While many commentators have recently argued forcefully for increased ‘rigour’ and ‘relevance’ within cultural economic geography, they have offered relatively less guidance on how we might achieve that in practice, according to criteria that are methodologically and epistemologically appropriate to the cultural turn. Within this context, I outline a series of feasible concrete strategies that researchers (especially those with limited resources of finance, status and power) might employ in the pursuit of these twin research ideals across five commonly experienced moments in the research process, namely: (i) development of research questions; (ii) research design and case study selection; (iii) data collection; (iv) empirical analysis and theory building; and (v) write-up and communication.

1. Progress in Human Geography 30, 3 (2006) pp. 289–308
© 2006 Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd 10.1191/0309132506ph610oa
I Introduction: cultural economic
geography as an ill-disciplined(?)
subdiscipline
Over the last decade or so,1 economic geogra-
phy has undergone a ‘cultural turn’, in which
scholars have rejected conventional dualisms
between ‘the economic’ and ‘the cultural’ in
favour of a range of more fluid and hybrid
conceptions that emphasize the mutual con-
stitution and fundamental inseparability of
these two spheres (see, for example, Lee,
1989; Thrift and Olds, 1996; P. Crang, 1997;
Massey, 1997; Peet, 1997; Sayer, 1997;
Barnett, 1998; Amin and Thrift, 2004). On
the one hand, the ‘cultural turn’ is a direct
response to the new economic realities that
have accompanied the shift to a postindus-
trial, knowledge-based, global capitalist eco-
nomy in which the social bases of economic
success (and failure) have become increas-
ingly apparent (Sayer and Walker, 1992). On
the other hand, it also represents an episte-
mological critique of structurally determinist
accounts of economic change, particularly
ideas from Marxian political economy,
Regulation Theory, Flexible Specialization
and Neoclassical Economics which have vari-
ously dominated the discipline since the early
1970s, and in which ‘economy’ trumped ‘cul-
ture’ in a predefined hierarchy of epistemic
Critical moments in the production of
‘rigorous’ and ‘relevant’ cultural economic
geographies
Al James
Department of Geography, University of Cambridge,
Downing Place, Cambridge CB2 3EN, UK
Abstract: While many commentators have recently argued forcefully for increased ‘rigour’ and
‘relevance’within cultural economic geography, they have offered relatively less guidance on how
we might achieve that in practice, according to criteria that are methodologically and
epistemologically appropriate to the cultural turn. Within this context, I outline a series of feasible
concrete strategies that researchers (especially those with limited resources of finance, status and
power) might employ in the pursuit of these twin research ideals across five commonly
experienced moments in the research process, namely: (i) development of research questions; (ii)
research design and case study selection; (iii) data collection; (iv) empirical analysis and theory-
building; and (v) write-up and communication.
Key words: cultural turn, economic geography, graduates, junior academics, methodology,
relevance, rigour.

2. significance. As such, this shift in conceptual,
empirical and substantive scope is one of the
most significant, and highly contested, deve-
lopments in the subdiscipline’s recent history.
It is also symptomatic of recent developments
in human geography more widely.
Contemporary research in cultural eco-
nomic geography does not reject traditional
concerns of capital, production, exchange,
valuation and consumption, but instead
broadens the analysis to examine, on the one
hand, how these processes operate within,
and impact on, the spatially variable sets of
sociocultural conventions, norms, attitudes,
values and beliefs of the societies within
which economic decisions and practices take
place; and, on the other hand, how these
economic categories are themselves discur-
sively as well as materially constructed, prac-
tised and performed. Without doubt, the
discipline has benefited considerably as scho-
lars have drawn attention to new subject
matter and scales of analysis; accorded roles
to previously ignored and subordinated play-
ers; encouraged a diversity of analytical
frameworks; and connected economic geog-
raphy to significant debates in other social sci-
ences.2 At the same time, scholars have also
invoked new metaphors, new strategies of
writing and authorship, and new research
methods (see Barnes, 2001), resulting in eco-
nomic geography now being more diverse,
variegated and vibrant than ever before.
It is therefore ironic that, despite these
widely espoused advances, many high-profile
commentators now question the rigour,
plausibility and relevance of a great deal of
economic-geographical research within the
cultural vein. Ron Martin and Peter Sunley
have launched one of the most high-profile
critiques of the cultural turn from within the
discipline:
The trend within the new (cultural) economic
geography appears to be a drift towards what
we would call vague theory and thin empirics.
By vague theory, we mean a retreat from
detailed, carefully formulated, and empirically
testable theoretical frameworks in which
structural causes are assigned a key
explanatory role, in favour of vaguely
articulated theoretical accounts based on
either dense, highly jargonised ‘discourses’
taken from the latest cultural or social theory,
or on loose assemblages of ill-defined concepts,
fuzzy metaphors, or mere neologisms. (Martin
and Sunley, 2001: 153)
Martin and Sunley’s comments echo those of
Ann Markusen who similarly highlights a
wane in the quality of in-depth empirical work
within cultural economic geography, arguing
that ‘scanty supporting evidence’ makes it
difficult for other scholars to subject such
work to scrutiny or to corroborate its results
(see Markusen, 1999; 2003). These problems
are, Markusen argues, reinforced by an
increasingly obtuse and self-referential mode
of writing that makes it difficult for policy
practitioners to operationalize many ideas
from within the discipline, sustaining a signifi-
cant policy distance.
One immediate response to these critiques
might be simply to dismiss them based on
their simultaneous appeal to inappropriate
traditional scientific yardsticks of ‘rigour’ and
‘relevance’ and to a misplaced correspon-
dence view of the world which misses the
point of what the cultural turn was about.
Thus for example, as one anonymous
reviewer of this paper rightly pointed out,
definitions of culture are never that clear cut,
and it is precisely because they are not that
they can produce exciting, creative and origi-
nal work which still nevertheless challenges
the intellectual, political and social status quo
(the ultimate goal of all ‘good’ research) by
providing alternative understandings of the
world.3 There is certainly much validity to
these important counterarguments.
Nevertheless, consistent with one of the
main thrusts of Martin et al.’s critiques, there
has also emerged a recognition from within
cultural economic geography itself that the
practical and methodological components of
the cultural turn continue to lag significantly
behind their ontological and epistemological
counterparts (see, for example, Jackson,
2002; Yeung, 2003). I fully endorse this view.
What we do have are multiple user-guides on
290 Critical moments in ‘rigorous’ and ‘relevant’ cultural economic geographies

