Trading routes, bypasses, and risky intersections: mapping the travels of `networks' between economic sociology and economic geography

Abstract

In economic geography the notion of the network has come to play a critical role in a range of debates. Yet networks are rarely construed in an explicit fashion. They are, rather, assumed as some sort of more enduring social relations. This paper seeks to foreground these implicit assumptions - and their limitations - by tracing the selective engagement of economic geography with network approaches in economic sociology. The perception of networks in economic geography is mainly informed by the network governance approach that is founded on Mark Granovetter's notion of embeddedness. By embracing the network governance approach, economic geography bypassed the older tradition of the social network approach. Economic geography thus discarded not only the concerns for network position and structure but also more calculative and strategic perceptions of networks prevailing in Ron Burt's work. Beyond these two dominant traditions, economic geography has, more recently, started to tinker with the poststructuralist metaphor of the rhizome of actor-network theory while it took no notice of Harrison White's notions of publics and polymorphous network domains.