ABSTRACT
While a focus on key economic institutions, notably the firm, has been a longstanding emphasis in economic geography, there is another, and competing, tradition in the sub-discipline. Employing key concepts drawn from political economy many economic geographers, especially in the 1970s and on, found that they could begin to construct powerful analyses. For many political economy inspired economic geographers, it is the highly uneven nature of capitalist development that needs explanation. Both the uneven and unequal incorporation of different groups of people and the uneven development of spaces – from continents to streets and alleys – demand analysis not just because they were, and still are, intriguing aspects of the world we live in, but because for many economic geographers, ourselves included, the inequities engendered by capitalist development represent a major social failing.
