Abstract
Speaking directly to economic and political geographers working on uneven development, this article critically examines the deployment of two key concepts, mechanism and process, as analytical tools for causal explanation in geographical analysis during the past two decades. Drawing upon critical realism to develop a theory of mechanism, this article clarifies the conceptual distinction between mechanism and process. Whereas process is conceived as a contingent change in the sequential series of entities and their relations, mechanism serves as a necessary relation to connect an initial causal condition with its particular socio-spatial outcomes in context. This analytical distinction between a contingent process
Keywords
Introduction
As one of human geography’s key contributions to the social sciences, contemporary geographical analysis of uneven development has focused primarily on uncovering diverse processes of spatial formations in late capitalism. Eschewing the deterministic grand theories of the earlier era in the 1970s and the 1980s, economic and political geographers are concerned with understanding the dynamics of capitalist production through variegated social and institutional practices and uneven spatial processes in context (Clark et al., 2018; Peck, 2016; Sheppard, 2011, 2013). When geographical processes are theorized through mid-range concepts in recent decades, such as neoliberalization (Castree, 2008; Green and Lavery, 2018; Peck, 2010; Peck and Tickell, 2002), path dependence (Boschma, 2004; Boschma and Frenken, 2006; Martin and Sunley, 2006, 2015), strategic coupling (Coe et al., 2004; MacKinnon, 2012; Yeung, 2005, 2016) and financialization (Christophers, 2015; French et al., 2009; Ioannou and Wójcik, 2019; Pike and Pollard, 2010), they are often used as heuristic devices for explaining socio-spatial changes and institutional practices leading to uneven development. But what is the explanatory efficacy of these
In the spirit of constructive dialogues in human geography, I aim to engage directly with these economic and political geographers working on the causal analysis of uneven development. This article is therefore primarily
While I concur with several commentators (e.g. Barnes, 2018: 1498; Gibson, 2019: 2; Martin, 2018: 1505) that asserting an essential subject matter as a core to the subdiscipline is neither feasible nor effective, I do think the search for clearer and more robust explanations of ‘big issues’ such as uneven development and the crisis of globalization can strengthen the analytical purchase of economic geography (and human geography for that matter). In this sense, my article seeks to offer a conceptual clarification of the analytical difference between mechanism and process and to theorize different types of mechanisms that might be deployed in causal explanation. More specifically, this conceptual effort is motivated by two observations of geographical work and the wider social sciences: (1) the need to differentiate between different analytical levels and concepts (e.g. process and mechanism) in developing causal explanations and (2) the desire to strengthen causal analysis through mechanism-based explanations.
First, the mushrooming of mesoscale or mid-range conceptions of geographical phenomena during the past two decades sometimes exhibits a lack of analytical rigour and therefore potentially weakened explanatory power. In a trenchant critique of earlier radical political economy, Sayer (1995: 4) argues that its fading by the 1990s occurred because ‘researchers became more interested in middle-range theory of the particular institutional forms of capitalism’. To him, mid-range concepts, such as post-Fordism, cannot supplant the need for ‘abstract theory of the general mechanisms of capitalism and other economic systems’. More recent work in the geographical analysis of uneven development has deployed the terms ‘process’ and/or ‘mechanism’ to describe influential mid-range concepts, such as neoliberalization and path dependence. Their followers in these large genres of literature tend to use process and mechanism interchangeably, as if these two concepts refer to the
Second, geographical work during the past two decades has undertheorized the role of mechanism in causal explanation and its relationship with context. This neglect is partly responsible for the above semantic and conceptual slippage and, as noted in James et al. (2018) and Martin (2018), the possible weakening of the wider analytical strength of economic geography. It might be useful to point out that the earlier and much more intense theorization of causality and mechanisms in critical realism during the 1980s and the early 1990s can offer some useful lessons for advancing the explanatory goals of geographical analysis. Some of these insights might have been forgotten or ‘lost’ and their renewal is perhaps overdue (cf. Allen, 2012; Cox, 2013a). In particular, the concept of causal power exercised through generative mechanisms in critical realist thinking has thrown into sharp relief the fundamental relationality in cause and effect in socio-spatial dynamics (Hudson, 2003; Sheppard, 2008; Varró, 2015; Yeung, 2005). As argued by Sayer (2012: 184; original italics), even such a relational/networked conception of space and place must explain ‘what it is
