Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 1994, volume 12, pages 257-264

Editorial

The scale politics of spaliality In a recent paper, Dorccn Massey (1992) expressed some concerns about the way critical theorists have recently engaged with, and appropriated, spatial concepts. She felt that the kind of spatial grammar emerging in critical theory is more about fixity, inertia, and stasis than it is about the dynamic qualities of space and human spatial relations. Instead of replacing the rigid categories of historicism and modern­ism, recent attempts to reassert space in critical theory seem merely to have generated a parallel set of problematical spatial ideas and metaphor. Massey proposed that critical theory move towards an integrative approach to spatiality that is firmly rooted in social and material activity: "It is not the 'slice through time' that should be the dominant thought but the simultaneous coexistence of social relations that cannot be conceptualized as other than dynamic ... space is by its nature full of power and symbolism, a complex web of relations of domination and subordination ... a kind of 'power-geometry'" (pages 80-81).

If an integrative approach to spatiality is overdue in critical theory, the same can be argued for a theory of scale in human geography. The issue, if not a full-blown theory, of scale has lurked behind recent debates in geography, and on a few occasions it has been at the very center of discussion. One gets from these debates a sense of the importance of scale, but at the same time the overriding impression is that geographers arc lacking in concepts capable of capturing the various nuances of scale. As Neil Smith (1992) has recently argued, geographers often conflate differ­ent, yet interrelated, meanings of scale. Sometimes scale depicts a geography of difference in material landscapes. On other occasions, scale is a set of abstractions through which we make sense of social processes making and remaking these material landscapes. To complicate matters further, scale is often used metaphorically in the sense that scale differences are implicit but are not fundamental to the idea being presented. Anthony Giddens's 'regionalization' of human behavior and social interactions would fit this description because it can be applied to many time-space scales (1985, page 281). The use of spatial metaphor is a well-recognized practice in geography (Agnew, 1982; Barnes and Duncan, 1991); less so is scale metaphor.

The language of scale is too powerful to be treated simply as a 'dimension' of spatiality. Nevertheless, if we are to accept Massey's arguments, any new approach to scale and difference must incorporate the politics of spatiality. I want to suggest that we can in fact talk of the scale politics of spatiality. I will discuss aspects of this politics in reference to the presentation of scale both in geography and in social life more generally.

The presentation of scale in human geography Many of the social objects that geographers encounter in research, such as neigh­borhood groups, urban growth coalitions, regional business associations, nation-states, and multinational corporations, have well-defined scales of operation. Although the properties of these objects depend upon how scale is organized, the corresponding scale categories—neighborhood, urban, regional, national, and global—make no direct reference to these properties. In and of itself scale can be a 'contentless abstraction' (Sayer, 1984, pages 89-90).

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Positivists see otherwise, particularly when it comes to data presentation. For example, spatial data acquired from secondary sources are often organized accord­ing to the spatial jurisdictions of those sources, and not necessarily on the basis of 'scientifically derived' scales. These data are susceptible to the ecological fallacy and create scale aggregation effects (the same set of data presented at different scales can yield different variances) (D M Smith, 1989). Therefore scale is (statisti­cally) causal. Statistical models, such as those available within a GIS framework, can identify the operation of scale effects and improve the level of spatial resolution and quality of data presentation (Chou, 1993).

Whereas positivists often look for the operation of 'scale effects' independent of a social and material context, postpositivists focus upon the social production of scale (Smith, 1984). Scale now is causal in the realist sense that the constituent properties of social objects change, or are activated, as these objects stretch and contract across space. Neil Smith has called the stretching process the action of 'jumping' between scales, and he rightly emphasizes that it is a process driven by class, ethnic, gender, and cultural struggles. On the one hand, domineering organi­zations attempt to control the dominated by confining the latter and their activities to a manageable scale. On the other hand, subordinated groups attempt to liberate themselves from these imposed scale constraints by harnessing powers and instrumen­talities at other scales. In the process, scale is actively produced. Andrew Herod (1991) has demonstrated the production of scale in US labor relations.

The social production of scale means that material scales cannot be taken for granted. Nor presumably can be abstract scales. For if a material region, such as the manufacturing belt in the United States (Smith and Dennis, 1987), coalesces and fragments, but at a different scale, can it still be called a region? Maybe it is the 'modernist' sense of the region that is challenged (Warf, 1990). But does it then follow that geographers should privilege 'other' scales in the same way that the region was itself once venerated?

