Fragmentation around a Defended Core: The Territoriality of Geography

R.J. Johnston

The Geographical Journal, Vol. 164, No. 2. (Jul., 1998), pp. 139-147.

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'The GeographicalJoumal, Vol. 164, Ko. 2,July 1998, pp. 139-147

Fragmentation around a Defended Core: the Territoriality of Geography

R.J. JOHNSTON

School ofGeographica1 Sciences, UniversiQ ofBristo1, Bristol B S 8 I S S Thispaper was acceptedfor publication in JuQ 1997

Geography, like all other academic disciplines, is fragmented into a large number of specialist communities, within which research occurs and individual careers are structured: Geography is characterized by at least four cleavages. Such fragmentation is necessary to scientific progress, but threatens the discipline's status and funding within academia, hence the attempts to defend Geography's territory within the academic division of labour. Geography's situation may be more acute than that for many other disciplines, because of its multifarious external links.

KEY WORDS: Geography, fragmentation, specialization, territoriality.

THE INTERNAL STRUCTURE of the acad- emic discipline of Geography has been debated recently, with some contending that it

is fragmented while others counter that it is not (see Johnston, 199 1; Gould, 1994). Furthermore, some of the observers of fragmentation claim that such a con- dition is neither unsurprising nor undesirable - it is all that can be expected in a large, modern discipline and does not set Geography apart from comparable subjects (Johnston, 1996a; 1997). In this essay that argument is extended and its importance evaluated.

The issue of fragmentation has frequently con-cerned geographers, who have sought to identifi and promote unity within the discipline, for a variety of individual and institutional reasons. It is probably as important now as it has ever been, however, particu- larly though not only in the United Kingdom, because of the changed funding situation for and within Universities. The competition between institutions for teaching and research resources is, in effect, competi- tion between Departments and comparable units, most of which are named and defined for 'traditi- onal' academic disciplines, such as Geography. Departmental 'managers' have to argue for resources within their institutions, and the disciplines themselves have to argue with funding bodies over the amount that institutions will receive for that subject. The impression of a fragmented and 'disunited' discipline can threaten such managerial actions hence, for example, Cooke's (1992) argument that, regarding the current interest in environmental issues:

. . . there is a danger that once again we shall allow our fissiparious tendencies to deflect attention away from our difficult, but funda- mentally important integrative role on the common ground where human and physical geography overlap.

Cooke, 1992: 132

0016-7398/98/@@@2-0139/S@@.2@/@

Against that, as argued here, fragmentation is seen by some as necessary to scientific progress, which disciplinary boundaries impede (Taylor, 1996).

M a t Geograph is and where it camejom It is widely accepted that the goal of Geography is given by the etymology of its name -Earth description. This has a long pedigree, as established by numerous subject histories (which the author distinguishes from disciplinary histories, reserving the latter term for surveys of the academic discipline as practised in Universities and comparable establishments). It became especially popular in many European coun- tries during the nineteenth century as part of the growing elite interest in Earth description, a develop- ment that had both general and specific components: the general related to a 'curiosity factor' associated with the desire for information and knowledge about the areas of the Earth being newly 'discovered' by European societies; and the specific concerned the material needs of those involved in the expansion of mercantile interests into those areas.

These two components were promoted by geo- graphical societies in many of Europe's major cities, which were founded to promote the study of Geography and provided fora in which new informa- tion was imparted to eager audiences (see, for exam- ple, the essays in Bell, Butlin and Heffernan, 1995). Those societies argued for the study of Geography within a general (or liberal) education, and lobbied hard for its inclusion in the curricula for expanding state school systems: geographical knowledge was considered an important basis for citizenship, as well as crucial for a range of commercial interests. Building on their success in this, they then lobbied for Geography's inclusion in Universities, calling for

8 1998The Royal Geographical Society

140 THE TERRITORIALITY OF GEOGRAPHY

the creation of Chairs in the discipline and the estab- lishment of degree programmes. This was achieved from the end of the nineteenth century on, with the case largely being accepted on the material rather than the curiosity grounds (as exemplified by the importance of 'colonial geography' in the Netherlands: Heslinga, 1996). Nevertheless, a major task for the early generations of University geogra- phers was to train those whose career intentions focused on teaching the subject in secondary schools.