Drawing upon the distinction between necessary and contingent relations in critical realism (Sayer, 1992; 2000), I develop a theory of mechanism that conceptualizes
While grounded in critical realist thinking, I should point out that this discussion of process and its conceptual distinction from mechanism is largely missing in the original philosophical and methodological works by two leading critical realists – Roy Bhaskar (1975, 1986, 1989) and Andrew Sayer (1984, 1992). However, my article is not about the reinvigoration of critical realism in human geography. It is neither a blanket call for resurrecting everything in critical realism for human geography nor a claim to critical realism as the way forward in resolving the alleged crisis of ‘hollowing out’ in economic (and perhaps political) geography. In a more modest way, my (re)conceptualization of the mechanism/process distinction seeks to offer a focused discussion of critical realism’s call for causal explanations and to reconcile
Cognizant of the highly diverse literature on uneven development in economic and political geography, I have chosen one influential strand –
The remainder of this article is divided into two main sections. In the next section, I develop my conceptual frame by theorizing mechanism in relation to the critical realism and social mechanisms literature. My argument for incorporating
Theorizing mechanism: Particular and necessary relations in context
There is now a very substantial body of social science literature on mechanism as a conceptual apparatus for developing causal explanations in the fields of analytical sociology, political science and the philosophy of social science (e.g. Demeulenaere, 2011; Gross, 2018; Hedström and Swedberg, 1998a; Hedström and Wittrock, 2009; Manzo, 2014). Gerring (2010: 1500) calls it ‘social science’s current infatuation with causal mechanisms’. What is mechanism in this literature? Gerring (2008: 163, 178) argues that his minimal (core) definition of mechanism as a ‘process’ is consistent with all contemporary usages and practices within the social sciences. In what Gorski (2015: 28) calls a ‘connector’ approach to defining mechanism, cause and effect are typically defined in positivist terms of temporal linearity (cause preceding effect), and causal mechanisms are the chains or links that connect them. To Zürn and Checkel (2005: 1049), these chains or causal mechanisms are ‘intermediate processes’ that ‘connect things; they link specified initial conditions and a specific outcome’. This ‘intermediary process’ view of causation and mechanisms is quite common in political science and sociology (e.g. Gerring, 2005: 166; 179; Gross, 2009: 363; Mahoney, 2001: 581; 2008: 413) and the philosophy of social science (e.g. Bunge, 1997: 414; 2004: 191; Mayntz, 2004: 241, 253; Reiss, 2007: 166).
Indeed, this conception of mechanism does not deviate from Hedström and Swedberg’s (1996: 288; 1998b) influential definition of social mechanisms as theoretical or analytical constructs connecting observed relationships between explanans and explanandum. Their own explanatory approach is to address ‘a further and deeper problem: how, i.e. through what process, was the relationship actually brought about?’ This process-based conception of mechanism, however, is not the only established definition of social mechanisms. Table 1 summarizes different conceptions of mechanism offered by philosophers, political scientists and sociologists. These different understandings of mechanism in the social sciences tend to revolve around defining mechanisms variously as processes, structures, systems, chains, links, patterns, constellations, events, entities, activities, parts or components and so on. And yet even this vast social scientific literature on mechanism also exhibits a tendency to conflate mechanism and process. This in turn leads me to rethink the two conceptual tools in light of critical realist philosophy.
Alternative definitions of mechanism in political science, analytical sociology and the philosophy of science and social science.
This conceptual section offers a
My argument here is developed in three major steps. The first step reprises very briefly the treatment of mechanism and, if any, process in critical realism – a social scientific philosophy that underpins this article’s effort in theorizing mechanism. The second step involves a clear definition of what mechanism and process are – the former a necessary relation with the outcome and a more specific kind of the latter. The third step entails the introduction of actors and their action into the specification of mechanisms for producing concrete outcomes in the socio-spatial world. Because of this critical role of actor-specific intentions, social mechanisms are often different from those operating in the physical/natural world (e.g. in biology and physics).