3. individual (as if stand-alone) techniques, cou-
pled with plenty of examples of good research
practice.4 What we have less of is guidance
on how to maintain effective methodologies,
in terms of the broader sets of standards and
guidelines (rather than rigid mandatory rules)
used in formulating whole research strate-
gies, from the derivation of research ques-
tions, to data collection, empirical analysis,
theory-building and write-up. As such, we
require a critical re-evaluation and refinement
of our research methodologies in cultural eco-
nomic geography that goes beyond simply the
choice of research instruments per se to
include the entire process of practising
research itself (Jackson, 2002; Yeung, 2003).
My aim here, therefore, is to begin to
unpack how we might go about rising to that
challenge on the ground motivated by three
significant limitations identifiable within the
critiques put forward by Martin et al. In so
doing, I seek to construct a countercritique
that engages explicitly with our critics on the
specificities of their arguments and which is
also couched in their own terms of reference.
First, while commentators have argued force-
fully on why we need to raise the bar with
regard to standards of‘rigour’and‘relevance’,
they have offered relatively little guidance on
how we might achieve that in practice, in
ways that are epistemologically appropriate to
the cultural turn itself. Problematically, how-
ever, as Martin himself acknowledges, level-
ling criticism is easy; suggesting ways in which
might move forward is a different – and much
more difficult – matter (Martin, 2001).
Second, while it is all very well for senior
sages of the discipline to define various
research ideals, what barriers do those of us
lower down the academic ranks face in
achieving those same goals of ‘rigour’ and
‘relevance’ – given our typically limited finan-
cial resources, lack of status, limited power
and relative inexperience in conducting
research – and how might we go about over-
coming those in practice? Third, while not
denying the value of‘rigour’and‘relevance’as
useful guiding principles for cultural economic
geography, the specific criteria against which
critics have suggested we judge them are by
no means beyond question. Specifically,
the utility of traditional scientific criteria of
replicability, representativeness and general-
izability seems severely limited given cultural
economic geography’s celebration of context,
creativity, indeterminacy and situatedness,
coupled with the open-ended, contingent and
spatially variable nature of the empirical reali-
ties which form our objects of study – hence,
what form might postpositivistic criteria for
evaluating ‘good’ research take? (see also
Peck, 2003).
These themes are explored in detail in the
next five sections, each of which takes issue
with a particular strand of the main critiques
recently levelled at the subdiscipline, showing
how each corresponds to a common method-
ological ‘moment’in the research process and
how each appeals to a too narrowly defined
conception of‘rigour’and‘relevance’. As part
of this, I draw upon on my own PhD research
experiences in Utah into the cultural eco-
nomy of innovative regional industrial
systems to discuss how I, as a young
researcher with limited financial resources,
time, power and reputation, sought to derive
a powerful and convincing geographical
account in the cultural economic vein.5 I will
focus especially on significant difficulties
encountered in trying to sharpen my level of
methodological practice at each stage (too
few scholars ever discuss what did not work),
along with some of the feasible, concrete
techniques that I employed to overcome those.
II Lack of policy relevance
(deriving research questions)
The first strand of the recent critiques level-
led at the new cultural economic geography is
that it lacks any serious agenda when it comes
to policy-relevant and policy-based research
(Markusen, 1999; Peck, 1999; Martin, 2001;
Dorling and Shaw, 2002). While the rele-
vance debate is certainly not new,6 in the
context of the cultural turn, the debate seems
to have taken on renewed significance and
Al James 291

4. meaning in recent years (see Dear, 1999).
Specifically, commentators have expressed
concern that the move towards a research
focus on culturally inspired questions around
the body, perceptions, embodiment, perfor-
mativity and identity (see Pollard et al., 2000),
coupled with a focus on absorbing new philo-
sophical approaches from social and cultural
theory, has had the unfortunate effect of
shifting attention away from a focus on polit-
ically inspired socio-economic issues of
uneven economic development, inequality,
growth and restructuring (Martin, 2001: 193;
Wills, 2002). As political economy has been
squeezed out, so Martin argues, ‘so concern
with policy has correspondingly withered’
(2001: 195), along with our understanding of
capitalism’s overarching dynamics and
organizing principles (Mitchell, 1995), and the
ability of many cultural economic geogra-
phers to contribute in a meaningful way in the
realm of policy.
While I certainly would not deny the vali-
dity of the general tenor of these claims (see
James et al., 2004) there are also a significant
number of limits to them. First and foremost,
we need to guard against essentializing cul-
tural economic geography. While there has
certainly been recent increased emphasis on
cultural approaches to understanding
economies and their geographies, cultural
economic geography is not a coherent school
but rather a complex nexus of contested posi-
tions in which different scholars hold funda-
mentally different (and often irreconcilable)
ontological and epistemological views on the
nature of cultural economy (see, for example,
P. Crang, 1997; Ray and Sayer, 1997; Amin
and Thrift, 2004). Nevertheless, for most
the aim has not been to undermine political
economy (in a manner antithetical to policy
relevance), but to demonstrate how ‘the
economic’ is itself necessarily ‘cultural’ in a
manner that not only makes those relations
far more complex than we have, perhaps,
previously been prepared to accept, but
which also calls into question the (false) divi-
sion between cultural economic and political
economic geography itself.7 Indeed, Progress
in Human Geography has been instrumental in
articulating such an agenda (see, for example,
Jackson, 2002; Lee, 2002; Hudson, 2003).
At the same time, we should also recognize
that the emergent shift in policy away from a
‘one-size-fits-all’ approach towards a new
vogue for flexible policies which are adaptable
to local economic and cultural ‘field condi-
tions’ (ie, context) has actually opened up
increased opportunities for cultural economic
geographers to stake their knowledge claims
(see Banks and MacKian, 2000).
Additionally, despite critics’ calls for
research that is not only interesting and
stimulating, but also relevant and urgent
(Samers, 2001), only rarely does anyone dis-
cuss how we might go about identifying pol-
icy-relevant topics in the first place. Given the
(increasingly) long lead-in times for journals,
these issues are especially apparent for
younger researchers who typically do not sit
on journal editorial and review boards
through which new papers are circulated, and
who have only limited funds to attend the
multiple conferences where urgent debates
are held long before they even reach the jour-
nals. My own strategy involved first under-
taking a simultaneous revisionist cycling
between three sets of sources (each corre-
sponding to a particular component of ‘rele-
vance’ as outlined by Dear, 1999) in order to
find a germane debate that spanned all three.
Specifically I focused on: (i) exciting forefront
theoretical and conceptual debates as evi-
denced in lead geographical journals and con-
ference proceedings (relevance as intellectual
centrality); (ii) current policy debates as
detailed in government documents and fund-
ing council thematic priorities (relevance as
potential policy application); and (iii) contem-
porary socio-economic realities and policy
issues as evidenced in popular higher journal-
ism newspapers, magazines and internet sites
(relevance as pertinence/timeliness).
Using higher journalism and internet
material offers three important advantages.
First, shallow analyses give both scope for
292 Critical moments in ‘rigorous’ and ‘relevant’ cultural economic geographies

