World binding

From Geography

World binding

It was Benno Werlen who first used the concept of 'world binding'. It is a key concept of action-/agency- centered human/social geography helping to understand the everyday geography-making. World binding thus implies a “shift from space centered imagination” (thinking from a container space in which certain concentrations of powers exist) to consider the “constitutional processes of geographic realities” (Werlen, 2009, p. 50). World binding is an activity or process of “appropriation”, in a symbolic, normative, rational or other way of spatial facts. A “basic assumption” then is the “acceptance of the pre-modern concept absolute and material space” (ibid.). Focusing on the subject from the world view of action-centered theory resaerch and analysis must be about how individual subjects “bring the world” to themselves in a late-modern era of globalization and thus “disembedded conditions” in space and time (ibid.). World biding should be regarded in this context as some sort of “practice of reembedding” since it implies to redefine one’s relation with the world. It is about to conform in part with ”social control” to acquire “control on own actions” and “practices of others”. Here we find a link to Anthony Giddens “allocative” and “authoritative” resources which help in the process of appropriation (ibid., p. 57). This appropriation can be “symbolic”, or cross “distances”. In general “world binding actions” are thus “not bound by territories” but by “institutions and organization”. “Meaning of socially appropriated space” then has a constitutive influence on social realities (ibid.,). World binding is thus a decisive practice contributing to “everyday regionalization” depending also on continously changing “power relations” (ibid., p. 50).

As mentioned above it is also closely linked to “institutionalization”, the “reproduction of individual and institutional practices” or or to put it the other way round “institutions emerge from […] the reproduction of social realities. A region then must be regarded for example “as aspect of social action” or “as institution as part of social reality” and the reproduction of the latter (ibid., p. 57). It can be (ina political sense) a “territorially defined” outcome of “institutional practices” and “arrangements”. Their “social relevance” depends on in how far they are used for and in social action. This is then what is describe as “regionalization” in everyday life (ibid.).

References

Werlen, B. (2009). Structuration Theory. In International Encyclopedia for Human Geography. Elsevier.

Contributors

Published by Meryl Burger (s0801704) 15:08, 7 May 2012 (CEST)

Enhanced by Janna Voelpel s3015041 15:08, 7 May 2012 (CEST)