Reprising mechanism and process in critical realism
Ever since the major works by Roy Bhaskar (1975, 1986, 1989), Andrew Sayer (1984, 1992) and others in the 1980s and thereafter, critical realism has emerged as an influential philosophy for the social sciences. Human geography is no exception, with many geographers explicitly or implicitly practicing realist research in their work (see reviews in Cox, 2013a; Mäki et al., 2004; Pratt, 1995, 2009; Roberts, 2001; Yeung, 1997). Many early ‘adopters’ of critical realism named in Cox’s (2013a) recent reprise remain as the most influential human geographers today. Even though they no longer make explicit reference to critical realism in their current work, I argue that their thought has often implicitly internalized some realist ontological assumptions (e.g. existence of reality independent of human ideas) and certain elements of realist methodology (e.g. abstraction and intensive research). This continual relevance of realist thought will be more evident in the next section when I examine causal explanations in contemporary studies of neoliberalization and path dependence in economic and political geography.
Since its heyday during the 1980s and the early 1990s, however, critical realism has now seemingly gone out of favour in human geography, to the extent that Cox (2013a: 3) declared in this journal that ‘[i]n human geography today one hears very little about critical realism’. This might be attributed to the rise of the ‘cultural turn’ in human geography in general and in the geographical analysis of uneven development in particular (Allen, 2012; Barnett, 1998; Castree, 2002; Hudson, 2003; Thrift and Olds, 1996), represented by a multitude of ontological and epistemological shifts
Pratt (2013: 28) further attributes this (cultural) turn – away from critical realism – to the ‘faddishness’ of human geography and the increased turnover in the ‘market in ideas’ in search of the next ‘big idea’. In radical Marxist geography in which critical realism exerted its greatest influence in the 1980s and through to the mid-1990s, the debate has since moved on to engage with trenchant critiques from poststructuralist, feminist and postcolonial interventions (cf. Sayer, 2001; Storper, 2001). In economic-geographical debates on urban and regional economies, critical realist geographers have switched gear to focus more on institutional approaches (Amin, 2001; Cox, 2004; Cox and Townsend, 2005; Peck and Tickell, 2002; Storper, 2009), relational analyses (Bathelt and Glückler, 2003, 2014; Yeung, 2005) and evolutionary conceptions (Grabher, 2009; Martin and Sunley, 2006) of urban and regional economic change. 4 Nevertheless, the influence of realist thought and methodology on these geographers remains significant, particularly among those concerned with causal explanations of urban and regional economic change. Against the backdrop of those faddish turns, certain elements of realist thought continue to be taken for granted in their empirical research.
While the enormous corpus of realist work cannot be easily reconciled and integrated, Bhaskar’s version of critical realism can be succinctly described as a social scientific philosophy that recognizes the existence of material reality independent of human consciousness (realist ontology), ascribes causal powers to properties/potential in objects and human reasons and their activation through generative mechanisms such as enduring social structures (realist ontology), rejects relativism in social and scientific discourses (realist epistemology) and reorientates the social sciences towards its emancipatory goals (realist epistemology). This version of critical realism makes its strongest claims at the ontological level: the independent existence of reality and causal powers ascribed to objects/human reasons and their activation through generative mechanisms that strengthen the possibility of reclaiming reality through an emancipatory social science.