5. more rigorous extension of these analyses,
and also often beg more (research) questions
than they answer. Second, short lead-in times
sustain a greater sense of urgency and up-to-
the-minute pertinence of content than is typi-
cally possible in academic journals. Third, a
lack of peer review means that these articles
are not bogged down in self-reference to
tightly defined intellectual groups, and hence
are more accessible to non-experts.
Moreover, so-called ‘higher journalists’ also
tend to commentate on emerging policy
debates in a more provocative and engaging
written style than is typically found in aca-
demic journals, especially important in light of
Amin and Thrift’s (2000) observation that
many young scholars are increasingly turned
off from doing policy-relevant work by what
they perceive as dull and boring policy
debates.
To illustrate, first, an extensive review of
the regional learning and innovation literature
revealed that, while the formal institutional
bases of dynamic regional economies are rela-
tively well theorized, the exact nature of the
causal mechanisms by which different sets
of cultural conventions, routines, attitudes,
values and beliefs promote innovative activity
more successfully in some regions than in
others remains only partially understood
(Asheim, 1996; Storper, 1997; Wolfe and
Gertler, 2001). Second, a simultaneous
review of various policy documents revealed
both the government obsession with high-
tech clusters as a means for securing national
economic competitiveness at a time of
eroding government spending, and also the
specific strategies employed in pursuit
of that goal. These documents also
revealed the main associated research
concern of policy-makers to be the spatial
transferability of institutions from ‘blueprint’
regional economies to less successful places;
or of what works where and why (Banks and
MacKian, 2000). Third, a review of the
popular business and news press (most
notably Newsweek, BusinessWeek and The
Economist), detailed the global spread of
cluster strategies, along with a swathe of
Silicon wannabes who have failed to match
Silicon Valley’s success, and worse, the poten-
tial for places to be written off for having the
‘wrong culture’, as prisoners of tradition and
habit. Combining the insights of all three sets
of sources, I decided that as a cultural
economic geographer I had a potentially
engaging, urgent and policy-relevant debate
centred on examining the mechanisms
through which regional cultural economy is
continually (re)constructed over time; the
cultural inflection of observed behaviour of
firms within both successful and less success-
ful regional economies; and hence the ‘place
effects’that cultural economy imposes on the
efficacy of intended cluster policies and
patterns of regional economic development.
Having identified a potentially policy-
relevant topic, my second strategy was
actively to engage policy-makers in the formu-
lation of possible research questions, consis-
tent with one of the key pillars of
action-orientated research (Greenwood and
Levin, 1998; see also Hanson, 1999; Pain,
2003; 2005). Problematically, however, not
only have critics again offered relatively little
guidance on how we might achieve this, but
they have also tended to privilege national
macro social and economic policy audiences
over others (Staeheli and Mitchell, 2005).
Significantly, not only is this to adopt an
unnecessarily narrow view of where policy
relevance should (and could) be enacted, but
these so-called‘high’policy audiences are also
the same ones to whom junior academics
face very strong barriers in engaging given our
limited status, reputation and experience. My
own approach was instead to engage a range
of policy actors in a variety of other arenas
including various community organizations,
advocacy groups, charities, voluntary organi-
zations, public authorities and educational
institutions working in the ‘third sector’ at a
range of scales (Massey, 2002). These policy
audiences are often seen as somehow less
valid than high-level policy audiences dealing
with macro-socioeconomic issues (see Peck,
Al James 293

6. 1999; Pollard et al., 2000), yet this view is
increasingly untenable in the political con-
texts of state devolvement of power and a
recasting of the role of local authorities from
service providers to strategists, brokers and
enablers of partnership activity (Banks and
MacKian, 2000).8 I also found these hetero-
dox policy audiences to be much more recep-
tive to requests for direct contact than
members of government, even at the state
level (in my case, the Utah State Legislature).
Specifically, I questioned them on key issues
that they would like to see researchers
address and research questions that had not
yet been asked but which ought to be, and in
many instances was able to modify and
expand certain research questions to take
those priorities into account – although
inevitably, some priorities were beyond the
scope of my own research.
Engaging with and triangulating between
multiple sets of literatures and practitioner
viewpoints early in the research project there-
fore offer potentially useful ways of pursuing
‘relevance’ as a research goal. However,
while it is possible to make concrete steps to
control the intended relevance of our work,
ultimately we have very little control over the
act of research ever being used to shift the
political status quo (see also Staeheli and
Mitchell, 2005), or indeed misused.9 To com-
pound matters, three years is a long time in
the policy world (Henry, 2005), and, as such,
a potentially relevant research proposal at the
outset of the graduate research process may
not necessarily be so pertinent come gradua-
tion. Notwithstanding these limits, we can
still feasibly make efforts to strengthen that
part of the research-reception process cen-
tred on write-up and dissemination, and this is
discussed in section VI.
III Narrowly blinkered ‘one-off’ case
studies (rigours of research design)
The second strand of the critiques recently
levelled at cultural economic geography con-
cerns scholars’ use of ‘anecdote, single case
studies’ (Martin, 2001: 198; Rodríguez-Pose,
2001: 181). While intensive case studies offer
an important means of exploring causal
connections under different local contingent
conditions (Sayer, 1984), and allow investiga-
tions to retain the holistic and meaningful
characteristics of real-life events (Yin, 1994),
commentators allege significant problems
with how case studies are often employed
within cultural economic geography.
Specifically, in addition to fears regarding an
excessive prioritization of the ‘novel and
avant-garde’ (Martin and Sunley, 2001:
158), critics are also concerned that the
‘representativeness’ of chosen cases is rarely
spelled out (Markusen, 1999: 872); that mul-
tisite comparative studies have given way to
more‘easily challengeable’isolated single case
studies (Markusen, 2003: 749); and that the
quality of case studies is hampered by nar-
rowing ‘blinkers’ imposed on the subject by
the researcher (Markusen, 2003). Here I
offer three responses.
First, while we might criticize scholars
within cultural economic geography for their
emphasis on the most ‘sexy’ and successful
cases, or on novel ‘outliers’ in the contempo-
rary economy, fundamentally, we must also
recognize that these are the same types of
information-rich case studies in which junior
scholars might invest their limited resources
most fruitfully. At the same time, every possi-
ble case study can be critiqued on multiple
levels relative to other possible places that
might have been chosen for study. Our aim,
therefore, must be to construct convincing
and defensible arguments which make explicit
the primary motivations for choosing a partic-
ular case study, but which simultaneously
recognize the limits of that case relative to
others that might have feasibly been
undertaken on the same budget. First and
foremost, case studies are theory-building
exercises (Massey and Meegan, 1986;
Cochrane, 1998; O’Neill, 2003; McDowell,
2003), and hence in selecting a particular case
study the important first step must be simul-
taneously to identify a gap in our current
knowledge and understanding, and to identify
294 Critical moments in ‘rigorous’ and ‘relevant’ cultural economic geographies

