Constructivist economic geographies

Abstract

The paper makes a case for explicitly constructivist approaches and projects in economic geography. Constructivism names and problematizes the relationship between the material and ideational dimensions of socioeconomic change, being founded on the proposition that collectively-held ideas and intersubjective beliefs do not merely reflect but also shape the political-economic world. Constructivist inquiries are concerned with the formation and reproduction of beliefs, knowledges and ideational worldviews; with social norms and commonsense understandings, symbols and imaginaries; as well as with the (trans)formation of identities, interests and institutions. The methodological implications of constructivism are not prescriptive or singular, but they are nevertheless significant. They demand transparency and reflexivity, while licensing experimentation and openness to pluralist dialogue rather than explanatory closure. Curiously, economic geography has barely acknowledged constructivist analytics, and the discipline has been mostly missing from this interdisciplinary conversation. This ought to change.

Introduction: Constructed worlds

Few economic geographers would dispute the claim that the economic world is socially constructed. From the longstanding discussions around the social construction of regions, places and scales (Marston, 2000; Massey, 2001; Murphy, 1991; Swyngedouw, 1997), to the concrete analysis of how markets, assets and nature are themselves socially constructed (Berndt and Boeckler, 2009; Demeritt, 2002; Fields, 2018; Peck, 2005), economic geographers have been generally sceptical of the notion that the organization and spatial distribution of material life arise spontaneously or that economies are governed by invariant laws, objectively realized. Furthermore, the critical ethos that pervades much of the field suggests the presence of an at-least ambient constructivism: to hold that the world is subject to transformation is to recognize that economic structures and relationships are politically shaped and socially made – and open to remaking too. In this respect, it may be true to say that we are all constructivists now (cf. Konings, 2015), if at least tacitly.

Yet constructivism, as an explicit analytical orientation that names and problematizes the relationship between the material and ideational dimensions of socioeconomic change, has received precious little attention in economic geography. For illustration, among the 9297 articles published in the field’s leading journals between 1990 and 2025, a mere 17 (0.2%) made any mention of constructivism. ¹ Economic geography, it seems, has never had a constructivist moment, nor has there been much of a concern to acknowledge or engage the approach. Viewed from a wider social-science perspective, this is unusual. In international relations, economic sociology and comparative political economy, constructivist debates have played formative roles over the past four decades, marking disciplinary passage points through which questions of culture, identity and discourse have been conceptualized and debated (Abdelal et al., 2010; Finnemore and Wendt, 2024). Economic geography charted its own way through these issues (see Barnes, 1996), but for one reason or another, constructivist mandates have not been taken up in a sustained way.

In this intervention, we ask what difference it might make to pursue constructivist questions more purposefully in economic geography. Constructivism is an interpretative method ‘founded on the assumption that social reality is never one-dimensional or strictly objective [but] is shaped by human experiences and interpreted in social contexts’ (Fischer, 2024: 9). Constructivist inquiries are concerned with the formation and reproduction of beliefs, knowledges and worldviews; with social norms and commonsense understandings, symbols and imaginaries; as well as with the (trans)formation of identities, interests and institutions. They take discourse, agency and the role of ideas seriously, but not in a one-sided or heavy-handed way. Instead, they explore how the ideational and the material are contextually intertwined – through contingent and politically mediated dynamics – in ongoing processes of socioeconomic change. Constructivism is not associated with a single theory or method, but is better understood as an analytical orientation or language that emphasizes the dynamic, contingent and socially embedded nature of economic lives, relations and worlds. It follows that constructivist explanations are always partial and contestable. They require, above all, engagement, reflexivity and interpretative transparency. After Max Weber’s well-known formulation, the goal is to understand ‘the relationships and the cultural significance of individual events in their contemporary manifestation [together with] the causes of their being historically so and not otherwise’ (Weber, 1949: 72). For economic geographers, this can be read as an invitation to explore how things came to be geographically so, and not otherwise. How is it that economic circumstances, in this geohistorical situation or that, come to be understood and represented the way that they are, rather than otherwise? How are they accounted for, legitimated, critiqued and resisted? How might they be envisioned and realized differently?

