiry have been pursued in Paul Du Gay’s study [Consumption and Identity at Work, 1996] of the collaborative manufacture of ‘enterprise culture’ among retail workers and consumers in 1980s Britain, and in Linda McDowell’s work on the gendered performance of culturally approved workplace identities in the City of London [see p. 457] – to name just a few of my recent favourites.