7. places which significantly exhibit the key
processes and phenomena of which our
knowledge remains only partial. However,
this is not to argue that we seek out ‘paradig-
matic’ cases, on the contrary:
There are no grounds for claiming that a case –
any case – represents a paradigmatic instance
of the phenomena in question. There may be
heuristically vivid and strategically critical
cases, but there can be no paradigms in the
literal sense. (Peck, 2003: 736)
Likewise, despite critics’ calls for scholars to
spell out the ‘representativeness’ of our cho-
sen case studies, we simply cannot ever guar-
antee that the slice of the world we choose to
examine is somehow a ‘statistically represen-
tative’ case or ‘typical’ instance from which
we might make inferences about a population
of other ‘identical’ regions (see Mitchell,
1983). Nevertheless, the importance of ‘con-
textualizing’ case studies, by describing their
level of fit with similar contexts outside the
chosen research situation arguably still
stands – indeed this was a particularly strong
concern of all of the policy audiences with
which I engaged at the outset of the research.
To illustrate from my own research, why
choose Utah as a case study? Because, to
examine the ways in which firms’ cultural
embedding in the region shapes and condi-
tions their abilities to learn, innovate and
hence compete in the knowledge economy
(knowledge gap), I felt it important to choose
somewhere with an especially visible, and
hence measurable, set of regional cultural
conventions, norms, attitudes, values and
beliefs. Utah offers such a case study,
based on the demographic dominance of
Mormonism, the distinctive culture associ-
ated with the LDS Church, of whom 75% of
Utah’s total population are official members
(LDS Church/Deseret News, 2001).
Moreover, location quotient analysis also
showed Utah to be a potentially information-
rich case study based on the state having 5.8
times more jobs in computer software (one of
the defining industries of the knowledge
economy; Castells, 1989) than one would
expect if Utah had a proportional share of US
national employment in computer software.
To contextualize this case study still further:
there are thousands of regional economies
across the globe that are also relationally
embedded in strong cohesive regional cul-
tures, including ethnic cultures, trade unions
cultures, and work cultures based on particu-
lar sectoral specializations. Perhaps more
importantly, Utah is also seeking to emulate
Silicon Valley as part of a cluster development
strategy aimed at improving local economic
prosperity. Such strategies have become
almost an obsession among policy-makers
across the world from the scale of the OECD
right down to the local (see, for example,
Swann et al., 1998; OECD, 1999; Keeble and
Wilkinson, 2000; Norton, 2001).
Second, commentators have also criticized
an overemphasis on ‘single, anecdote case
studies’ within cultural economic geography.
In contrast, comparative case studies allow us
to investigate the working out of causal
processes or tendencies in different contexts,
settings and situations. Moreover, by
analysing and understanding the relations,
processes and agents that give rise to the cir-
cumstances we confront in two or more simi-
lar places, we are in a better position to tease
out local specificities from more general
structures which are manifest locally there,
and hence to increase the potential transfer-
ability of our findings to other settings.
However, not all of us are furnished with the
same level of research funding that feasibly
allows us to undertake multisite comparative
case studies, no matter how worthy of study
they might be. As Phil O’Neill reminds us:
It is reasonable to expect that researchers seek
projects of a scale and nature that are
achievable within the typically modest budgets
of academics and postgraduates: studies of a
regional economy, a clever small firm, a cluster
of inner metropolitan advertising houses in
their loft offices. (O’Neill, 2003: 4)
Nevertheless, while it is often not possible
within budgetary constraints to mount
comparative multisite case studies on an
Al James 295

8. inter-regional scale (let alone an inter-national
one), that does not mean that we cannot
exploit the advantages of the comparative
case study method on an intra-regional scale.
Thus, in my own research, I was able to
employ two comparative case strategies.
First, I compared Mormon founded, managed
and majority-workforce software firms, with
their non-Mormon counterparts, seeking to
keep these two sets of firms as similar as pos-
sible (same industrial classification, product
niche, employee size, age, private ownership)
in order that any differences between them
be legitimately interpreted as a function of
their different degrees of cultural embedding
in the region. Second, I compared Mormon
and non-Mormon firms located within Salt
Lake County (64% Mormon general popula-
tion) with their counterparts in Utah County
(90% Mormon general population), allowing
me to examine the role of mutual observa-
tion, peer pressure, and conformity to group
norms in shaping the Mormon cultural-inflec-
tion of firms’ decision-making processes and
observed behaviour.
The third component of the critiques of
scholars’ use of case studies within cultural
economic geography concerns their alleged
imposition of unnecessarily narrow ‘blinkers’
on their objects of study (Markusen, 1999:
872), which compromises the ‘fullness’ of
subsequent analyses and explanations by
excluding key processes and causal mecha-
nisms. Problematically however, case study
‘closure’ – or defining and delimiting our
investigations by imposing boundaries upon
them – is an inevitable aspect of all geographi-
cal enquiry (Lane, 2001). As such, I argue that
the problem is therefore not one of closure
per se, but of scholars’prioritization of certain
types of closure over others.To illustrate from
my own work, many scholars have attempted
to explain the workings of dynamic regional
economies through an appeal to institutions
at the regional scale alone (see Gertler, 1997).
This unnecessarily narrow approach results
from a particular form of ‘closure by space’
(Massey, 1999: 263) in which case studies are
delimited and defined according to the same
administrative boundaries within which highly
accessible contextual data is initially available
(typically at the county or Metropolitan
Statistical Area level). Fundamentally, how-
ever, we cannot assume that the key
processes that shape and condition our case
studies similarly obey those same (often
arbitrary) administrative boundaries.
Accordingly, in my own study I also employed
‘closure by process’ (Massey, 1999), examin-
ing the role of inter-state processes of labour
mobility, as well as legislative processes at the
national scale which increase employers’
responsibilities to accommodate their
employees’ cultural lifestyles in the work-
place. The point, therefore, is not only to
avoid giving priority to any one type of case
study closure, but also explicitly to compare
the different results that emerge through dif-
ferent types of closure in order to produce an
enlarged perspective (see also Lane, 2001:
252).
IV ‘Thin empirics’ (rigours
of data collection)
The third strand of the recent critiques
levelled at the new cultural economic geogra-
phy concerns an alleged ‘flight to superficial
empirics’ and substantively thin research
(Martin, 2001: 197). First, commentators
have expressed concern that, where data col-
lection relies on qualitative open-ended inter-
views, interviews are superficially thin in
content and based on an overly selective and
narrow respondent sample (Markusen, 1999:
872; Martin and Sunley, 2001: 154; see also
MacKinnon et al., 2002). Second, the use of
intensive qualitative interviews within the dis-
cipline is itself argued to have been at the
expense of extensive and quantitative modes
of empirical inquiry, as scholars have reacted
‘knee-jerk fashion’against the undertheorized
‘data-mining’exercises of previous positivistic
modelling traditions (see Demeritt, 2001;
Martin, 2001; Rodríguez-Pose, 2001;
Hamnett, 2003). Critics have therefore
called for scholars to embrace explicitly
296 Critical moments in ‘rigorous’ and ‘relevant’ cultural economic geographies