Our concern here is not simply to advocate the wholesale importation of constructivist approaches. Rather, our purpose is to think through the implications of naming constructivism ‘out loud’, as an analytical and methodological orientation for economic geography. Two potential contributions are highlighted. First, a more explicit and deliberate constructivist sensibility would extend and deepen economic geography’s analytical repertoire, calling rigorous attention to questions of knowledge, meaning and power (including identity, norms, rules, ideation and discourse) in the social production of economic space. Second, constructivism requires as well as rewards pluralist engagement and methodological reflexivity, recognizing that all social actors – researchers included – are implicated in contested processes of social construction, whenever and wherever they seek to act in and interpret the world. This means grappling with an enduring dilemma for social science: that worlds outside of ourselves do exist, but they can only be known in particular, partial and perspectival ways. With these points in mind, the paper proceeds in three parts. The first section provides a brief introduction to constructivist approaches in heterodox political economy, summarizing some of the ontological and epistemological principles that have shaped what has become a widely distributed (but certainly not singular) constructivist orientation. The next section highlights some affinities with, and potential contributions to, economic geography. We conclude by reflecting on what constructivism might mean for economic geography, as well as what geographers and geographical perspectives might bring to this interdisciplinary conversation.

Political economies under construction

Constructivism defies succinct definition. For heterodox political economists, it is founded on the proposition that ‘collectively held ideas shape the social, economic and political world’ (Abdelal et al., 2010: 2) – that socioeconomic ‘reality’, rather than being unilaterally determined by material forces, is socially constructed through ideas, discourses and shared beliefs, which must therefore be understood, to some degree, ‘on [their] own terms’ (Fischer, 2024: 15). This position indexes a concern with the relationship between intersubjective worldviews and socioeconomic reality, although there is no consensus on how each shapes the other. Constructivists maintain that the character and design of economic orders and governance regimes are neither fixed nor subject to universal rules, choosing instead to highlight how power, ideology, ideas and (geo)historical contexts shape institutions, policies and the very meanings of the economic (the pluralization of which is deliberate and consequential in this context, not casual). They prioritize the role of politics and social agency over structural determination, foregrounding the contested character of economic structures, systems and outcomes, while recognizing the often-constraining power of routines, habits and ideas. In practice, constructivists tend to ‘assign a critical role to . . . language, discourse, and/or culture’ (Elder-Vass, 2012: 12), paying particular attention to the formation, transformation and reciprocal effects of identities, interests and institutions.

Constructivism has many roots, presenting in quite a few varieties, but beginning in the 1980s it would morph into a distinctive project within comparative and international political economy. Hardly coincidentally, this was when the (last) Cold War reached its disorderly end, accompanied by presumptive declarations of the history-ending supremacy of capitalism, intercut with the uneven ascendancy of neoliberal globalism (Anderson, 2025; Fierke and Jorgensen, 2001; Guzzini, 2013; McCourt, 2022). Situated knowingly in this historical conjuncture, constructivist approaches are animated by critiques of the inevitability, taken-for-grantedness, and necessity of the status quo, but also by a driving concern to explore counterfactuals, alternatives and other possible ‘worlds of our making’ (Hacking, 1999; Onuf, 1989; Palan, 2000a). Early waves of constructivist scholarship renewed questions of structure and agency, delved into processes of interest formation at scales from the individual to the international, and questioned the role of ideas and ideology during moments of crisis, social struggle and historical transformation (see Cox, 1981; Hall, 1989; Ruggie, 1998; Wendt, 1987). This was prelude to a creative proliferation of institutionalist, poststructuralist, feminist, historical-materialist and science-studies variants of constructivism.

