Society in Time and Space: A Geographical Perspective on Change (review)

Dodgshon believes it possible and fruitful to state general propositions about societal change as a spatially embedded process. In so believing, he rejects the turns toward phenomenology and cultural determinism that have drawn many other geographers away from economic reductionism over the last two decades. He also denies that theories of practice (for example, Bourdieu’s) or of structuration (for example, Giddens’) can account for large-scale social change, on the ground that such theories fatally draw explanation toward the smaller-scale phenomena that visible, vital social interaction produces or reproduces.¹

What to do? Dodgshon adopts a venerable, if currently unfashionable, theoretical device: assumption of a self-maintaining system. Here called “society” or “a society,” the sort of system in question has norms, rules, goals, projects, center, and periphery. It also interacts with physical, biological, and built environments. Thus far, Dodgshon would have received approval from both Sorokin and Parsons.² He moves to a more specifically geographical interpretation by arguing that the strategic embedding of socially significant objects and activities in spatial arrangements constrains social change. Human structure and agency interact, he asserts, “not just temporally, through phases of recursive or dialectical succession, but through strategies of spatial negotiation, with areas in which the emergence of new practices and new institutional forms takes place relatively easily being juxtaposed with areas in which it is prevented, retarded or constrained by structural inertia” (16; the passage, alas, provides a fair sample of Dodgshon’s prose).

After extended reviews and critiques of other scholars’ ideas about societal change, Dodgshon edges into the view that although societies are complex adaptive systems rather than simple equilibrium-maintaining machines, they “ultimately resist ongoing change or cope with it badly” (51). The remainder of the book then falls into three parts: (1) examination of historical changes at the scales of world systems, empires, states, and regions; (2) closer analysis of how socially produced landscapes, organizations, and built environments introduce inertia into social systems; and (3) general statements about the geography of societal change. Rather than sustained examples, each section combines quick historical generalizations with discussions of relevant theorists: Michael Mann, Mancur Olson, Immanuel Wallerstein, Jack Goody, Marshall Sahlins, Allan Pred, Harold A. Innis, Parsons, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and many others arrive for interrogation, some of them repeatedly.

In the book’s most original argument, Dodgshon claims that, contrary to the common idea of information technology as an accelerator of social change, “This growth in the amount of information being carried forward by society patently amounts to an increase in the inertia of landscape” (179). He finally elaborates this idea into the notion that each society has an established geography of inertia and unused freedom, a geography shaping whatever involutionary, revolutionary, and evolutionary changes occur within it. Relatively powerless people tend to occupy marginal and interstitial spaces affording more flexibility, or unused freedom, precisely because those spaces are not sites of domination. The book’s closing pages illustrate this line of argument by means of multiple observations on European history.

Dodgshon never addresses the classic questions that arise in analyses of large systems: how to tell whether some set of interacting units actually form a coherent system; how to specify the limits on any given system; or how to trace boundaries between a system and its environment(s). In practice, he relies on conventional cultural, economic, and political frontiers; the capitalist world system, Mesopotamian civilizations, the Chinese Empire, the Portuguese Empire, France, Germany, and England all figure explicitly as cases in point, with the system standing of regions within them (for example, North America) left unclear.

Since the book’s most substantial historical discussion concerns the expansion of fixed capital—hence both environmental transformation and increased constraint by built environment—in European industrialization, neither the systemic model nor the naming of systems actually does much explanatory work. G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton once remarked that George Bernard Shaw’s plays...