ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the inadequacies that various writers have recognized in recent approaches to the study of economic geography. It also indicates some crucial questions that focus on the distinctive nature of the subject's potential contribution to knowledge. The chapter then identifies the perspectives that talks about the task of formulating a more satisfactory approach taking its direction. It further argues that neither the determinism of positivist social science and a dogmatic neo-marxism nor a subjective indeterminism is adequate sources of knowledge for the study of human action and interaction with the natural environment. Admitting the generic deficiency of epistemological positivism in the social sciences and recognizing that implicit ideological assumptions inherited from liberal economic theory must also be reckoned with, he concludes that "much current formal theoretical work in economic and urban geography appears to be heading in the wrong direction".