Once the discipline was accepted within the vari- ous University systems, however, there was an increasing perceived need for it to be defined more precisely, especially so as the Universities - following the American model - increasinelv focused their

" 8

activity on research alongside teaching; the notion of institutions in which the teaching was research-led became the norm in many countries. Geographers were impelled to find a research rationale for their disci~line which involved more than s im~lv collect- , , ing, collating and disseminating information about the Earth.

Completion of this task involved a number of sep- arate 'false starts', attempts to define the discipline in ways that proved unacceptable (after evaluation) either to geographers themselves or to scholars in other disciplines - environmental determinism is a paradigm exemplar of this. Eventually, the focus became the region, and this was codified in the English language, though based largely on German works, in Hartshorne's classic The Nature of Geograph (1939). This, as many have pointed out since, was very much a positive presentation - Geography is what geographers do, or, perhaps more precisely, Geography should always be what geographers have done to date. It is still frequently referenced or para- phrased, however, as the leitmotfof Geography and remains a major constraint to what some consider 'acceptable' in the continued structuration of the dis- cipline (Johnston, 1984).

The politics of position The regional paradigm defined the discipline at the beginning of a period of rapid expansion of Universities, when in addition several new disciplines competing with geographers for students and research roles were being established. Geographers had their ameed niche within the academic division " of labour, which increasingly they found it necessary to defend as contests grew, not only for 'disciplinary space' but also for resources and students. After the Second bt'orld War they were called upon to pro- mote their cause in the face of aggressive strategies by the proponents of other disciplines, notably in the rapidly burgeoning Social Sciences (especially Economics, Sociology and Political Science) but also slightly later in the Environmental Sciences.

Geographers were not very successful at this task,

at least initially. Their focus on regions and on the uniqueness/singularity of places was not widely per- ceived as consistent with the growth of scientific study - with Science defined then very much as a positive activity aimed at providing explanation, followed by prediction, through generalization (see, for example, Ackerman's, 1945, reflections on his wartime experience in the USA). Thus, for example, Geography was not initially included in the curricula for any of the new Universities founded in the UK in the early 1960s (East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Lancaster, Stirling, Sussex, Warwick, Ulster and York), although it soon found a place at Sussex and then, a decade or so after the University's foundation, at Lancaster. This was a major change in the discipline's fortunes within the UK, for it was well-established in all of the country's other Universities (save those with specialist missions, such as Imperial College) and was popular with students. (Interestingly, as discussed further below, several of those new Universities - East Anglia, Lancaster, Stirling and Ulster - did establish Environmental Science, and geographers were recruited to occupy senior positions in all four.)

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, therefore, Geography was accepted in the Universities but not widely recognized as a vibrant, modern scientific dis- cipline. Regional geography was not in tune with the current of the times - as already exemplified by some critics (e.g. Kimble, 1951), mildly condemned by one of the discipline's historians (Freeman, 196 l), and excoriated by others, in a variety of ways (David, 1958; Buchanan, 1968; Gould, 1979). This was fur- ther exemplified in the UK in the mid-1960s when Geography was excluded from the list of disciplines covered by the newly-established Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC - later ESRC) which was to manage research grants and studentships for those disciplines. The determined efforts of a group of senior geographers saw its acceptance negotiated within a couple of years (Steel, 1984), against some o ~ ~ o s i t i o nfrom the re~resentatives of other disci- plines (and not a little from some other geographers), but the discipline was paired with Town Planning for the decisions on research grant applications.

This belated acceptance of human geographers into the main institution for Social Science funding reflected the strength of the case made regarding changes in the subject's nature in recent years. Alongside their continuing concern with place - or region - human geographers increasingly promoted the study of space, and argued that with this they brought a particular perspective to the Social Sciences. They soon added the study of environment to their portfolio, realizing its growing popular and political importance and arguing that, through their interactions with physical geographers and their syn- theses of human and physical material, they were well-placed to take the vanguard position on research

1 ,

141 THE TERRITORIALITY OF GEOGRAPHY

and teaching in this area. (In the United States, this involved the 'rediscovery' of physical geography which had been very substantially down-graded in most Departments during the 1950s-1970s, so much so that there is no article on it in the retrospective collection of essays published as a special issue of the Annals to celebrate the AAG's 75th anniversary in 1979: see Marcus. 1979.)

