ABSTRACT
The rediscovery of the region and its critics: post-fordism, districts and all that Something funny happened in the early 1980s. The region, long considered an interesting topic to historians and geographers, but not considered to have any interest for mainstream Western social science, was rediscovered by a group of heterodox political economists, sociologists, political scientists and geographers. Not that no attention had been paid to regions by social scientists before that: in regional economics, development economics, and economic geography, regional growth and decline, patterns of location of economic activity, and regional economic structure were well developed domains of inquiry. But such work treated the region as an outcome of deeper political-economic processes, not a fundamental unit of social life in contemporary capitalism equivalent to, say, markets, states or families, nor a fundamental process, in social life, such as technology, stratification, or interest-seeking behaviour. Economic geography was a second-order empirical topic for social science.