To begin to answer these questions, it is useful to consider three recent presenta­tions of scale in geography. These are: the emphasis on scale-specific research projects; theories of scale that assign social processes to specific scales; and the trend towards mesoscale analysis. I suggest that in each of these cases geographers conflate—sometimes intentionally—scale as abstraction with scale as metaphor. As this conflation has created confusion, a more open awareness of the presentation of scale would, I suggest, enable the development of a more critical approach to scale and the politics of difference.

For some researchers, the presentation of scale is a kind of self-legitimation strategy in that it provides a frame of reference for a new research program, or perhaps even a new paradigm. An example would be the ESRC-funded locality studies project in Britain and its identification of the local(ity) as a scale worthy of critical enquiry. This project attracted much critical attention and became part of a wider debate in geography about philosophy and method (Massey, 1991). The original locality debate was about scale, however, and specifically about the appro­priateness of the local scale for investigating capitalist restructuring processes.

Locality studies were justified on the grounds that neither the international nor national scales provided a complete picture of the wide-sweeping changes happening to the British economy and society in the 1980s (Pickvance, 1990). A more local focus was necessary in order to tease out the complex processes-international, national, and local—producing change. Among these processes, the Conservative Party's domination of the national political arena and its focus on

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national economic policies had created an opportunity for the Labour Party and the left to mobilize around local and metropolitan authorities (Bocldy and Ridge, 1984). Thus locality was not simply where change was being experienced, it had become politically contested and was therefore contributing to that change.

It seemed, however, that the spatial limits of the case-study localities had been arbitrarily defined and, if shifted to a wider scale, a quite different set of explanatory factors would come into play (Smith, 1987). Neil Smith called the scale-explanation shift the 'gcstalt of scale*. He expressed doubts about the empha­sis on local politics and change as compared with, say, politics and change at the scale of the European Community. Although locality researchers could not be accused of ignoring a wider scale context, they had not backed up the locality focus with a theory of scale. Accordingly, "There needs to be some kind of correspon­dence between the scale of real processes and events and the scale of analysis" (page 64); locality researchers were whimpering up the right tree whilst tied to their kennels with a short leash.

Upon reflection, the gcstalt of scale is an unfortunate analogy, although at the time it served to make a useful point. It is unfortunate because it failed to make the distinction between scale as abstraction and scale as metaphor. Locality studies were not necessarily driven by any desire to establish rigid empirical, let alone abstract, scale boundaries. If the aim had been, for example, to demonstrate the growing rift between North and South in the British economy and polity during the 1980s, the project could perhaps have been called Regional studies'. But inter­regional differences were built into the project (localities from the North and South, as well as from metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas, were selected), so presum­ably the title 'locality studies' was chosen because it provided an appropriate metaphor for change. Unlike 'modernist* categories, such as community, place, and region, the 'postmodern* idea of locality conveyed the sense of tensions between the immediate and the distant, the experiential and the global, and the future and the past (see Cooke, 1990). Locality studies embodied what was later shown to be the contemporary 'paradox of scale' (Preteceille, 1990).

The presentation of scale to justify a research project is not the exclusive prerogative of locality researchers. In a parallel development, the 'global' has been presented in world-system theory and urban planning as a legitimate scale of critical enquiry; hence global cities, the global economy, and the global system of exchange. In this instance, scale as metaphor is taken one step further. Whereas locality studies emphasized the local and global significance of locality, the world-system approach juxtaposes the global to the local, thereby demonstrating a hierarchical, vertical, and top-down social and economic order. This power hierarchy is revealed by the tripartite division between the global as the domain of the 'real', the nation-state as the realm of the 'imagined', and locality as the center of 'experience' (Taylor, 1982; 1989). Because world-system theory is interested in the longue duree rather than the particularities of place and time, this hierarchy provides a useful 'ordering-framework' theory. At the same time, it remains aloof from the messy complexities and geopolitical dynamics of locality politics and state policymaking. Thus world-system analysis gives the false impression that discourses at the local and nation-state scales have minimal impact at the level of the world-economy and that therefore they are subordinate scales and unworthy objects of critical enquiry (Cox and Mair, 1991; 6 Tuathail, 1993).

In a similar fashion to the tripartite hierarchy of world-system theory, the second presentation of scale in geography makes scale metaphor for social process. In urban studies, for instance, 'urban' traditionally has meant the collective consumption of

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public services, whereas 'regional' has stood for private production and distribution (Castells, 1977). These kinds of metaphor are simple and evocative, but nevertheless conceptually weak. Metaphor tends to overhomogenize and oversimplify sociospatial relations and material landscapes (Agnew and Boiling, 1993). When this happens, metaphor can all too easily assume mythical proportions. The danger of myth is that it encourages idee fixe, whereas the power of metaphor lies in its ambiguity and flexibility. Even the most sophisticated theories of scale must periodically undergo revision, expansion, and transformation (compare Smith, 1984; 1992).