Constructivists understand political-economic life as ultimately uncertain. Because humans cannot predict the outcomes of their mutually conditioning and collective actions, constructivists argue, they are forced to rely on intersubjective conceptions of how the world works in order to proceed (Fierke, 2013: 193; Seabrooke, 2007: 371). Constructivists therefore engage chosen objects of analysis – whether international orders, institutions of different kinds or state projects – as social facts produced through the continual interaction of situated and socialized actors (Guzzini, 2013: 201; Herrera, 2005: 81). The basic orientation is that social actors ‘see the world through perspectives, developed socially’, upon which they subsequently act (Palan, 2000a: 579). This is a license to explore those received understandings and social facts that motivate and inform the behaviour of actors, including the ideas, norms, assumptions and values through which material worlds are interpreted and transformed. Material factors and ‘structures’ both constrain and constitute these norms, beliefs and ideas, but cannot be understood apart from the ‘webs of meaning’ with which they are jointly constituted (Geertz, 1973). The stuff of political economy might exhibit regularities and tendencies of its own, but it cannot be understood separately from the matrix of social action, institutionalized norms, prevailing worldviews, dominant discourses and so forth with which it is coproduced.

What distinguishes constructivism from other postpositivist approaches is less this ontological position and more a distinctive approach to epistemology and analytical practice. The constructivist view of socioeconomic life as necessarily relational, situated and historical is shared across feminist, poststructural, historical materialist and other kinds of critical social thought (Konings, 2015), as is the recognition that social-scientific inquiry depends on socially constructed concepts and discourses, while also being shaped by the positionality and perspectives of researchers. Constructivists actively embrace the widely shared epistemological position that social reality and ‘truth’ are not preordained through nature or subject to deterministic laws, but are concept-dependent products of relational and contextualized social practice. Constructivists are faced with choices, however, when it comes to matters of methodology. One key distinction concerns how the interpretations of social actors themselves actively shape the relationships, institutions and processes being analyzed. While poststructuralists, feminists and historical materialists might perceive truth or knowledge as the expression of interests that are shaped by pregiven hierarchical structures (such as class and gender), constructivists argue that actors’ knowledge of those social relations and structures – and their position within them – is also recursively integral to their very operation. This is not to deny the existence of unstated or ‘deeper’ power relations lurking in the background. But it is to place actors’ interpretations of these relationships and structuring conditions – as well as the beliefs that underpin those interpretations and the actions they produce – in the analytical foreground. It also signals an epistemological commitment to reflexivity, since researchers themselves also shape this process of meaning-making (Neufeld, 1993).

For their part, constructivist political economists study how changing norms, ideas and collectively-held beliefs underpin the formation, durability, breakdown and reconstruction of political-economic orders (Blyth, 2002, 2013; Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998; Hay, 2016; Ruggie, 1998). The ‘ideas school’, an outgrowth of the historical-institutionalist tradition of political economy, has played an especially important role in forging and debating a repertoire of constructivist approaches (see Peck et al., 2025), analyzing the causes, catalysts and consequences of institutional change and policy formation through periods of relative stability and crisis; tracing role of ideas in political struggles over economic policy and outlining the function of myths, stories and narratives in institutional restructuring (see Abdelal et al., 2010; Belánd and Cox, 2016). Their explanations tend to be retroductive or inductive, rather than hypothetico-deductive, the goal being to understand, paraphrasing Weber, how things came to be so rather than otherwise.

Even if economic geography never really had a constructivist moment of its own, the field might be said to be dispositionally constructivist, in light of the broadly shared view that economic worlds are, to some extent at least, socially constructed. Yet the historical conditions that provoked constructivist turns in heterodox political economy seem to have been associated with quite different dynamics in economic geography. The critiques of positivism that gave rise to constructivist debates in international relations and political science were, in large part, responses to the dominance of rationalist methods in those fields. In economic geography, on the other hand, positivist approaches have been questioned since at least the 1960s and hardly occupy anything like a dominant position. There has consequently been little impetus to stake out or defend constructivist positions against a rationalist mainstream, or for that matter in debate with dogmatic materialists. The most sustained engagement occurred in 1980s debates over structure and agency, encapsulated in a passing interest in structuration theories (see Gregory and Urry, 1985; Gregson, 1987). The insertion of what could be called ‘intersubjective beliefs’, along with more far-reaching critiques of rationalism, essentialism and the exploration of science-studies and performativity approaches, came with the subsequent ascendancy of a series of ‘post-prefixed’ projects (see Barnes, 1996), although these have yet to ignite wider methodological conversations around constructivism.

