ABSTRACT
In their own varying ways, all the chapters in this opening section reflect on the identity of economic geography as an academic subdiscipline. They do so at a moment when that identity is as fluid as it has been at any time since the early 1970s, a period that saw the beginning of the rise to intellectual hegemony of Marxian political-economic approaches. In the mid-1990s, this political-economic tradition is on the defensive. The content, concepts and approaches of (political) economic geography are all being actively reassessed. Content is being rethought in terms of what social and spatial portions of life count as economic, what portions (if any) are therefore non-economic, and how these designated spheres of the economic and non-economic interrelate. Concepts are being reflected on, both in terms of the definitions and utility of key political-economic theoretical constructs such as class, production, labour, capitalism or the economy itself, and in terms of the relevance of theoretical concerns that are conspicuous only by their absence from such a list (identity, representation or meaning for instance). And approaches are being reconsidered through debates over the kinds of theorization and methodology needed to make sense of whatever empirical and conceptual concerns economic geographers decide they are interested in.