In realist philosophy, mechanism occupies an important epistemological role in its ontological conception of the world as being structured, differentiated and changing. Realist ontology recognizes the existence of causal powers and their activation through generative mechanisms that produce differentiated social or physical phenomena in nature. To Bhaskar (1989: 18), these mechanisms are the intransitive objects of inquiry because without their existence to activate causal powers, explanations and subsequently social emancipation are simply unknowable and impossible. But to develop social knowledge, the concept of mechanism serves an epistemological role in that the identification of mechanisms and their connection to other intransitive objects can form an important basis for theory construction and knowledge production. In short, mechanism has an intransitive dimension at the ontological level (its existence) and a transitive role in epistemology (our knowledge of its connection to an actual phenomenon such as uneven development). One key aim of substantive social sciences is to theorize and investigate the mechanisms at work that generate empirical events and discourses. As noted further by Bhaskar (1989: 2), these generative mechanisms and social structures ‘are irreducible to the patterns of events and discourses alike. These structures are not spontaneously apparent in the observable pattern of events; they can only be identified through the practical and theoretical work of the social sciences’.
Critical realist works by Bhaskar, Sayer and others, however, have surprisingly far less to say about
Reconceptualizing mechanism (and process)
While causal explanation is important in social science and the identification of mechanism is a necessary step, we cannot realistically claim process-based mid-range concepts, such as neoliberalization and path dependence, as
Applying the above realist conception of necessary relations to the mechanism/process distinction, we can define
On the other hand,
In addition, an object cannot be a process
Figure 1 illustrates the above theorizing of mechanism and process. Operating at the more
Structure, process and mechanism in causal analysis.
This formulation of mechanism and process allows for meso-level concepts (processes) to be situated in multi-scalar analyses involving multiple actors and institutions at the general level. And yet the concomitant requirement of specification in the production of causal explanations tends to reduce the temptation of simply identifying a large list of factors and interactions in these process-like concepts. This exercise will likely limit the number of causal mechanisms to just a few.
6
As such, any causal explanation needs to specify one or more mechanism(s) necessary to the concrete phenomenon under investigation. This phenomenon can be an object or a process that forms the beginning of our investigation. A political-economic phenomenon such as neoliberalization is a process. But if its necessary relations with concrete outcomes such as geographical uneven development can be specified, it is reconceptualized from a process
This conceptualization brings to the fore the importance of
This mechanism approach to causal explanation therefore does not endorse the universal applicability of mechanisms in the operation of a postulated mechanism can only be tested by logically deriving the effects that should be observed if the mechanism was operating as assumed in the theory, and then comparing these theoretical expectations with what actually is being observed.
Causal theory and actors
A causal theory describes why and how certain variable relationships conceptualized in one or more mechanisms operate to produce the expected outcomes from the initial conditions – it is fundamentally explanatory in nature. While these conditions and outcomes are empirically observable, their causal mechanisms are not necessarily amenable to direct observation. Developing causal theory therefore requires an analytical procedure to render these mechanisms visible and intelligible to our empirical analysis. In critical realism (e.g. Brown et al., 2002; Pratt, 1991, 1995; Sayer, 1982, 1992), this methodological procedure is commonly known as
In Bhaskar’s (1986: 11, note 26; 1989: 19) realist philosophy, this procedure is embedded in the broader realist conception of
The transformation of a process of change into a causal mechanism for an outcome requires abstraction and specification of its necessity to these outcomes (see Figure 1 lower section). In this conception, [c]hange occurs because people act. They act on and with other things or conditions, but these too should be seen in their relation to human agents: as products of a human action that also transforms them and gives them new properties.
In geographical analysis, this particularity can produce different types of mechanisms connecting social and/or institutional action with their individual and collective outcomes. At the micro level (Figure 1), individual action by actors can produce concrete outcomes through what sociologists commonly call ‘action–formation mechanisms’ (M1). Grounded in James Coleman’s (1986, 1990) well-known schema of sociological explanation, Hedström and Swedberg (1996, 1998b) suggest that specifying a mechanism requires articulating the purposive action of actors in a specific social situation, through which a variable produces necessary change in another variable. This micro-level mechanism is known as a situation mechanism or an individual action–formation mechanism, such as cognitive dissonance. But when actors interact with each other and individual actions are transformed into a collective outcome, a micro- to meso-level transition is deemed to have taken place, and the resultant mechanism is known as a transformational mechanism (M2), for example, the tragedy of the commons. At this more meso level, collective action beyond individual actors can bring about transformational effects in society and space.