Accounting for the causes and consequences of this pattern of uneven engagement and paths not taken is beyond the scope of this brief intervention. Instead, our central argument is that constructivism should be surfaced and engaged with explicitly, especially amid the current round of geohistorical uncertainty, while also recognizing that constructivism is more than a stance or method of individual researchers, but implies a field constituted through diverse approaches, conversation and contention. In the wake of the cultural, institutional and other turns of the past three decades, economic geography’s proliferating diversity has been moved by positions and arguments congruent with constructivism. But these have been frequently articulated in broad, ontological terms or in support of particular positions and research programmes, rather than through ‘lateral’ dialogues around epistemological practice or exchanges around substantive questions and explanations. A more deliberate and intentional engagement with constructivism, we argue, would help energize and deepen these conversations.

Varieties of constructivism

Since constructivism is itself an intersubjectively-produced approach, it is more appropriate to understand it as a shared locus of analytical practice and debate, rather than as a fixed ‘theory’, single approach or prescriptive methodology. There are many sources of inspiration for constructivist positions, from Wittgenstein’s notion of language games, Weber’s method of verstehen and Durkheim’s concept of social facts to Polanyi’s principle of embeddedness; and from Gramscian notions of hegemony to poststructuralist theories of performativity (Hopf, 1998: 177; McCourt, 2022: 100; Ruggie, 1998: 857–862). Constructivist research programmes travel under various labels, including discursive institutionalism, constructivist institutionalism, ideational institutionalism and constructivist political economy (see Abdelal et al., 2010; Hay, 2008; Schmidt, 2008). As Elder-Vass (2012: 4, 8) points out, there is not one but a range of constructivisms, each of which strike different balances between more conventional social-scientific theories and cultural, linguistic, discursive or knowledge-based explanations. There are some shared characteristics – such as an orientation toward difference across contexts rather than a single objective reality, concerns with the complex combination of material and ideational factors and an emphasis on processes of social interaction – but these approaches differ in the strength and form of their commitments to, and critiques of, idealism, materialism and realism.

Constructivisms are often positioned along an axis running from ‘weak’ or ‘thin’ treatments through to the relatively ‘strong’ or ‘thick’ (Marsh, 2009; Palan, 2000b; Sayer, 1997; Sum and Jessop, 2013). For strong or what are sometimes called radical constructivists, the referents of knowledge are themselves understood to be social constructions. Here, narratives are characteristically thick, being associated with more inductive modes of explanation keyed into granular specificities and contingent circumstances. Strong constructivists will sometimes attract criticism for leaning into idealist or voluntarist modes of explanation, for instance by assigning inordinate influence or independent causal capacity to ideas themselves, without assessing why it is that certain ideas, norms and beliefs become socially embedded or strategically selected, rather than others (Bieler and Morton, 2008; Risse-Kappen, 1994; Sum and Jessop, 2013). Others assert that strong constructivists simply do not believe in objective realities such as gravity (Sayer, 1997). But the issue, strong constructivists will reply, is one of epistemology: ‘hardly anyone doubts that the “world” exists “independent” from our minds’, Kratochwil (2000: 91) notes, but the ‘question is rather whether we can recognize it in a pure and direct fashion or whether what we recognize is always already organized and formed by certain categorical and theoretical elements’.

Weak constructivisms, on the other hand, tend to hew toward materialist or realist modes of explanation, while taking account of the socially-constructed nature of knowledge and institutions, as well as for the ways in which these bear the stamp of distinctive social origins. These approaches encompass Gramscian constructivisms, with their emphasis on hegemony and the ‘materiality of ideas’, and Polanyian constructivisms, with their concern for the institutional and ideational embeddedness of economic relationships in society and nature (Bieler and Morton, 2018; Block and Somers, 2014; Hopf, 2013). Both give substantive weight to institutional and ideational modalities of social power, while nonetheless preserving a sense that material necessities of production, reproduction and exchange impact, limit and constrain the scope of ideational causation. But if thick constructivism can be critiqued for focusing too much on downstream contingencies rather than underlying causes, thin accounts are vulnerable to the opposite charge, of merely embroidering (without disrupting) materialist explanations, for instance by ‘bringing ideas in’ on an ad hoc or supplementary basis.