The link with physical geographers was important politically. In the UK, a number of physical geogra- phers had shifted away from the regional focus a few years before their human geography colleagues and, although accepting that specialist study of many aspects of the Earth's environment was likely to reside in other disciplines (meteorology in Physics, for example), they were able to establish their scien- tific credentials (Johnston and Gregory, 1984); they extended on this by being at the forefront in develop- ing applications of new technologies, notably environmental remote sensing. Thus, within the UK's emerging institutional arrangements for research and postgraduate activities, physical geogra- phers were accepted into the Natural Environment Research Council INERC) without the ~roblems that human geographers experienced with the SSRC. Furthermore, senior physical geographers were recruited to establish two of the country's new Schools of Environmental Sciences (Keith Clayton at East Anglia and Gordon Manley at Lancaster), and others later joined those at Stirling (ILZlchael Thomas) and Ulster (Frank Oldfield).

By the 1960s, therefore, geographers were extend- ing their research and teaching portfolios, in order to win acceptance within the wider communities of environmental and social scientists, with whom they increasingly made common cause. This involved both expanding their subject matter and exploring new methodologies - which were belatedly linked to their philosophical foundations. But this had to be done within the context of their established niche in the academic division of labour. Areal differen- tiation, although perhaps expressed differently, remained at the core of Geography's identity as an academic discipline. There is little substantive differ- ence, for example, between the definitions of Geography offered by Hartshorne (1939; 1959) and McDowell (1995), save the latter's (post)modern terminology, and when Berry was arguing for the quantifiers' 'new geography' at an AAG President's Session in 1964 he set it very firmly in the regional paradigm (Berry, 1964).

That umbrella definition has embraced a flourish- ing fragmentation, however, comprising a great deal of variation in the extent to which sub-disciplinary communities promote their work as contributing to the appreciation of 'areal differentiation'. Within physical geography, for example, the major switch in focus towards short-term process investigations,

although intended to illuminate morphogenesis, led to what Sugden (1996: 451-2) has identified as a retreat from studies of landscape evolution. That retreat may have been halted, and in part reversed, as implied by Kirkby's (1 98 1 : 10 1) justification of the addition of and L a n d f o m to the title of the journal Earth Suface Processes, because he wanted to embrace 'the full span of geomorphology in its broadest sense as the science of landforms and their evolution'. More recently, Richards (1990) has argued that geomorphologists should adopt the realist approach to Social Science advanced by Sayer (1984): mecha- nisms do not alwavs lead to the same events. he contended, 'unless the contingent conditions are appropriate' (p. 195), and experiments with closed systems (holding most factors constant) may reveal nothing of use about open system, 'real-world' situa- tions because of the role of interacting mechanisms " and contingent circumstances (as illustrated by a col- lection of papers edited by Owens, Richards and Spencer, 1997). Responding to comments by Bassett (1994) and Rhoads (1994), Richards (1994: 278) fur- ther contended that the 'open system character of the problems addressed by the environmental sciences .. . places them nearer the social than the physical sciences'. If, as Sugden (1996: 452) stressed, geomorphologists are to develop their 'ability to reconstruct the history of landscape evolution', this will involve them not only reappraising the 'areal dif- ferentiation' definition of Geography but also some of the approaches to scientific understanding pro- moted within that fragment of the discipline in recent decades (Johnston, 1997b).

Similarly, within human geography, an increasing range of studies focuses on individuals' self- and group-identities - what Dear (1997: 232) calls the 'personal politics of space-time' - as people and groups continually reconstitute themselves. The role of place in those structuration processes - and hence the creation and re-creation of areal differentiation as the geography of 'difference' - remains fundamental to the entire project, however.

F ~ p e n t e d Geograph? The study of Geography is currently fragmented in four main ways.

Substantive dgerentiation involves sub-disciplinary divi- sions identified according to their subject matter. At the macro-scale, this is exemplified by the widely- recognized human:physical split, involving two sepa- rate communities, each with some internal coherence but having little substantial contact with the other (and the argument for a third major community -environmental geography in some terminologies - is for an activity which rarely combines the intellectual activity of the two, as against their superficial subject matter: see Johnston, 1983). At the meso-scale, there

142 THE TERRITORIALITY OF GEOGRAPHY

are the subdivisions of human and physical geogra- phy, some compositional (such as social, political and economic geography) and some contextual (urban geography, rural geography and the regional geogra- phy of x, for example) - on contextual and composi- tional, see Thrift (1983). And at the micro-scale these have their different topical areas of investigation, such as urban social geography, each with its own exemplars.