The tension between the local and the global provides a focus for the third form of scale presentation in human geography, mesoscale theory. Here there is clearly a deliberate play on the ambiguity of scale in that 'meso' suggests both an intermedi­ate spatial scale (country, region, metropolis) and a set of middle-level abstractions (structured coherence, local labor market, vertical disintegration, local dependence, or local mode of social regulation). Geographers using mesoscale concepts have mainly focused on the contradiction within capitalism between globalization (the expansion of the market, and interregionalism) and simultaneous localization (the territorial embedding of exchange relations, and indigenous economic development). Thus, the local and the global not only represent different research objects but also entail contrasting methods of analysis (Lipietz, 1993). A lot of attention has been paid to the regional manifestation of global-local tensions, but some equally inter­esting mesoscale regulatory issues involve the tension between local or regional regulatory institutions and national social formations (Peck and Tickell, 1992). Divergent views on the use of regulationist concepts in geography (see Lovering, 1990) might therefore be cases of scholars arguing on the basis of their particular interpretation of what is the scale in mesoscale.

Briefly leaving aside the issue of scale as metaphor, let us now return to Neil Smith's point about the need for some sort of correspondence between real (that is, material) scales and research scales. To put this as a question, should a research scale be chosen because it provides a manageable base for investigating tensions and interactions between material scales or because a set of processes a priori operate at that scale? Some might see this as an either/or situation, or at least politically determined. I prefer to view it as the sort of creative tension that drives theory forwards. On the one hand, some of the most insightful works on spatial divisions of labor and the geography of industrialization have worked with well-defined material scales and then have generated process-oriented abstractions (regional production structures; vertical disintegration). On the other hand, working with theoretically derived research scales should not automatically exclude social and material processes operating at other scales. For instance, the local labor market (a process-oriented scale category) probably operates at a much smaller scale than was previously theorized, suggesting the need for a corresponding refinement of theory and, presumably, of the research scale too (Hanson and Pratt, 1992). Research scales do not simply exist in the minds of researchers; they are socially produced from the material activity of doing research.

The presentation of scale in everyday life and politics The recent tendency to privilege specific scales in geographical research might suggest an uncritical internalization of concepts increasingly encountered in social and political discourse at large. Ideas such as the global economy, regional conflict, the gay community, and local economic development, are frequently presented without it seems much pause for critical reflection. This practice would be excus­able if, as postmodernists might claim, the language of scale was as fleetingly

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presented as it was discovered. Yet one of the challenges to postmodernism is explaining why seemingly fragmented and disconnected experiences have become codified and generalized in narrative, 'postmodernism' itself being an example,

In the extent that postmodernism is deeply concerned about the presentation of difference in-contemporaryculture,' then the language of scale must be included in its repertoire, It is unfortunate that, at least in geography, postmodernism has been identified as carrying a particular attitude towards scale, This attitude, perhaps a reaction to the crisis of modernity and the lattcr's homogenizing discourses (Gregory, 1989), has privileged the local scale as containing the locales in which representation, language, meaning, and difference are constructed and contested, Even those scholars who prefer not to be labelled postmodern (Pred, 1992) are attracted to highly localized environments wherein language and action are closely intertwined with the material and symbolic attributes of place (Prcd, 1990; Tuan, 1991). It is not always or even clear that 'the local' here carries any metaphorical weight; it simply signifies the territorial boundedness of knowledge and practice. Yet by asserting the importance of the local, the existence of 'other' scales and associated power relations is implicitly recognized. The tragedy (Smith, 1992, page 57) of postmodernism merely reinforces the need for a critical discussion of the contribution of scale to the politics of difference.

Nevertheless, the language of scale is an important aspect of subject identity. Identification in terms of scale enables the oppressed to 'position' themselves in relation to 'other* scales that are perceived to be oppressive. As a material and symbolic act, for example, closure around a local community may help a Black homeowners' group or gay workers to establish their identities and to differentiate themselves from other organizations, such as the nation-state (see Parkin, 1979). In this context, the language of scale provides a powerful signal of identity, difference, and self-worth.