9. multi-method approaches in which the
ultimately false and unproductive dualism
within economic geography between
‘qualitative’ versus ‘quantitative’ ways of
knowing is explicitly rejected (Obermayer,
1997; Plummer and Sheppard, 2001).
While I will later take issue with the first
critique, I fully endorse the second view, that
the range of methods that can (and should) be
used within cultural economic geography is
much greater than is generally assumed. This
should not be interpreted as a call for a return
to previous positivistic ways of knowing: the
too often taken-for-granted bracketing
together of quantitative and positivist geogra-
phy is by no means a necessary relationship
(Gould, 1999; Sheppard, 2001). At the same
time, the appeal of mixed methods also rests
on the principle of convergence: that when
multiple sources provide similar and/or
complementary findings their credibility is
considerably strengthened (Knafl and
Breitmayer, 1989; Krefting, 1990).
Nevertheless, critics have offered from far a
well laid route as to how we might actually go
about combining quantitative and qualitative
data collection methods in practice.
In order to avoid critiques of methodologi-
cal eclecticism – in which the complementa-
rity of different methods employed is more
illusory than real (Winchester, 1999) – my
own approach was to use the comparative
strengths of different methods to try and
overcome the limits of others. For example,
to identify significant patterns at the regional
scale I undertook first an extensive industrial
survey of Utah’s lead computer software
firms, incorporating both quantitative and
qualitative data across six key characteristics
of local firms.10 While this allowed me to iden-
tify a series of regional patterns and statistical
correlations between a range of key variables,
in order to explain those it was necessary to
employ open-ended interviews, group discus-
sions and direct observation at the scales of
the firm and individual workers. Specifically,
these allowed me to access the myriad cul-
tural assumptions, competing possibilities,
tradeoffs, historical contingencies and
multiple motives that underlie the corporate
decisions within the firms that formed my
objects of study, as well as non-decisions
rendered invisible in the survey data (see also
Schoenberger, 1991). However, an appeal to
corporate memos, newspaper archives, inter-
net searches and participant observation was
then necessary to verify some of the claims
made at interview. And so on . . . However,
we cannot assume that the relative strengths
and weaknesses of different methods will
always directly map onto one another (see
also Peck, 2003). More fundamentally, the
exact balance of qualitative and quantitative
approaches employed in any mixed method
research design will inevitably vary between
projects, and can only ever be judged in rela-
tion to the nature of research question at
hand and the sources of information that we
have at our disposal to answer that question
(Graham, 1999); it cannot simply be
proscribed blanket fashion.11
Second, in addition to calls for an explicit
embrace of mixed methods within cultural
economic geography, critics have also urged a
move away from what they have identified as
an ‘unwarranted selectivity in the choice of
respondents’ (Markusen, 1999: 872; see also
Martin and Sunley, 2001: 154). I argue that
these critiques oversimplify a much more
complex set of issues. Above all, as junior
researchers with limited resources, it is impor-
tant that we deliberately select the most likely
informative respondents, and in particular,
people on the ‘front line’ of their organiza-
tions – those with the executive power and
management fiat. However, in my own study
I found that job titles are not necessarily
indicative of the most informative contacts.
(For example, some of the CEOs in my
respondent sample had only been employed
by their respective firms for less than a year
and were surprisingly ill-informed about those
firms.) It is therefore essential that we also
target research participants at a range of
lower levels within the corporate hierarchy. In
my own case these included male and
Al James 297

10. female, Mormon and non-Mormon computer
programmers and analysts involved directly in
designing and writing code; team leaders
responsible for the day-to-day operation and
management of whole software projects; and
Vice-Presidents in finance, personnel,
investor relations and marketing roles. I also
targeted a range of industry and culture
watchers and other officials outside my
sample firms whose insights might offer
important evidence or counterevidence for
data triangulation, corroboration of manager
interviews, and theory-building.12
However, regardless of the composition of
our‘ideal’sample of research participants, the
selectivity of the respondent sample that we
achieve in practice ultimately rests on our
ability to gain access, something that is espe-
cially problematic for younger academics,
whose lack of reputation and title, make it
harder to get a foot in the door. In my own
research, the single strategy that I found most
effective in gaining access to firms (and hence
in bridging the gap between ideal respondent
sample versus sample achieved) was to use
email as my initial mode of contact.There are
several advantages to this approach. First,
email allows us to detail the purpose, nature
and intent of our research succinctly, and
unhindered by a bad line or confusing regional
accent. Second, email offers arguably the
least intrusive mode of contacting firms;
unlike phone calls there is never a ‘wrong’
time to call (eg, first thing Monday morning,
last thing on a Friday) because email will typi-
cally only be opened when the respondent is
ready to open it. Third, email is a relatively
cheaper, quicker and more hassle-free
method of conducting surveys than conven-
tional mail. For the researcher, it is easier to
personalize a block email to specific parties
than to print out hundreds of letters, and mail
them with stamped-addressed envelopes to
encourage a response. For the respondent, it
is easier to hit reply and insert responses into
the text than it is to draft a formal letter of
reply, print it, and mail it. Finally, email allows
us to get our request for access directly into
the inbox of potential research participants,
and hence to bypass often unhelpful ‘corpo-
rate gatekeepers’, including receptionists and
office managers who filter phone calls and let-
ters on behalf of our potential research partic-
ipants. Significantly, in contrast to an initial
response rate of 15% by phone, I was able to
increase this to a figure of 50% using email
(resulting in 105 firms taking part in my initial
regional survey).
Above all, the crux of this email strategy
rests on determining the email addresses for
potential targets. However, while it is possible
to access management biographies listed on
firms’ websites, typically the email addresses
for those key targets are not given. To over-
come this (and hence ‘guess’ the email
address for a target respondent) there exist
two techniques. The first is to mimic the
email format for the firm as given on firms’
websites for media contacts and to apply it
to the names of key respondent targets
(for example r.e.spondent@firm.com or
r_dent@firm.com). For firms where even
press contacts’email addresses are not listed,
the second technique is to email the webmas-
ter (webmaster@firm.com) in order to gener-
ate a reply from the webmaster’s internal
personalized corporate email address, the for-
mat of which can then be mimicked for key
targets in the usual way. In my own research,
these two techniques gave a very high hit
rate, getting the email directly into the inbox
of the right person in around 90% of cases.
A final potential source of thin empirics in
cultural economic geography is that our
objects of study (workers, firms, industries,
regions, etc) are in reality constantly moving
targets (Schoenberger, 1991: 188). As such,
corporate interviews have the potential to
generate data that are temporally ‘thin’,
based on their probing economic behaviour
and structure at only a single point in time.
These constraints are especially felt by
younger scholars, because given tight
research budgets, it is often only feasible to
conduct interviews this intensively once, and
hence potentially problematic to determine if
298 Critical moments in ‘rigorous’ and ‘relevant’ cultural economic geographies

