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

This paper 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.

HE INTERNAL STRUCTURE of the academic discipline of Geography has been

debated recently, with some contending that it
is fragmented while others counter that it is not (see
Johnston, 1991; Gould, 1994). Furthermore, some of
the observers of fragmentation claim that such a condition 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 concerned 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, particularly 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, competition between Departments and comparable units,
most of which are named and defined for 'traditional' 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 fundamentally 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 countries during the nineteenth century as part of the
growing elite interest in Earth description, a development 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 geographical societies in many of Europe's major cities,
which were founded to promote the study of
Geography and provided fora in which new information was imparted to eager audiences (see, for example, 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
range of commercial interests.
as crucial for
Building on their success in this, they then lobbied
for Geography's inclusion in Universities, calling for

8 1998 The Royal Geographical Society

140

THE TERRITORIALITY OF GEOGRAPHY

the creation of Chairs in the discipline and the establishment 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 geographers was to train those whose career intentions
focused on teaching the subject in secondary schools.
Once the discipline was accepted within the various 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
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~linewhich involved more than s i m,~,l vcollecting, collating and disseminating information about
the Earth.
Completion of this task involved a number of separate '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 paraphrased, however, as the leitmotfof Geography and
remains a major constraint to what some consider
'acceptable' in the continued structuration of the discipline (Johnston, 1984).
"

at least initially. Their focus on regions and on the

uniqueness/singularity of places was not widely perceived 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 discipline. 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 further 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
the re~resentativesof other discio ~ ~ o s i t i ofrom
n
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 syntheses of human and physical material, they were
well-placed to take the vanguard position on research
1,

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 promote 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,

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 geographers 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 scientific credentials (Johnston and Gregory, 1984); they
extended on this by being at the forefront in developing applications of new technologies, notably
environmental remote sensing. Thus, within the
UK's emerging institutional arrangements for
research and postgraduate activities, physical geographers were accepted into the Natural Environment
Research Council INERC) without the ~roblemsthat
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 extending 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 differentiation, although perhaps expressed differently,
remained at the core of Geography's identity as an
academic discipline. There is little substantive difference, 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 flourishing 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,

141

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 (198 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): mechanisms 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' situations because of the role of interacting
" mechanisms
and contingent circumstances (as illustrated by a collection of papers edited by Owens, Richards and
Spencer, 1997). Responding to comments by Bassett
(1994) and Rhoads (1994), Richards (1994: 278) further 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 differentiation' definition of Geography but also some
of the approaches to scientific understanding promoted 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 dGeograph?
The study of Geography is currently fragmented in
four main ways.
Substantive dgerentiation involves sub-disciplinary divisions identified according to their subject matter. At
the macro-scale, this is exemplified by the widelyrecognized human:physical split, involving two separate 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 geography, some compositional (such as social, political and
economic geography) and some contextual (urban
geography, rural geography and the regional geography of x, for example) - on contextual and compositional, 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 generalizations. 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 physical geography, on the one hand, and aspects of
human geography, on the other (with spatial analysis
in human geography perhaps occupying an intermediate 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 'explanation' 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 ('intellectual 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 disciplinary fragments that coexist within this coarse fourdimensional 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-generation 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 geographers reflects the demand for their services as teachers 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 specialized 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 quality 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
-

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 memberships 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 changing.
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 significant, as the nature of a community - what its members 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 confusion 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 disciplinary fragments, one of the separate communities
-

143

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
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 geographers 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 communities, 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 contributions 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 personal 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 segments of it) is occasionally altered very substantially:
they stimulate our own processes of continental drift
and orogeny.
c 3 ,

Some peculiar characteristics of Geography The characteristics of Geography as a fragmented academic discipline 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 academic disciplines in its degree of overlap with others.
(Such exceptionalism was, of course, the foundation
of Schaefer's argument against Hartshorne! The latter 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 interact, although the extent of imbalance in the 'intellectual 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 disciplines. Many of Geography's communities substantially 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-disciplinary 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 beginning 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~entationwithout restructuring Why does Geography

survive? Why have its various communities neither
established separate disciplines, occupying newlyfashioned 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, straightforward 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 commitments to Geography's core beliefs. Their academic socialization to the discipline through long years
of education and professional employment binds
geographers to its professed core beliefs and rationale, 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 geographers have such strong commitments to an intellectual 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 socialized 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 geographers 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 establishment of successful hybrid groupings, such as
Environmental Science, incorporating physical geogr a ~ h vand asDects of ~oliticaleconomv and cultural
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 members 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
either in
institutional structure of academic life
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 multidisciplinary 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
competitionfor 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 U K as the enterprise economy (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:
L

THE TERRITORIALITY OF GEOGRAPHY

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
u for
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
u , a function 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.
This largely formula-driven approach discourages
innovation in a variety of ways and encourages terriespecially among
toriality among academics
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 additional resources!). Even more undesirable is allowing
the establishment of new Departments for hybrid disciplines, 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 managers 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
I

145

against interdisciplinary work and encourage publication 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. T o the extent
that those criteria promote particular research styles
(externally-funded, in teams, etc.) over others, however, 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 maximize 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 prothose of other discivlines.
mote their interests against
"
by pointing to their success in attracting students and
producing high quality research.
In sum, having been created as an academic discipline, Geography has become something that must
be sustained bv, ~ r o v i un eitself successful on externally-imposed criteria. Internally, it can achieve that
through its own fragmentary structure and can withstand some resistance to the dominant ethos; externally, it has to conform to outside expectations. To
meet the latter requirement calls for commitment to
the discipline, both intellectual and, especially, political: in whatever directions their work takes them,
ultimately individuals have to declare their allegiance
to Geography as a separate, intellectually-coherent
discipline.
L

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

T H E TERRITORIALITY O F 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 characterization that was probably especially true of human
geographers. From the Second World War on, however, 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 communities within their discipline, whose own boundaries 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. I h i l s t many geographers have
been building ever-stronger links beyond their discipline's traditional limits, they have at the same time
had to defend their territorial boundaries more vigorously. 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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