To invoke this spectrum of constructivist approaches is not to imply the existence of a goldilocks zone, where explanations can be gotten ‘just right’. Yet it is practically an article of faith in constructivist circles that these approaches must occupy positions in the ‘middle ground’ (Adler, 1997; Fierke, 2013; Guzzini, 2013; Seabrooke, 2007; cf. Locher and Prügl, 2001), where explanations and arguments are contested at some distance from the extremes of rationalism, materialism, idealism and voluntarism. This middle-ground positionality chimes with the revealed preference for grounded, situated and contextualized modes of explanation in economic geography, and with the related proclivity for flexible and middle-range approaches to theorizing, which would in turn suggest an affinity with somewhat thicker styles of constructivism, keyed into more specific, localized or conjunctural circumstances (Peck et al., 2025). The accompanying warrant, to contextualize and ‘locate’ constructivist explanations, ought to be seen as a generative one for economic geography.

Towards constructivist economic geographies

Constructivists as a group are sometimes criticized, rather uncharitably, for being ‘woolly’ (Guzzini, 2013: 215), but to the extent that their approaches signal principled antipathies to reductionism, essentialism and explanatory foreclosure, fortified by refusals of economism and idealism, many are prepared to live with the charge. Constructivism provides tools and rationales for constructing explanations; it is not an explanation in and of itself. Or as Abdelal (2009: 76) puts it, ‘Constructivism is not the answer’. This said, constructivist approaches – in the plural – surely have value in opening up questions around hegemonic, dominant, residual and emergent understandings, renderings and visions of economic worlds and futures, extending out to alternatives and counterfactuals, concerning how things could have been – and might otherwise and elsewhere be – different. This resonates with what for many is an elemental commitment in economic geography – that not only can economic life be organized differently, as a matter of principle, in actually (co)existing practice it is being organized differently, somewhere else.

If constructivism habitually occupies a properly contested middle ground, between hard-core materialism and unfettered idealism, as well as between deterministic truth claims and relativist ambivalence, this amounts to a distinctive and principled position, not just a halfway house or mere splitting of differences. Importantly, the constructivist terrain is also a meeting ground, for instance between critical-realist and poststructuralist approaches, as well as a proving ground for contextualized and conjunctural explanations. In some ways, this is relatively familiar territory for economic geographers, even if the rationales, routines and practices of constructivist analysis have yet to receive sustained attention in the field. This late arrival could even prove to be an advantage in the sense that the initial methodological choices made by constructivist economic geographers would necessarily have to be deliberative ones, not least concerning places and ways to start, directions of travel, and strategies for toggling back and forth (see Peck, 2024). Ideational analyses, for example, might begin on the ‘inside’, starting out with texts, theorists, thought collectives and so on, or they might work inward from the ‘outside’, beginning with places, projects, programmatic schemes and so on. Ideally, neither would remain unidirectional, but whether working from the inside-out, or the outside-in, geographical sensibilities would surely be an asset. Economic geography’s generally contrarian disposition – working with (local) innovations and would-be exceptions, confronting rather than confirming paradigms, and engaging with questions of restructuring and uneven development rather than equilibrium or convergence – ought to be assets too.