11. analyses borne out for the current period of
were also true in other periods of a firm’s his-
tory (Markusen, 1994: 485). Nevertheless,
there exist feasible techniques through which
we might begin to overcome these limits.
First, in order to reconstruct a longitudinal
profile of firms’previous activities since start-
up I pushed participants on key historical
events, including structural changes in the
industry (see Markusen, 1994) and significant
breaks with the past within the firm, such as
shifts in management, ownership and mission
statement. Second, I sought to interview a
‘corporate historian’ in each firm (following
Glasmeier, 1988), defined as an employee
who had been with the company at least 10
years, or from start-up in the case of younger
firms. Third, I also actively sought out both
retired and former employees able to com-
ment on their previous firm’s historical deve-
lopment, and also to make a (typically candid)
assessment of its current performance.These
strategies offer potentially useful ways of
overcoming problems of temporally thin
empirical data using interview methods.
Moreover, when used as part of an overall
multimethod approach that explicitly incorpo-
rates quantitative methods of data collection
and a large and diverse sample of firms and
participants targeted directly in the first
instance, such an approach offers a useful
means of strengthening the quality of col-
lected empirical data.
V ‘Vague theory, anecdotal evidence
and partial stories’ (rigours of empirical
analysis and theory-building)
The fourth strand of the recent critiques lev-
elled at the new cultural economic geography
is an alleged slippage in the standards by
which collected data are subsequently
interpreted, analysed and transformed into
powerful explanations and theories.
Specifically, commentators have questioned
the credibility of what they call‘vague theory’
(Martin and Sunley, 2001: 153) which is
alleged to have accompanied a retreat from
detailed and rigorous empirical analyses, and
an increased permissiveness about both the
quality of, and the necessity to, include evi-
dence in support of contending theories
(Markusen, 1999: 872). Indeed, where empir-
ical material is used, it is argued to consist all
too often of ‘a few selected interview quota-
tions, frequently from just a handful of indi-
viduals in a very specific setting, and usually
without any sustained attempt to interrogate
such evidence critically . . . or to assess its
wider relevance’ (Martin, 2001: 197). The
result of such ‘anecdotal information’
(Rodríguez-Pose, 2001) is argued to be mere
‘partial stories’ and thin empirical descriptions
(Martin and Sunley, 2001: 155), which often
bear only a tenuous resemblance to the every-
day social and economic lives and concerns as
they are lived and experienced by real people
on the ground (Hamnett, 1997; Ward, 2005).
While I would not deny the considerable
scope for ongoing improvement and develop-
ment in the marshalling of evidence and con-
struction of theories within cultural economic
geography, the use of the term‘vague theory’
begs the question: against which external and
independent reality is it actually possible to
judge the comprehensiveness and accuracy of
a particular theory? Fundamentally, every
interpretation, analysis and theory is ulti-
mately the view from somewhere, (Barnes,
2001), and as such can never be divorced
from the interests and context of the theo-
rizer (Gregory, 1978). At the same time, all
theories can only ever be provisional and par-
tial: our claims to ‘truth’ are always works in
progress, always uncertain, always contin-
gent and always alterable in the light of new
information and ideas – indeed, these uncer-
tainties lie at the heart of the knowledge pro-
duction process (Smith, 1984; see also Schön,
1983; Bohman, 1993). However, rather than
simply accept the relativist claim that all
competing theories provide equally useful
resources for learning about and understand-
ing the world (following Harding, 1993: 61),
our goal must be to maximize the coherence,
plausibility and penetration of our empirical
analyses – within the limits of our own
Al James 299

12. positionalities and currently available
resources – in order to persuade others (aca-
demically and politically) of the integrity,
credibility and plausibility of our competing
knowledge claims. We also need to make
explicit the processes through which those
theoretical claims are themselves being
generated (Peck, 2003).
Within this context, my own strategy for
analysing the 1200ϩ pages of interview tran-
scripts that formed a significant component of
my data was to employ a systematic set of
coding and recoding processes, informed by
some of the techniques of grounded theory
(Strauss and Corbin, 1990) which usefully
guide the researcher through the building of
theories (rather than their ‘testing’) through
iterative abstraction (see also M. Crang,
1997; Bailey et al., 1999). First, I fractured the
data through a process of open coding, anno-
tating it and making notes about notes, as a
means of opening the data to render it more
manageable. This involved analysing tran-
scripts phrase by phrase, taking apart individ-
ual observations, sentences and paragraphs
and giving each discrete incident, idea or
event a name that represented a phenome-
non. Here I also asked a series of questions of
the data, in terms of the actors involved, their
motives and positionalities. As ideas emerged
they were jotted alongside the text as theo-
retical memos. Second, I brought together
similar phenomena identified in the data by
the initial open codes into common cate-
gories, hence decreasing the number of units
that I had to work with. I then gave these cat-
egories conceptual labels, or in vivo codes
(Glaeser, 1978), explicitly borrowing words
and phrases used by the participants them-
selves to name concepts – these participant
concepts are preferable to researcher-derived
concepts (Rose, 1982). In these two initial
stages, preliminary theories first develop as
provisional concepts, and theoretical memos
form a running record of insights and ideas
about the data, facilitating the move from a
mass of raw data to a more analytical realm.
Third, I put the data back together in new
ways by making connections between the
categories and subcategories identified above
through a process of axial coding (Strauss and
Corbin, 1990), examining categories in terms
of their relationships with each other. This
process is critical in that it helps to identify
possible mechanisms that those relationships
might represent within the data. Finally, I pro-
gressively integrated the categories to help
move towards preliminary theories, taking
the coded data and scrutinizing ideas and
concepts in an iterative process, moving back
and forth between research questions and
old and new material until a series of theories
developed that best fit the data.
As part of this process, it is necessary con-
stantly to compare data within categories to
establish consistency, across categories to
establish clear boundaries. Analysis proceeds
in a gradual fashion, cycling back and forth
through the data, changing codes and cate-
gories in light of later ideas. Following Dey
(1993) I also focused on exceptions, extremes
and negative examples to counter inclinations
only to include evidence that confirmed my
various theories. The aim is not simply to add
up the insights of the different transcripts, but
to combine them in the construction of
empirically grounded theories which best
explain the available data. As such, the valid-
ity of the theories that emerge is not based on
‘statistically significant’ empirical regularities
identifiable in the data, nor on the ‘represen-
tativeness’ of the interviews; rather, it rests
on analytical plausibility, cogency of reason-
ing, and corroboration (rather than replica-
tion) across a range of interview cases, (see
Mitchell, 1983; Jackson, 1985; Peck, 2003).
At the same time, I also sought to check the
credibility of evolving analytic categories,
constructs and formulations with members of
the groups from which I had originally
obtained the data (following Baxter and
Eyles, 1997). Typically, I emailed key sections
of analysis to research participants, asking
them to comment on the plausibility of the
initial interpretations offered, such that I
might subsequently refine them in light of
300 Critical moments in ‘rigorous’ and ‘relevant’ cultural economic geographies

