Scale and the limitations of ontological debate: a commentary on Marston, Jones and Woodward

In their recent essay, ‘Human Geography without Scale’, Marston, Jones and Woodward (2005) take stock, albeit selectively, of almost 25 years of scale research and find it wanting. Given how substantial and influential the scale literature has become, not only in human geography but also now in political science, sociology and anthropology, we welcome their efforts to assess and critique this literature. We agree with a number of the specific concerns they raise, but disagree with their representation and diagnosis of the literature, as well as their call to ‘expurgate scale from the geographic vocabulary’ (422) and replace it with a flat ontology. We share the concerns of Marston et al. regarding the recent tendency in human geography to privilege scale over other spatialities, such as networks, space, place, region and mobility, or to subsume these spatialities under a fetishized master concept of scale. To the extent that such privileging has occurred, e.g. when complex processes of resistance to neoliberal globalization are reduced to scale jumping, it has resulted in inadequate attention to the practices and spaces of everyday and not-so-everyday life. We concur that scalar discourses of globalization might contribute to the reification of the global scale and the suppression of resistance, and share their concern that certain discourses of globalization are used to obscure the particular spaces and places, e.g. boardrooms, where decisions are made. Finally, we concur with their critique of hierarchical, top-down, notions of scale that represent causal processes as necessarily high level and broad scale, ‘touching down’ locally. Such notions indeed obscure the myriad local material and discursive practices through which the very fabric of globalization is produced. Nevertheless, we take exception to their general characterization of the scale literature and the alternative they offer to remedy its purported deficiencies. Specifically, their analysis is flawed in five crucial ways. It