Constructivist research agendas in economic geography are potentially as wide as they are deep. The examples are too numerous to summarize here, but an indicative list would include the following: First, there is scope to focus on the construction and reconstruction of different ‘models’ of economic development, either in real time or through geohistorical analyses. These inquiries might be (trans)national in scope, but they might also focus on cultures and practices of economic policymaking, or the interactions between different organizations and centres of persuasion, such as treasury departments, think tanks, advocacy groups, social movements and political parties. They might also explore contests over meaning among different groups as they participate in the adaptation and circulation of these models. The constructivist ethos we prescribe here would not only seek to assess how and why dominant models become so, but would also trace the practices through which residual, ‘failed’ or defeated alternatives live on through processes of hybridization and mutation. Emergent economic formations ought to be assessed not as wholesale replacements of prior ones, but in terms of new institutional and material relationships, of rearranged political-economic alliances and antagonisms, and of redrawn ideational and conceptual boundaries. Work in this vein could explore why some places come to accept the economic models and imaginaries that they do, while others reject the same models entirely, or only take them up in part (see Herrera, 2005). By delving into interactions between institutionalized contexts and geographically-situated understandings of the economy, constructivist studies could shed new light on the dynamics through which economic models interact with local economic interests as they travel across space, layer on top of each other, fail and form new combinations. Neoliberal models of reform, for example, will often ‘fail forward’, faltering or underperforming in their own terms, but nevertheless conditioning what become the next moves (Peck, 2010).

Second, more institutionalist varieties of constructivism are well-suited to engage market-making projects of different kinds, inside and outside the state, plus emergent forms of collaboration and coercion. The constructivist mandate is to trace how particular technical devices and organizational arrangements are (re)ordered through meaningful social practices. Through what novel or rearranged normative outlooks, expectations and customs is the extension of market exchange made possible? Through what ideas, ideologies and practices is marketization contested? Existing studies of market-making in economic geography have already begun to carve a path towards these questions, as have emerging lines of work in heterodox political economy that adopt a ‘morphological’ approach to the study of ideological formation (Freeden, 2013), using this lens to historicize the production of market ideologies and norms (see, e.g. Eagleton-Pierce, 2021). Economic geographers could follow these leads, paying close attention to the way these norms shift and mutate in response to grounded economic realities and evolving institutional arrangements, and to the diverse ways in which markets are constructed geographically (Rantisi et al., 2020).

Third, research into the spatial constitution of communities of economic practice, epistemic networks and ideational movements remains in its infancy. Careful investigations of how agency is mobilized (or not) through ideational projects, and how these draw upon and augment ‘local’ capacities, have an important role to play here. Political scientists and cultural theorists have continued to make progress in this area, using a broad repertoire of methods – including interviews, social media and network analysis and discourse analysis – to trace the intellectual networks that have recently ascended to the helm of state power, ranging from modern monetary theory partisans to techno-libertarians (Helgadóttir and Grosen, 2024). Geographers have distinctive contributions to make here, too, tracing these projects as they morph, mediate and translate across different spaces: digital and non-digital, state and extra-state and so on (see Amin and Roberts, 2008).

And fourth, there is an open mandate to examine the production and circulation of economic imaginaries, future-facing visions and schemes for alternative and community economies. Among recent examples, there are studies of how policymakers, consultants and activists create and contest visions of regional competitive advantage (Ebner, 2024), the local mobilization of circulating imaginaries of post-growth, solidarity, foundational and care economies (Russell et al., 2022) and articulations of the ‘network state’ (Crandall, 2025). More expansively still, in a (global) context in which received understandings of the form and ‘direction’ of capitalist development are being questioned, not to say upended, there is important work to be done on (competing) ideas of capitalism itself, where they come from, how they travel and transform (see Anderson, 2025; Appel, 2019; Cassidy, 2025). For these and other questions to be asked qua constructivist questions cannot simply be a matter of inventive application, however, for there is an obligation to surface and to problematize methodological and interpretative choices. Cumulatively, this would allow for the costs, advantages and consequences of differing methodological approaches – for example, genealogies, varieties of discourse analysis, conjunctural analysis and new devices from literary studies – to be more explicitly weighed. Constructivism, in this sense, is not just about methodological practice, it is also about methodological talk.