In economic and political geography, a good number of these actor-level and institutional-level mechanisms can be identified in the existing studies of uneven development. At the actor level, we can think of adaptive learning and emulation as particular mechanisms (M1) for ‘fast policy transfer’ among regulatory authorities (Peck and Tickell, 2002) or for knowledge spillovers among embedded firms (Boschma and Frenken, 2006). Martin (2010) also describes three micro-level mechanisms for institutional change: layering, conversion and recombination, whereas Yeung (2016) proposes several firm-specific mechanisms of strategic coupling for promoting national industrial transformation: strategic partnership, industrial market specialization and lead firm formation. The operation of these mechanisms entails both specific action on the part of these authorities and firms and necessary changes in the configurations of their relations with other entities in order to produce the eventual outcomes of changing local/national governance or innovative activities or new path formation in regional/national development.
At the more meso level, transformational mechanisms (M2) can take the form of particular collective action through privatization, commercialization, commodification, (re)regulation, financialization and political constructions of markets that transform existing socio-spatial relations into neoliberal patterns of institutional shifts and regulatory restructuring. A similar mechanism-based approach can be pursued to identify the transformational mechanisms at work that explain the path dependence or self-organization – a process – of uneven regional evolution. These mechanisms may be product diversification or ‘branching’ at the collective firm level (Frenken and Boschma, 2007) or convergence and increasing returns to capability development at the institutional level (Martin and Sunley, 2006, 2015). Inter-organizational networks are also important meso-level mechanisms for regional growth (Hamilton-Hart and Yeung, forthcoming; Huggins and Thompson, 2014) and global economic development (Coe and Yeung, 2015, 2019; Yeung, 2016). In all of these instances, certain political–economic processes of neoliberalization and uneven regional evolution can be explained by individual action–formation mechanisms (M1) or transformational mechanisms (M2) that connect causal forces with their particular empirical outcomes.
From process to mechanism: Re-examining geographical analyses of uneven development
As noted in Introduction, an analytical focus on processes at the general level is inadequate without specifying precisely how these processes can become mechanisms
In more specific terms, whereas a general process such as neoliberalization or path dependence (or even labour process) can exist independently of particular geographical outcomes (e.g. local unemployment or rise of high-tech clusters), there is no such thing as a ‘general’ or a ‘universal’ mechanism without its purpose and outcome(s) clearly identified and theorized; a mechanism is always a necessary mechanism
This section first begins with some of the canonical works on neoliberalization, starting with Peck and Tickell (2002), as part of the ‘process-tracing’ of the emergence of this influential body of literature. This mid-range concept was originally developed in the context of a post-Fordist regime of accumulation. As other researchers adopt the concept, often uncritically, in their supposedly ‘causal’ analyses of different contexts and geographical outcomes over time, neoliberalization – as a process of neoliberalism – gets conflated with causal mechanisms for specific forms of uneven development. Certainly not intended by such pioneers as Peck and Tickell (2002), this conflation by followers reflects a key problem of under-theorization of mechanism/process in the existing geographical studies of neoliberalism. The second subsection discusses a tailored example from China’s recent market transition, a possible site of neoliberalization at work according to Harvey (2005), and shows how my conceptual distinction can alleviate some of the shortcomings and improve existing explanations of uneven development. A third brief subsection provides another example of this mechanism/process conflation in the evolutionary analysis of ‘path dependence’ in economic geography and regional studies.
Neoliberalization: What’s in a process and what can go wrong?
In their highly influential paper on neoliberalizing space, Peck and Tickell (2002: 380) explicitly call for a ‘process-based analysis’ of
While this process-based conception of neoliberalization as both an ‘out there’ and an ‘in here’ phenomenon can be useful for understanding neoliberalism’s planetary diffusion, I argue that the concrete mechanisms constitutive of this process have not been adequately specified in lacks any clear sense of how consent is actually secured, or any convincing account of how hegemonic projects are anchored at the level of everyday life, other than implying that this works by ‘getting at’ people in some way or other.
