Scale, Social Production of

A Marxist “theory of Scale”

Linked to processes of globalization, localization, and regionalization, scale became a fundamental concept for political geographers in the 1980s. The works of Peter Taylor and Neil Smith were pivotal in identifying the different levels at which processes of the world economy are manifest. Both identify a nested hierarchy of scales running from the global to the local. Taylor's three-level model of the modern world system identified the [Page 2507]world economy, nation-state, and locality, while Smith highlighted urban, regional, national, and global as critical scale categories. Introducing for the first time a “theory of scale,” this approach was not without its critics. Scales were rather more fixed than is commonly accepted today. The result saw scale categories reified as distinct levels of analysis, each with its own disciplinary following. Integration of analysis across scales and/or at multiple scales therefore proved difficult, with many arguing that scale lacked practical as well as rhetorical value. Finally, this first cut at a theory of how scales are produced was heavily inscribed with Marxist ideas of materialism. This is to say that scales are real social products (not simply handy conceptual mechanisms for ordering the world) and they emerged out of the dynamics of capitalist accumulation.

Scale as a dynamic Construct

Rather than see scale as a nested hierarchy, debate in the 1990s focused on discursive and relational notions of scale that moved away from scale as a taken-for-granted to scale as a dynamic concept. This debate took place largely in the journal Political Geography, with social constructivist approaches demonstrating how scales are the negotiated outcome of social and political struggle. More than this, they showed how scales are always in the process of being produced and reproduced, and it was in this context that the concept of a politics of scale was introduced and developed. To compensate for the overreliance on the rhetorical value of scale in the 1980s, accounts from the 1990s also argued that scale politics are not found in theoretical discourse but in real-world practices of social conflict and struggle. Notable empirical studies from this time focused on telecommunications, labor restructuring, and political parties to highlight how scales are socially constructed, not ontologically pregiven. Scales such as the national and regional were no longer seen to be part of some logical hierarchy between global and local but as actively created by political and economic processes. In other words, scales are not “out there” waiting to be used but must be brought into being and given meaning.

...