13. those reactions.13 While there is the potential
here for censorship and arguments, defensive
reactions and recriminations (see Bryman,
1993), my own experience was generally a
supportive and encouraging one, and hence
formed an integral part of the coding, recod-
ing and analytical induction processes upon
which my subsequent knowledge claims are
based. This strategy is also consistent with
the cultural turn’s rejection of the artificial
separation of ‘observer’ and ‘observed’,
‘researcher’ and ‘researched’, in recognition
of the research process as a mutual project in
which all parties are simultaneously involved
(albeit to varying extents).
Finally, the presentation of verbatim quo-
tations – or what have unhelpfully been
labelled as‘anecdotes’by many of our critics –
offers another essential component of evi-
dencing and making credible our contending
theories within cultural economic geography.
Importantly, verbatim quotations allow us to
demonstrate how meanings and phenomena
are expressed in participants’ own words,
rather than the words of the researcher.They
also allow us to present some of the descrip-
tive richness derived from interview conver-
sation in the text; to reduce tendencies to
overgeneralization by juxtaposing multiple
and competing perspectives; and to present
a polyphonal and collaborative text,
constructed between the researcher, reader
and socio-economic actors represented in the
setting (Atkinson, 1990; Hughes, 1999).
Nevertheless, the use of interview
evidence to furnish and support authors’
arguments is by no means straightforward.14
Problematically, it is all too easy to cull from
our transcripts exemplary quotes that sup-
port what we would like to say; and to ignore
quotes which would either otherwise contra-
dict our theories or are less dramatic (but pos-
sibly more indicative) (Silverman, 2001). My
own approach was fourfold. First, while there
exist mechanical methods (eg, based on the
repetition of certain words and phrases)
through which it is possible to justify the
choice of particular quotation, these do not
necessarily produce theoretically aware
accounts (McDowell, 1998). As such, I
selected material based primarily on the rela-
tionships and traits stressed as most impor-
tant and extraordinary by participants, and
which best contradicted and/or confirmed
previous analyses. Second, I avoided using
quotations from the same 20 most articulate
participants, instead including quotations
from as many participants as possible in the
final write-up. Third, alongside each quota-
tion I described the positionality of the actor
(within the bounds of anonymity) such that
the reader might then draw their own conclu-
sions regarding the possible biases and alle-
giances shaping a respondent’s testimony, and
hence the quality and meaning of the quota-
tions used. As part of this, it is also important
to recognize the potential slippage between
seeing informants as representative of com-
munities rather than as mere single voices
within larger corporate entities (following
Markusen, 1994; Mullings, 1999). Finally, I
pitched quotations against each other, both to
highlight the complexities and contradictions
driven by the complex intertwining of ‘eco-
nomy’ and ‘culture’, and to minimize tenden-
cies towards overgeneralization.
VI Obfuscatory jargon and academic
cliques (rigours and relevance of
write-up and communication)
The fifth and final strand of the recent cri-
tiques levelled at the new cultural economic
geography centres on the outputs of the
research process, centres on scholars’ choice
of language, terminology, and modes of
writing. Specifically, commentators have
expressed concern that the new cultural eco-
nomic geography is becoming an increasingly
abstract, waffly and impenetrable body of
scholarship, based on dense and unnecessarily
obtuse dialogue, fast-moving jargon, buzz-
words and ambiguous metaphors, in turn
perpetuated by self-indulgent ‘clever lan-
guage games’ written by and for small
intellectual peer groups (see, for example,
Hamnett, 2001; Martin and Sunley, 2001;
Al James 301

14. Massey, 2002; Peter Hall in Walker, 2002).To
compound matters, increased employment of
the passive voice and displacement of agents
and actions by process nouns15 are argued to
sustain a discourse in which processes them-
selves become the causal agents (Markusen,
1999: 870). As such, even where work in the
new cultural economic geography does deal
with important social and economic issues,
critics have argued that it is often written up
in an elitist jargonistic form that not only ren-
ders it difficult to cast into policy useful terms
(Martin, 2001: 194) but also makes it difficult
to convince scholars outside of their small
peer groups, let alone in other disciplines, of
the validity and significance of key findings
regarding the world ‘out there’ (Dorling and
Shaw, 2002: 632).
Based on my own graduate experiences of
struggling to get to grips with much of the
geographic literature relevant to my chosen
PhD, as well as continuing complaints from
my own graduate students around the same
issues, I would not deny the validity of these
observations for some – but certainly not all –
current work in cultural economic geography.
To ensure clarity of meaning in my research
write-up, I attempted to include clear and
plainly stated explanations of all key terms at
the first point they appeared in the write-up.
However, given the contested nature of
many so-called ‘fuzzy terms’ used in cultural
economic geography, this was easier said than
done. On one level, I found it useful to con-
struct tables detailing the differential usage of
key terms (eg, ‘embeddedness’, ‘culture’,
‘high-tech’) across the various strands of the
geographical literature (and in allied disci-
plines), highlighting where my own use of a
particular term aligned with and deviated
from other usages in each table. Second, in
keeping with Markusen’s critiques of ‘process
language’, I also sought to avoid using passive
verbs, process nouns and passive sentence
construction, as well as making explicit the
deliberative human agents, actors and
bureaus, whose ongoing purposive
actions are simultaneously constitutive of and
constrained by, the various structures and
processes that variously formed my ‘objects’
of study. Third, I tried to write as concisely as
possible, using the fewest words without any
loss of clear expression or meaning.The over-
all approach, therefore, was not simply one of
maximizing the chances that my analyses and
write-up would be understood, but also that
they would not be misunderstood.
Subjecting our research to the construc-
tive scrutiny of wider interpretative commu-
nities offers a final strategy for improving the
credibility of our geographical analyses (see
Baxter and Eyles, 1997: 511; Staeheli and
Mitchell, 2005).This is because validity is not
so much a property of our interpretations per
se as it is the collective agreement of intended
audiences that the interpretations are con-
vincing (McDowell, 1992). Problematically,
however, all too often this key process is
restricted merely to review by an audience
comprised of other members of our own dis-
cipline (see also Dorling and Shaw, 2002;
Cutter, 2003), placing limits on the potential
appeal and intelligibility of our interpretations
not only to scholars in other disciplines, but
also to the huge array of lay people beyond
academia. In this context, I found it useful to
discuss my evolving interpretations with
colleagues in political science, economics,
sociology and business management at the
University of Utah and Brigham Young
University. Predictably, the sociologists criti-
cized my analyses based on their ‘inadequate
conceptualization of culture’; the economists
for their ‘not being economic enough’; and
the business managers for their not analysing
business strategy in enough depth.Time-con-
suming, yes; infuriating, without a doubt; but
in the end, by trying to respond to as many of
these critiques as possible, I was forced to
construct a more convincing piece than was
initially the case. Similarly, by producing a
report for some of the policy actors involved
in the development of my initial research
questions, I was also forced to broaden the
wider implications of my (sometimes narrow)
academic analyses. Overall therefore, for
302 Critical moments in ‘rigorous’ and ‘relevant’ cultural economic geographies