Lacking clear referents such as the political origins of modern liberalism, many geographical studies of neoliberalism and neoliberalization are far too general in their process-based analysis and much more circumscribed in their causal explanation of how the critical intersections between this general process of political change and everyday socio-economic life are governed. This has led to what Ferguson (2010: 166, 171) calls ‘empty analysis’ yielding ‘an unsurprising conclusion’ in much progressive scholarship: ‘neoliberalism is bad for poor and working people, therefore we must oppose it’; it serves ‘as a kind of abstract causal force that comes in from outside (much as ‘the world system’ was reckoned to do at an earlier theoretical moment) to decimate local livelihoods’. The normative outcome of these studies tends to be about denouncing neoliberalism rather than thinking through what can be done about it (see also Venugopal, 2015; Weller and O’Neill, 2014).
Let me illustrate this analytical conundrum with reference to David Harvey’s (2005) extremely influential book
It is unclear, however, whether this ‘very complex process’ of uneven geographical development is synonymous with the process of neoliberalization. If so, what are its explanatory determinants and forces of ‘creative destruction’, that is, causal mechanisms? How can the process of neoliberalization serve as the
To retain the explanatory power of neoliberalization and to prevent it from becoming a catch-all phrase to account for ‘everything that has happened since the 1990s’, it is necessary to translate this abstract political–economic thought and ideas of neoliberalism at the conceptual level into a concrete set of institutional practices in the empirical domain that interact with preexisting social-spatial conditions (context) to produce uneven developmental outcomes (see Birch and Siemiatycki, 2016). Extending my earlier theorization of mechanism, this analytical translation requires careful specification of internal and necessary relations that turns the general process of neoliberalization into concrete mechanisms on the ground that can ‘get at’ people and (re)shape their everyday life. Otherwise, neoliberalization-based explanations will suffer from the same fate as ‘class reductionism’ in earlier radical political economy (see Sayer, 1995) because not all (uneven) geographical outcomes can be reduced to neoliberalization.
Notwithstanding some uncritical applications of the abstract and processual conception of neoliberalization, I argue that greater conceptual clarity between mechanism and process can resolve
In principle, a causal explanation may comprise multiple mechanisms that connect initial conditions or changes with empirical outcomes. While the same process
Putting this conceptual distinction back into neoliberalization studies, we can broadly identify neoliberalization as a contingent political–economic
Explaining neoliberalism ‘with Chinese characteristics’: How might the mechanism/process distinction work?
Revisiting Harvey (2005: 120–151), let me briefly examine the case of China since he has devoted an entire chapter to its contemporary transformations and pointed to the apparent parallels of neoliberalism in China’s post-1978 economic reform, such as the move towards ‘free’ trade, the privatization of former state-owned enterprises, the ‘growth-first’ phenomenon and the rise of the market economy. Calling this a form of ‘neoliberalism “with Chinese characteristics”’, he has identified competition and privatization, a democracy of consumption, the massive proletarianization of workforce and urban speculation, as the key
As a process of change characterized by market-based capitalist logics, certain elements of neoliberalization might well have occurred in contemporary China (see Horesh and Lim, 2017; Lim, 2014; Peck and Zhang, 2013; Wu, 2008, 2010; Zhang and Peck, 2016). Even though Harvey (2005: 81) found it ‘interesting to note how neoliberalization in authoritarian states such as China and Singapore seems to be converging with the increasing authoritarianism evident in neoliberal states such as the US and Britain’, I argue that the concrete working of this convergence process on the ground in China differs substantially from its political origins in the United States and Western Europe. This is because the resemblance of China’s economic opening up with the ‘syndromes’ of neoliberalization may well be impelled by other counterfactual forces, such as the political regime’s legitimization imperatives and strategies. However ‘neoliberal’ look-alike or ‘family resemblances’ of its economic reforms and uneven outcomes, China’s economic transformations are likely to be driven mostly by
More specifically, the Communist Party state in China has been well theorized as
In short, the devil is really in the details, and this is where specification of mechanisms and their concrete contexts of operating efficacy matters much (though this important task is beyond the scope of this article). 12 This specification can respond effectively to Peck et al.’s (2010: 96) question on contemporary China as a key frontier in, or even a bold exception to, neoliberalization and serve as ‘a kind of radical Rorschach test, separating those prone to divine neoliberalizing tendencies (however contingently expressed) from those inclined to focus on the kinds of exceptions that ostensibly disprove the (neoliberal) rule’. In practice, marketization is fundamentally shaped by China’s unique political–economic structures and socio-spatial contexts, such as the political domination of its one-party central state (Dunford and Liu, 2015; Wang, 2009), the highly corporatist nature of the local state (Ang, 2016; Breznitz and Murphree, 2011; Huang, 2008; ten Brink, 2019), the extensive role of interpersonal networks in everyday life (Nee and Opper, 2012; Yang, 1994), the land-based logic of development (Hsing, 2010; Lin, 2009) and the continual domination of state-owned enterprises (Naughton and Tsai, 2015; Norris, 2016).
