Politics and Method

First Published in 1985. For more than a decade now a number of debates have been taking place within industrial geography. The period has been one in which issues of the geography of industry—of the spatial form of industrial decline and growth—have often been at the forefront of wider political debate. The issue of the relationship between theory, method, politics and policies is common to all the social sciences, and the debate which is presented here has relevance beyond industrial geography —in economics, in sociology, in other branches of human geography. This book is built around a seminar which was held in 1983. It was organized under the auspices of the then SSRC, now ESRC, as part of the programme of Doreen Massey’s Fellowship in Industrial Location Research. The aim was explicitly to allow time for a small group of participants to discuss the range of issues around the question of the relationship between policies, politics, theory and method.