15. written work in cultural economic geography
only to be understood by tightly defined
groups of like-minded peers is problematic; it
is important that we explicitly seek to com-
municate our ideas effectively to a much
wider audience (see also Massey, 2000).
VII Conclusion
Recent years have witnessed cultural eco-
nomic geography come under considerable
scrutiny and critique from a range of high-
profile scholars calling for increased methodo-
logical ‘rigour’ and ‘relevance’ within the
subdiscipline. On the one hand, I am broadly
sympathetic to these provocative interven-
tions, not least because practical discussions
of how we should do cultural economic geo-
graphy continue to lag severely behind more
philosophical discussions of why we should
refigure the ‘economic’ around the ‘cultural’
and we need to bridge this gap. On the other
hand, I argue that the specific criteria against
which critics have suggested we judge the
‘rigour’ and ‘relevance’ of our research are
unnecessarily limited (and limiting), based not
only on their appeal to a too narrowly defined
set of ‘high’ policy audiences, but also to tra-
ditional scientific yardsticks of validity, replica-
bility, representativeness and generalizability
which are epistemologically inappropriate to
cultural economic geography. An alternative –
and arguably more useful – set of evaluative
principles for evaluating ‘good’ research has
been put forward by Lincoln and Guba (1985)
and includes the criteria of credibility (authen-
ticated representations of subjective experi-
ences); transferability (fit with similar
contexts outside the original research situa-
tion); and dependability of the interpretation
(minimization of idiosyncrasies in interpreta-
tion) (see also Baxter and Eyles, 1997).
Nevertheless, unless these postpositivist
criteria are themselves matched by explicit
discussions of how cultural economic geogra-
phers might actually go about living up to
them, there is a risk that researchers will
adopt those criteria merely as a ‘tick-box
template’for reporting their work without this
significantly affecting their research practice
(see also Jones, 2004). Indeed, these issues
are particularly pertinent for younger scholars
who face a distinctive set of constraints on
doing ‘rigorous’ and ‘relevant’ research in
practice – as a function of their limited
resources of finance, status and power – but
whose voices have remained largely absent in
recent debates. Herein lies the central contri-
bution of this paper.
Of course, the strategies presented here
are by no means exhaustive. Nor is the sys-
tematic approach taken meant to betray the
complex, messy and serendipitous nature of
the research process, shaped especially by
luck, chance, intuition and opportunism.
Rather, it is merely to tackle our critics
directly on the specificities of their critiques
(rather than simply rejecting them outright)
as they apply to different, commonly experi-
enced moments of the research process. It is
also to offer younger scholars struggling to
devise and operationalize their own research
methodologies a little more advice to go on
than simply ‘be lucky’as they cycle iteratively
back and forth between research question,
case study selection, data collection, analysis,
provisional theories, and so on. Much more
can be said – and no doubt it will be!
Acknowledgements
This paper has evolved over the last three
years and draws on research funded by the
ESRC (Award: R00429934224). Thanks to
Ron Martin, Roger Lee, Sarah Damery, Will
Harvey and three anonymous reviewers for
encouragement and comment on earlier
drafts. I also benefited from broader discus-
sions around these issues at the inaugural
Summer Institute in Economic Geography
held at the University of Wisconsin at
Madison in July 2003, organized by Jamie
Peck, Kris Olds and Brenda Parker; and at a
similarly inspired one-day graduate workshop
organized by the Regional Economy and
Society Research Cluster in the Department
of Geography, University of Cambridge, in
April 2005.
Al James 303

16. Notes
1. While geographers conventionally cite the
cultural turn as a phenomenon of the past
decade, as has been identified by Hudson
(2003: 467) there are earlier strands of the
economic geography literature that prefigure
this more general concern with the interrela-
tionships between culture and economy
including Lee (1989), Harvey (1973:
195–284), and Buchanan (1935).
2. Cultural economic geography has borrowed
from management and organizational studies,
political economy, evolutionary and institu-
tionalist economics, new economic sociology,
economic anthropology, and heterodox socio-
economics (O’Neill, 2003).
3. Roger Lee has articulated this notion of
‘good’ research at a range of recent postgrad-
uate training sessions around the UK and
elsewhere.
4. Some notable examples include (but are by no
means limited to) Linda McDowell’s (1997)
work on the gendered performance of
culturally approved workplace identities in the
City of London; AnnaLee Saxenian’s (1994)
comparative study of the role of different
regional industrial cultures in the divergent
economic performances of Silicon Valley and
Boston’s Route 128; Meric Gertler’s work on
the origins and consequences of cultural dif-
ferences between engineering firms in
Canada and Germany (Gertler, 2004); Adrian
Smith’s work on the cultural economy of
household practices of food production and
interhousehold networks of reciprocity in
East-Central Europe (Smith, 2002); and Jane
Pollard’s study of manufacturing culture
within Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter
(Pollard, 2004).
5. Specifically, my research examined the ways
in which the behaviour of firms within Utah’s
high-tech cluster is constituted through and
differentially shaped by the socially con-
structed norms, values and evaluative criteria
within Mormonism; the impacts of that cul-
tural embedding on firms’ abilities to learn,
innovate and compete; and the mechanisms
through which that cultural embedding is
(re)constructed over time (see James, 2003;
2005).
6. For example, see Harvey (1974); Knight
(1986); Hoggart (1996); Johnston (1997).
7. I am grateful to Roger Lee for this point.
8. This state devolvement of power is rooted in
the assumption that societies and economies
are now too fluid, complex and expensive to
be managed solely by central government
(Beck, 1992; Goodwin and Painter, 1996;
Giddens, 1998).
9. For example, as David Harvey once pointed
out, General Pinochet was also a geographer
(Harvey, 1974).
10. The survey examined: (i) employment, age,
location; (ii) interfirm relationships and
external orientation; (iii) financing histories;
(iv) in-house technological capabilities and
innovative processes (occupational structure,
R&D employment and expenditure, and
R&D intensity); (v) competitive ‘perform-
ance’(revenue, revenue growth since start-up
and frequency of product introduction); and
most importantly (vi) the proportion of a
firm’s founding and management who were
Mormon.
11. One logical extension of this argument – and
one supported by an anonymous reviewer of
this paper – is that in some research situations
quantitative methods are simply inappropri-
ate, and hence that the mix of methods should
be wholly qualitative.This was not the case in
my own research.
12. These included local economic development
experts, trade association representatives,
venture capital leveragers, technology associ-
ation officers, government workers, economic
development associations, university alumni
relations managers, journalists, Church
officials and other religious leaders.
13. Other possible strategies for member check-
ing include the provision of sanitized tran-
scripts of interviews to research participants
(from which false starts, grunts, repetitions,
etc have been purged) in order to check infor-
mation.
14. These debates touch on broader issues of
‘evidence’ and ‘proof ’ in the organization of
ethnographic accounts (see, for example,
Clifford and Marcus, 1986).
15. Process nouns are defined by Markusen
(1999: 870) as those words which were once
nouns or verbs, transformed into adjectives,
processes, verbs and then again into process
nouns with ‘ization’ endings in which tangible
agents, and the structures in which they
304 Critical moments in ‘rigorous’ and ‘relevant’ cultural economic geographies

17. operate, become obscured through a
discourse in which processes become
the causal agents (eg, differ/different/
difference/differentiate/differentiation;
sustain/sustainable/sustainability).
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