These specificities in China’s contemporary political economy or ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ mean that the apparently
What might then be some plausible examples of such necessary mechanisms connecting causal forces with concrete socio-spatial outcomes? Short of an in-depth empirical analysis, let me be a little speculative here. To be fair, most causal explanations are elliptical to some degree and tend to gloss over multiple component mechanisms. Still, a good number of actor-level (M1) and institutional-level (M2) mechanisms can be identified from the existing studies of neoliberalization – these two types of mechanisms are not necessarily sequential to each other, but they can be combined or treated separately in an actual empirical study. At the actor level (see Figure 1), we can think of adaptive learning and emulation as action–formation mechanisms (M1) for ‘fast policy transfer’ among regulatory authorities (Peck and Tickell, 2002; Peck and Theodore, 2015). Instead of defining the process of neoliberalization as policy diffusion in itself, it is conceptually more useful to think of such diffusion as but just
Action–formation mechanism can also connect the ground-up accommodation and negotiation by actors (however contingently) with top-down forces of neoliberalization. In China, populist tendencies such as the massive shift towards consumerism and materialistic experience and the politics of (in)difference to wealth and inequality are constitutive of this mechanism of action formation. This kind of bottom-up sociocultural change produced through particular actor-level mechanisms may make top-down neoliberal ‘fixes’ (e.g. national policy shifts and market opening) look like highly coherent and effective in their operationalization when it may in fact be these actor-level mechanisms that do the actual work on the ground. This analytical focus on the actor-level mechanisms of neoliberalization can bridge the macrospatial orientation of the existing studies and the key concern of some critics with the governmentality of everyday socio-economic life. It also brings actors and their intentionalities into the causal explanations of socio-spatial outcomes associated with neoliberalization.
At the more meso level, transformational mechanisms (M2) can take the form of particular collective action, such as privatization, state redistribution and political constructions of markets. In Harvey’s (2005: 159–161; 2006: 153–155) analysis of neoliberalism, some of these are conceived as features of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ – the main mechanism through which the outcomes of neoliberalization can be achieved, such as redistribution of wealth and income. A mechanism-based approach, however, must specify each of these as a particular mechanism for specific outcome(s) of neoliberalization. In this operationalization, transformational mechanisms serve as the analytical tool to give explanatory substance to such a general process as neoliberalization. A causal explanation of these outcomes in China therefore necessitates a (re)combination of all these differentiated component mechanisms, and this explanation cannot be reduced to the
From neoliberalization to path dependence: Another example of meso-level conflation?