A sense of self-identity and worth can be reinforced by the presentation of scale as metaphor. When a multinational corporation declares itself to be global, it is not simply indicating that it has extended its geographical reach, it is making a statement to its shareholders about its expanding power to control and integrate within its organizational structures resources, labor, and markets. At the opposite end of the scale spectrum, trimming government to a more 'human scale' (Sale, 1980) becomes an argument for a massive restructuring of the welfare state, and one that can have disastrous consequences for humans right down to the scale of their everyday bodily needs. An even less subtle scale metaphor is the case of regional developers and metropolitan newspapers complaining about federal protec­tion for 'tiny' and 'insignificant', yet nevertheless endangered, species.(1)

Deployed metaphorically, scale gives the impression that social and economic legitimacy increases as one jumps up the scale hierarchy. Empowerment is not simply, or even, a question of jumping up scales. Often several scales, up and down the spectrum, are simultaneously involved. Thus labor unions mobilize, with or against corporations, locally and nationally. Local and global corporations form into regional industrial associations, and simultaneously attempt to manage intra-regional and interregional social divisions of labor and conflicts. It is constructive to view the relationship between the different scales as nested rather than hierarchical (Smith, 1992), and simultaneous rather than discontinuous.

(1) Thanks to Tom Feldman for providing this example.

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With its internally fragmented and hierarchical territorial structures, the state provides fertile ground whereupon scales as metaphor thrive. Kevin Cox and Andrew Mair (1991) recently have conjoined the production of scale to the process of state formation. By organizing new scale divisions of labor in the state, locally dependent factions of capital and labor shift their problems of local dependence to different territorial scales. As factional struggles unfold and scale divisions of labor in the state form and shift around, there is a corresponding scale territorialization of political discourse. In the process, notions such as the economy, the public interest, and civil liberties take on scale-specific meanings. These territorialized political discourses can be plotted along both the horizontal (for example, region versus region) and the vertical (localities versus central government) axes.

Although the social production of scale is mediated by ongoing social struggles, the presentation of scale can refer to past, present, and/or future conditions. The language of scale is simultaneously spatial and temporal, but more often than not it is an anticipation of the future. Groups and organizations strategically 'map out' material scales that eventually might liberate them from their existing scale con­straints. The mapping process is also mediated by struggle, so that the language of scale is contested and manipulated. The presentation of scale as metaphor becomes more deliberate and soon conveys messy and ambiguous images of future, and indeed past and present, conditions.

We now begin to see the importance of thinking in terms of the scale politics of spatiality. But because this politics 'takes place' at a different 'level' to material scale (that is, it can include past, present, and future scales), we should never assume that it makes reference to any existing material scale. This is not to say that the scale politics of spatiality occurs outside of any material context. On the contrary, a material scale context (for example, a hierarchy of territorial structures in the state) is presupposed, albeit it is a context that is undergoing change. The presentation of scale in political discourse merely provides clues as to the scale of material geographies that are in the process of becoming, but it does not indepen­dently 'construct' these scales. These future scales eventually become the 'scale fixes' to existing and imposed scale constraints, if only to create new constraints and opportunities for domination/subordination.

A brief example is in order. A recent struggle in Worcester, Massachusetts, saw employees of a locally headquartered multinational corporation successfully resist a takeover bid by a British conglomerate (Jonas, 1992). Prior to the takeover bid, the Worcester company was mapping out its future as a global corporation. But during the takeover struggle it clearly identified its future as belonging with the local community in Worcester. For a while, the struggle was also presented as an issue of national concern for the jobs of Americans and the security of the nation-state. In the meantime, employees were organizing around different scales, from local to national and even to global. Eventually, however, stronger antitakeover legislation was passed by the State of Massachusetts, thereby cutting off other 'scale fixes'. Whereupon the unsuccessful takeover bid was presented by the British conglomer­ate to be a case of local politics interfering in the free-market global economy. Scale was not simply a dimension of this particular struggle; it was integral to the presentation and material evolution of the conflict.

Conclusion By distinguishing between scale as abstraction and scale as metaphor, and recognizing that these are at times interrelated social and political constructs, I hope I have taken Neil Smith's recent plea for a theory of scale one step further. The presentation of

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scale is integral to academic and more generally .social, political, and cultural struggles. As Doreen Massey has argued for space, scale imposes an element of rigidity on narrative; nevertheless scale is very much a part of how geographers need to think about change and about the changing power-geometry of human relations of subordination and domination. Perhaps some of these ideas will also influence the way the language of scale is absorbed into critical theory.

Andrew E G Jonas

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