ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the preliminary fashion, the links between regional uniqueness, regional change, and social change and the ways in which human geographers and other social scientists have analysed them. For many years, the main concerns of human geography indeed arguably its dominant pre-occupation was the study of regions. Some geographers even went so far as to claim that there was a regional method which defined the discipline as a distinctive area of intellectual inquiry. Regions certainly need to be understood in the context of theories about social structure and change but, conversely, the particular regional patterning of a given society is a contingent matter, a product of the interrelationships between general structural relations, which are endowed with causal powers, and the specificities of places. In this sense, the traditional object of analysis of geographers now holds a central place in modern social theory.
