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Space and Politics

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Handbook of Politics

Part of the book series: Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research ((HSSR))

Social scientists have long been concerned with power and politics and with the geographic settings in which social life occurs. But these two concerns have evolved rather separately. In sociology, economics, and political science deductive traditions of the twentieth century stressed the importance of producing generalizations that were context invariant. If geographic context was brought in to these disciplines, it was largely with respect to variations between nation and states. Of course, geography has long directed its spatial imagination across a range of contexts. However, adding a critical view of power and privilege occurred rather late in the last century (Harvey 1973).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    That is, politically-oriented research often makes use of general spatial analogies, theories building upon spatial metaphors, and network analyses. While these spatially-related representations are valuable (see for example, Bourdieu 1977; Mohr 2005), this chapter is concerned with research that directly recognizes politics and political organizations as inherently grounded in territorial settings.

  2. 2.

    The idealist view ranges from recognizing the usefulness of scale as a social construction (Marston 2000) to the more extreme position that “scale” slices political processes arbitrarily, obfuscates more than it illuminates, and thus should be abandoned with researchers only focusing on processes (Marston et al. 2005).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USA

    Gregory Hooks

  2. Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

    Linda Lobao

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA

    Kevin T. Leicht

  2. Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

    J. Craig Jenkins

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Hooks, G., Lobao, L. (2010). Space and Politics. In: Leicht, K.T., Jenkins, J.C. (eds) Handbook of Politics. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-68930-2_20

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