E@ternolo&al dflermtiation involving divisions according to differing beliefs in the nature of knowledge - what can be known, and how. Buttimer (1993) identified four major metaphors, for example, involving the world as one of:

a mosaic of forms; a mechanical system; an organic whole; and an arena for events.

The first two are associated with modes of science and social science which emphasize explanation as the product of repeatedly-verified empirical general- izations. whereas the other two are associated with achieving understanding.

The division between the two main types of inquiry is not necessarily a simple split between phys- ical geography, on the one hand, and aspects of human geography, on the other (with spatial analysis in human geography perhaps occupying an interme- diate position, disavowing positivism but promoting positive analysis: Bennett, 1989; Golledge and Stimson, 1996). Realism, as promoted by Sayer (1992) for the Social Sciences and argued for by Richards (1990; 1994), for example, has much to offer physical geographers, and others are actively exploring a range of scientific perspectives (see Rhoads and Thorn, 1994; 1996).

DzJerentiation in rationale involves divisions among geographers in the raison d'etre for their discipline (or segment thereof). Three or four such divisions are sometimes identified (e.g. Johnston, 1997a; Buttimer, 1993), but the basic split is between 'pure' and 'applied' (Taylor, 1985), which are linked to 'expla- nation' and 'understanding' respectively.

Communip dflermtiation involves divisions which are themselves geographical. These vary in scale, and include:

1 The macro-scale divisions, which are largely language-based (with that based on English almost certainly the largest);

2 The meso-scale divisions, most of which are based on separate countries ('national schools'); and

3 The micro-scale divisions, which are most often

based on one or more academic institutions ('intel- lectual schools', such as the Berkeley School based on Carl Sauer between the 1920s and the 1960s).

Becoming an academic geographer involves being socialized/acculturated into one of the many discipli- nary fragments that coexist within this coarse four- dimensional matrix. Some individuals work in two or more separate fragments, others shift among them (although the 'distances' between some are much greater than between others, and the volumes of migration are consequently much less): many remain within one fragment for very long periods.

Fragmentation, specialization and careers The rationale for these cleavages is linked to the nature of scientific activity and the accompanying expansion of knowledge: specialization is necessary in order to practise as an academic geographer, certainly so for a researcher at the frontiers of knowledge-gener- ation and for a teacher seeking to take students close to those frontiers. This specialization/fragmentation has been accompanied by the growth of the discipline, an association which was probably necessary to progress in research - as it has been in virtually every other academic discipline. Growth has occurred not only in the total number of practising geographers but also in the size of the units in which they work (University Departments or their equivalent); again, this has probably been a necessary condition.

The growth in the number of academic geogra- phers reflects the demand for their services as teach- ers of undergraduates and postgraduates, since the teaching function underpins most University systems, including their finances. With more students per Department, and the consequent larger numbers of teachers, so the latter were enabled to concentrate their teaching (or the majority of it) on the special- ized areas in which their expertise was recognized. This released them from the necessity of reading widely in the discipline, well beyond their specific interests, in order to sustain their contributions to teaching across a wide curriculum and provided them with more time in which to promote their research concerns and advance their career interests -which have increasingly become linked to the qual- ity and quantity of their research output.

The product of more geographers having more research time was more research output - journal papers and monographs. As its volume increased, so the ability of individual scholars to keep pace with it was reduced, and to the extent that they felt the need to remain up-to-date over a wider field than their own (perhaps for their contributions to foundational teaching) this was facilitated by textbooks and review journals (such as Progress in Human Geography and Progress in Physical Geography). At the same time, the skills needed to conduct research in many of the

143 THE TERRITORIALITY OF GEOGRAPHY

fragments became more sophisticated and took longer to learn: the various types of Geography became increasingly separate, both substantively and technically (using the latter term in a very broad sense to cover all aspects of research methodology). Thus a continuing cycle was set in motion: more research was produced, and researchers became more svecialized in those comDonents of it in which they remained both up-to-date and active. Growth and fragmentation went hand in hand.

