ABSTRACT
If a room full of geographers in the 1960s was pressed to identify the part of their discipline which most exemplified their pretensions to practising a science, the majority would have pointed first to location theory. Location, it was felt by many, was the essential vocation of the geographer and the more mathematical the methodology the more evident the truth of the claim of science. It was apt, therefore, that location theory was a primary target for critique in the radical ferment that opened a variety of post-positivist approaches in the early 1970s. The lines of this critique are now well established. In so far as traditional location theory took neoclassical economics as its inspiration, it conveyed a narrow, ahistorical vision of the world, which abstained from questioning deeper societal assumptions. Under the guise of scientific objectivity, it accepted, indeed recapitulated, a social, economic, and political status quo which, in the words of Kenneth Boulding, ‘was nothing to quo about’. The critique of location theory attempted to replace an essentially positivist and introverted focus with an understanding of the historical dynamism of locational change as an integral part of broader processes of geographical development.