To broaden out my selection of cases, let me offer very briefly a second and tighter example of the tendency towards mechanism/process conflation. In evolutionary economic geography, researchers have paid significant conceptual attention to the role of path dependence is a probabilistic and contingent process: at each moment in historical time the suite of possible future evolutionary trajectories (paths) of a technology, institution, firm or industry is conditioned by (contingent on) both the past and the current states of the system in question, and some of these possible paths are more likely or probable than others. The past thus sets the possibilities, while the present controls what possibility is to be explored, which only becomes explained
In this burgeoning and highly cited literature on evolutionary economic geography, there is a common tendency to conflate mechanism with process such that particular
Second, conflating process with mechanism reduces the explanatory power of even well theorized mid-range concepts such as path dependence. In Martin and Sunley’s (2015: 722; my emphasis) recent reappraisal and further development of evolutionary economic geography, they argue that ‘self-organization and emergence are key
Third, the historicity of path dependence as process tends to be subsumed under its concrete mechanisms, rendering it much more difficult to distinguish past events as causal forces and/or as historical contingency. This mode of evolutionary analysis often traces regional outcomes back to past events and processes of variation, selection and replication or retention. But the causal properties of these events and processes are rarely well established through the careful identification and specification of concrete mechanisms, whether they are place-dependent or otherwise. In his critique of historical sociology, Mahoney (2000: 507) argues that ‘[w]hile this kind of historical research may employ various modes of “path analysis” in which relationships among temporally sequenced variables are considered, it does not necessarily examine path-dependent processes of change’. Specifying concrete mechanisms
Conclusion
This article has argued that theory in geographical analysis needs causal explanations underpinned by a clear distinction between process and mechanism. This call for revitalizing explanation as a central purpose of geographical analysis of uneven development has come a long way since Harvey’s (1969: 173–174) caution against ‘intuitive perceptions’ as the raison d’être of human geography. I have advocated a non-deterministic and mechanism-based approach to causal explanation and theory development. This epistemological approach can serve as a possible zone of engagement with other reflexive and critical approaches in human geography. Geographical theory can be explanatory in nature – my argument in this article is that its explanatory power depends on the identification and specification of generative mechanisms connecting cause and outcome. While performing a necessary role in causal explanation, however, mechanism can be conflated with process even in canonical works by the most influential geographers on neoliberalization and path dependence in the existing economic and political geography literature. This conflation in turn reduces the analytical efficacy of geographical analysis and its potential contribution to theory development in social science.
In particular, I have explained the critical importance of conceptually distinguishing mechanism and process in order to develop more realistic mid-range concepts and explanations that can account for individual action and emergent powers connecting initial causes and their concrete outcomes and, yet, offer analytical clarity and explanatory precision in this procedure. As a contribution based on certain elements in critical realist thought, I have demonstrated that the conception of mechanism as a particular and necessary relation for producing outcomes in context is a robust and pragmatic one. In this conceptualization, a mechanism is central to causal explanation because a general and contingent process of change, while integral to this explanation, may not be causal ‘enough’ to explain concrete empirical outcomes. By explicitly developing a mechanism-based approach to account for uneven geographical development, geographers can avoid what Hedström and Ylikoski (2010: 54) call ‘lazy mechanism-based storytelling’ or what Gerring (2010: 1504) and Kalter and Kronberg (2014: 100) term ‘mechanism talk’ (i.e. a mechanistic application of mechanisms). Identifying and specifying these mechanisms in relation to the general processes of socio-spatial change, such as neoliberalization and path dependence, can go a long way to advancing such geographical knowledge of uneven development. It can also contribute to the renewed purpose of explaining the ‘big pictures’ of uneven global development as a core intellectual project in economic geography (James et al., 2018; Martin, 2018) and other subdisciplines in human geography that are concerned with critical understandings of major contemporary political and economic debates.
Looking forward, many of our mid-range theories of the capitalist society and space need to specify better and more explicitly their underlying mechanisms and component mechanisms for understanding particular outcomes of uneven geographical development. This specification of mechanisms will also enable geographical analysis to be more compatible and comparable with those mechanism-based analyses in other social science disciplines. It allows for a more reciprocal form of ‘engaged pluralism’ emergent in economic geography (Barnes and Sheppard, 2010; Hassink et al., 2014; MacKinnon et al., 2019; Pike et al., 2016) and political science (Hall, 2013; Sil and Katzenstein, 2010). Ultimately, this article’s conceptualization intends to serve as such a mechanism for an explicit shift towards causal explanation in future geographical research.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The writing of this article has been a long and convoluted
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
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