This process stimulated creation of the cleavages identified above. Individual researchers joined one (sometimes a few) relatively small communities of scholars which were identified by what they studied, and how. They formed networks whose member- ships can be identified by their cross-referencing of each other's work, many of which were formalized by the creation of institutional structures such as learned societies or, more probably, sub-groups within those societies (such as the IBG's study groups) and the establishment of journals focusing almost exclusively on one fragment of the discipline only. The process of socialization into academic life saw the individuals involved become increasingly specialized through their years of undergraduate and postgraduate training, until they found their niches within one of those fragments.

The fragments wax and wane in their size and strength, as the different parts of the discipline gain and lose popularity - for a variety of reasons, both external and internal. Their membership changes too, as some individuals decide to leave and reorient their activities, by joining new networks and chang- ing. their intellectual affiliations: this occurs because U

the networks are not isolated from others so that their members, in a variety of ways (not least through their professional contacts within and outwith their Universities and Departments), become aware of other developments of which they may wish to become part. Thus the disciplinary map is a fluid one: the relative position of the fragments remains set, but their nature may alter quite considerably.

The alterations may on occasion be very signifi- cant, as the nature of a community - what its mem- bers do research on and, even more importantly, how they do it and for what ends - is subject to major change. This was the subject of Kuhn's (1962) seminal work on ?he structure of scientzjic revolutions, which was very substantially misunderstood by many of those who adopted its terminology - especially that of revolutions for academic political reasons. -

(They were not assisted by the terminological confu- sion in Kuhn's book, however, especially over the word parad&.) Whereas some geographers argued for revolutions in the practice of the entire discipline, Kuhn had argued that the revolutions, when they occurred, usually involved only one of the discipli- nary fragments, one of the separate communities

operating within the discipline. If we adopt his much more limited approach, focusing on the communities and how thev change. then we can see how much

c 3 ,

more relevant his work is to the study of Geography over the last 50 years than some of his critics within the discipline accept. (This is a criticism of the geog- raphers who misapplied Kuhn, of course, not of Kuhn himself.)

Whereas most geographers remain active within one or, at most, two or three of these separate com- munities, a few range more widely - though very rarely across the entire discipline (as defined by the curriculum for an undergraduate Honours Degree in the subject, say). They have made seminal contribu- tions that have influenced research practice in a range of the communities, in some cases stimulating revolutions in practice there and even leading to the establishment of new communities. Most of them are readily identified by citation indices: their wide per- sonal influence is reflected in the frequency with which their seminal works are cited. It is through them (such as David Harvey and Doreen Massey in recent decades), and those who work closely with them, that the disciplinary map (or substantial seg- ments of it) is occasionally altered very substantially: they stimulate our own processes of continental drift and orogeny.

Some peculiar characteristics o f Geography The characteris- tics of Geography as a fragmented academic disci- pline identified here apply equally well to most other disciplines in the Social and the Natural Sciences, as Dogan (1996) has recently argued for Political Science. But there are additional features that are perhaps peculiar to Geography, which has long been widely recognized as different from most other acad- emic disciplines in its degree of overlap with others. (Such exceptionalism was, of course, the foundation of Schaefer's argument against Hartshorne! The lat- ter identified History as having a similar exceptional position - as have some of his followers, such as Cole Harris - but whereas geographers have for long explored along and across their frontiers with other discivlines. historians have tended to remain much more self-contained within their own institutional structures.) That overlap is largely asymmetrical, with geographers being much more outward-looking than the academic neighbours with whom they inter- act, although the extent of imbalance in the 'intellec- tual terms of trade' varies across the fragments: some of the specialized journals generally associated with Geography are largely populated by non-geographers (defined by their institutional locations), for example, whereas others are almost entirely populated by geographers (compare, for example, the Journal of Biogeography with the Journal of Transport Geography).

What this means is that the fragmentation of Geography has probably produced more centrifugal

144 THE TERRITORIALITY OF GEOGRAPHY

tendencies than has a similar situation in other disci- plines. Many of Geography's communities substan- tially overlap those in other disciplines, as illustrated by attendance at specialized seminars and other meetings, membership of inter-disciplinary groups (few of which have the structures usually associated with learned societies), publications in inter-discipli- nary journals established to service the overlap, and citation patterns. Geographers are more likely to join networks established in other disciplines than vice versa.

All of this produces a situation which looks very anarchic to outsiders, including University Administrators, and may be very confusing to begin- ning students who find that the discipline as practised at universities is very different to their expectations. And yet Geography continues, and remains a strong component of many University systems.