Across these and other research agendas, constructivism entails specific commitments to reflexivity, contributing to the deepening of methodological practice in economic geography. In recent years, constructivist conversations in the wider social sciences have moved on from the ontological and epistemological debates that accompanied the rise of the ideas school, many of which ‘failed to take the next step, to show how scholars and scientists . . . were themselves involved in the constructing process’ (McCourt, 2022: 15). What McCourt calls the ‘new constructivism’ has taken that step, maintaining that actors not only exist within socially-constructed worlds, but that they are also active agents of social construction, participating as they do in intersubjective meaning-making projects. From this perspective, the messy business of producing, analyzing and interpreting ‘data’ about the external world is inescapably conditioned by the relationships between researchers and their subjects and objects. At the same time, the interpretations that researchers develop through these partial and iterative processes can travel into the world, with the potential for reciprocating effects and interactions, becoming woven into academic discourses and the collective work of theory-making.

As Burawoy (2009: 74) has written, the challenge of reflexive social science is to ‘disentangle movements of the external world from the researcher’s own shifting involvement with that same world, all the while recognizing that the two are not independent’. In keeping with their general aversion to strong methodological prescriptions and hard-and-fast rules, constructivists do not advocate singular responses this challenge, but tend to stress the following principles: rejecting objectivism, empiricism and foundational truth-claims (McCourt, 2022); recognizing the made (constructed) character of concepts, labels and analytical frameworks (Onuf, 1989); promoting intersubjective (rather than individualist) theories of social action, as necessary in order to problematize the relationships between observation and action, knowledge and power and observer and participant (Guzzini, 2013) and finally, insisting that social-scientific knowledge is recognized as a pragmatic and adaptive interpretation of the world, rather than a mirror of objective reality, such that ‘objectivity is not measured by procedures that assure an accurate mapping of the world but by the growth of knowledge, that is, the imaginative and parsimonious reconstruction of theory to accommodate anomalies’ (Burawoy, 2009: 21). This is not to confuse constructivism with an overarching theory of the social world, or a determinant perspective on social reality (Konings, 2015). The constructivist proposition is that research practices and theory cultures are strengthened not by offering misleading ‘solutions’ to enduring problems in social science (such as the struggle for objectivity, the relationship of observer to participant, the negotiation of theoretical traditions and empirical findings), but by making them active sites of reflection and dialogue.

The promise of constructivist economic geographies is to establish new and mutually productive trading zones with parallel projects and kindred endeavours in heterodox political economy and critical economic studies – both substantively and through the enrichment of methodological practice. Here, economic geographers surely have things to contribute as well as to learn. Not least, they are well placed to follow some of the explanatory paths less travelled in extant work in the constructivist tradition, notably those positioned between the incumbent methodological nationalism in fields like macroeconomic sociology and historical institutionalism, compared to almost the opposite tendency in poststructuralist and science-studies, where materially inscribed and institutionalized power relations, along other such structuring factors, tend to receive less attention. There are ample opportunities for geographical constructivists creatively to work some of the spaces in between, not least by bringing their mesoanalytic vantage points and concern for spatial context into dialogue with these characteristically more macro or micro approaches. Mediating or ‘mezzanine’ interventions of this kind would usefully toggle back and forth between the micro and the macro, just as they would seek to iterate between the ideational and the institutional, the discursive and the material, the semiotic and the structural and so forth.

Working across these different analytical spectra, the challenge for constructivist economic geographers is persuasively to situate ideas, norms and worldviews as contextually mediated, instituted and dialectical processes with constitutive geographies. Meeting this challenge demands close attention to the emergence, construction and circulation of discursive projects and ideational schemes, indexed to the work of contextually-positioned social actors, classes and institutions. This terrain of open and contestable explanations, receptive as it is to experimentation and novel perspectives, demands but also repays methodological innovation. And here, the invitation is not just to ‘do’ constructivist economic geographies, since there is hardly a shortage of work in the field that is de facto constructivist, constructivist-adjacent or congruent with constructivism. Where there is work (still) to be done is in bringing constructivist methodologies more explicitly and reflexively into play – and then into conversation. This is not to advocate the development of constructivist economic geography as its own community or project, but rather to put its methods, practices and perspectives on the agenda and in the mix, and to say the constructivist methods part out loud.