Fra~enta t ion without restructuring Why does Geography survive? Why have its various communities neither established separate disciplines, occupying newly- fashioned niches within the academic division of labour (perhaps including members of their networks located in other disciplines), nor left Geography to join those existing disciplines wherein most of their interactions take place? There is no single, straight- forward response to these questions, but a number of possible components to an answer can be identified and evaluated.

The first is adherence to an intellectual core: whatever the attractions of, and benefits from, interactions with other disciplines, these are outweighed by com- mitments to Geography's core beliefs. Their acade- mic socialization to the discipline through long years of education and professional employment binds geographers to its professed core beliefs and ratio- nale, and precludes all but a few from deserting it: the intellectual ties are strong. But what are they, and is there any convincing evidence that geogra- phers have such strong commitments to an intellec- tual core? This author doubts it.

More importantly, perhaps, although Geography lacks a core to which all of its adherents are strongly committed, in their research and teaching activities, many other disciplines do have one. If this is the case, then one or both of two consequences may follow:

1 Firstly, geographers will not be welcome to join those disciplines, since they haven't been social- ized into them and so, however well they may appreciate and contribute to some of the research at their peripheries, those trained as geographers do not meet the (implicit if not explicit) criteria for membership; or

2 Secondly, members of those other disciplines are strongly committed to them and so are unwilling

to join geographers in the establishment of new hybrid disciplines.

If either is the case, then the opportunities for geog- raphers to leave their discipline are few - unless they are prepared to retrain and meet the membership criteria for others. Similarly, there is little potential for the reverse flow of scholars, into Geogravhv from other disciplines, and Geography remains a relatively isolated collection of academic communities, focused on a largely empty core.

Others argue against this, pointing to the estab- lishment of successful hybrid groupings, such as Environmental Science, incorporating physical geog- r a ~ h v and asDects of ~olitical economv and cultural

L ,

studies, embracing parts of human geography. In general, however, these have been at best only partly successful. In the UK, for example, although several successful University Departments of Environmental Science have been established. manv of their mem- bers retain an allegiance to their parent discipline (geology, geography, geochemistry etc.), or at least some of its fragmentary communities. Similarly within the Social Sciences, despite plenty of evidence of the sort of 'opening-up' for which Taylor (1996) persuasively argues, this is not reflected (yet?) in the institutional structure of academic life either in -

the departmental structures of most Universities or in the organization of learned and professional societies. (In at least some of the Universities, however, there is a growing trend for the establishment of multidisci- plinary research centres, but the organization of teaching, through which much of the funding flows, remains firmly rooted in the traditional discipline departments.)

This last point directs us towards what the author sees as a much more important component of the answer to his questions: change is inhibited, and increasingly so, by academic politics and the associated competition for resources. Over the last two decades the management of Universities has become much more firmly based in the materialist foundations of what has become known in the UK as the enterprise econ- omy (Johnston, 1995). This relies increasingly on the premises of a free-market economy for its guiding concepts, with which are associated the drives for such things as accountabilitv and value-for-monev. " University is set against University, Department against Department, discipline against discipline, intradisciplinary community against intradisciplinary community - all of which militate against major structural change, however desirable this may be intellectually.

The nature of these trends and their influence on academic politics and disciplinary structures can be illustrated by the particular case of the business and politics of British Geography. Two salient features characterize contemporary British Universities:

THE TERRITORIALITY OF GEOGRAPHY 145

1 Funding for teaching follows students, so that the amount of money available to a University to pay for and support staff depends on the number of students that it recruits. The amount which a University receives is an aggregation of the amounts that it receives per student in its various disciplines, so each Department is effectively a separate revenue source.

2 Funding for research from public sources has two main components:

Block recurrent funding to Universities, the amount of which is determined by evaluations of the quality of research done and the number of researchers involved. As with the fundine for u

teaching, this sum is aggregated up from that allocated to the institution's separate units: each is evaluated by a peer review process as to the quality of its work, and the higher the perceived quality, the greater the amount of money made available per researcher. Project funding, which is obtained through competitions organized by the various Research Councils. Applications are subjected to peer review evaluation. so success is lareelv a func-u ,

tion of meeting criteria set by others in the same discipline.

Thus, the amount of money available per Department is a function of the number of students taught and the perceived quality of the research undertaken (since most Universities distribute their money to Departments according to the amounts that they earn, at least implicitly): the health of a Geography Department depends on its ability to attract students and on the aualitv of its staffs research.

I /

This largely formula-driven approach discourages innovation in a variety of ways and encourages terri-toriality among academics - especially among departmental managers (Johnston, 1996b). However desirable it may be for students to attend courses in other disciplines, this may have to be resisted because it can lead to a loss of resources (although these may be compensated by attracting students from other Departments to courses arranged for them: the problem is that if all Departments embark on such course offerings, the outcome will be more effort expended on teaching by all, with no addi-tional resources!). Even more undesirable is allowing the establishment of new Departments for hybrid dis-ciplines, especially if that is going to occur at the expense of existing Departments (i.e. there are no more students, so fewer of the existing number enrol on Geography courses).

In research, too, the task of departmental man-agers is to maximize returns to their units, and so their staffs work must be oriented in ways that will win the approval of the peer review panels that undertake the regular evaluations. This may militate

against interdisciplinary work and encourage publi-cation in recognized 'high quality Geography outlets' (even collaboration between Geography Departments in different institutions may be discouraged). The academic freedom of individual scholars to pursue their own interests may not be constrained, but they may be 'invited' to ensure that what they do and publish, where, is sufficient in both quantity and quality to meet the evaluation criteria. To the extent that those criteria promote particular research styles (externally-funded, in teams, etc.) over others, how-ever, so they (at least implicitly) direct the nature of the work undertaken.

Territorialitv is fundamental to the overations of contemporary Universities, therefore; it entrenches the interests of the existing disciplines and to some extent militates against change, however desirable that may be intellectually. Departments must maxi-mize their income streams if they are to obtain the resources necessary to support their staff research and teaching interests (indeed, even keep them in work). Thus adherence to the discipline is crucial, in an organizational if not an intellectual sense. Individuals have to sustain their allegiance to Geography, which they may do through subscribing to a 'lowest common denominator' definition of it as the discipline that seeks to explain and understand areal differences in place, space and environment. Alongside this, departmental managers have to pro-mote their interests against those of other discivlines." by pointing to their success in attracting students and producing high quality research.

In sum, having been created as an academic disci-pline, Geography has become something that must be sustained bv ~ rov ineitself successful on exter-, L u

nally-imposed criteria. Internally, it can achieve that through its own fragmentary structure and can with-stand some resistance to the dominant ethos; exter-nally, it has to conform to outside expectations. To meet the latter requirement calls for commitment to the discipline, both intellectual and, especially, politi-cal: in whatever directions their work takes them, ultimately individuals have to declare their allegiance to Geography as a separate, intellectually-coherent discipline.

In summaly The concept of territoriality was invoked earlier in this essay to describe the operations of modern Universities. It is a metaphor that can be more widely applied to describe the current disciplinary situation. When Geography was established as an academic discipline within the University systems of Western Europe and North America around the turn of the present century, it did so by proving there was a demand for trained geographers and their work and by establishing a niche within the intellectual division of labour.

146 THE TERRITORIALITY OF GEOGRAPHY

That initial niche had its core and boundaries, but the latter needed neither stout defence nor clear demarcation during the first half of this century. For much of that period, geographers were relatively introverted in their work, having few interactions with practitioners in neighbouring disciplines a charac- -

terization that was probably especially true of human geographers. From the Second World War on, how- ever, as the University system grew and the academic division of labour became more heavily populated, so the need for defining and defending the territorial boundaries became more pressing, even though at the same time geographers were becoming much more active in the creation of separate research com- munities within their discipline, whose own bound- aries extended well beyond that of their parent discipline to incorporate work in a number of others.

Finally, the managerial developments of the last two decades have extended the need for territoriality strategies and exacerbated the political constraints on intellectual activity. Ih i l s t many geographers have been building ever-stronger links beyond their disci- pline's traditional limits, they have at the same time had to defend their territorial boundaries more vig- orously. Thus the fragmentation of the discipline, in itself neither surprising nor antithetical to intellectual progress, has been allied with numerous attempts to create a disciplinary unity of purpose.

Endnote This paper is the revised text of a seminar given at the Technical University of Zurich, February, 1997. The author is grateful for the invitation to give the seminar there and for the constructive discussion that ensued.

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