UNDER CONSTRUCTION CULTURE AND REGIONAL FORMATION IN SOUTH-WEST ENGLAND ★ Bernard Deacon Institute of Cornish Studies, University of Exeter, UK Abstract New regionalist writings display a growing tendency regional discourse in south-west England, one that to turn towards the role of institutions and culture involves the everyday reproduction of representa- in the formation of regions. However, the way these tions of the region in the new regional institutions. are articulated is less than clear.This article calls for Underlying this discourse of the region lie some a re-combination of culture and institutions in order traditional and stereotypical images of the South to analyse the process of regional formation at a West. Furthermore, the implications of this reconfig- micro-level. To do this it employs the concepts of uration of scale are explored in relation to another discourse and the everyday to investigate the cul- territorial identity at a lower scale, with reference to tural reproduction of the region in the peak institu- the campaign for a Cornish Assembly. The article tions of the new regionalization in the South West of concludes that the power of regional elites to create England. In the absence of widespread regional regions is overstated by the new regionalism. identities in England, such institutions play a major role in constructing and policing the meaning of KEY WORDS ★ Cornwall ★ culture ★ institutions ‘region’. Interview data help to unpack an evolving ★ region ★ scale The new regionalism, institutions and and underestimating the role of the state (Lovering, culture 1999; Webb and Collis, 2000). Coupled with this is the critique of its unreflective scripting of the region The new regionalism has attained a preeminent (Martin, 1999). Regions are treated as pre-given status in the literature on European sub-state categories, this assumption articulating with an governance. However, the constellation of unreflective adoption of neo-liberal economic theorization clustering around new regionalism has narratives. Finally, doubts have been raised from been subjected to growing criticism from within the within the paradigm that it either under-theorizes field. Taking issue with the economic determinism culture, over-relying on simplistic and and global reach of some regionalist analyses unmeasurable notions of social capital; or succumbs (Ohmae, 1995; Scott, 1998), a more nuanced new to a vague cultural reductionism (Keating, 2001). In regionalism has adopted and internalized a range of consequence the new regionalism has not yet middle-level concepts and approaches, for instance convincingly articulated culture with governance. institutions and the associational economy, culture In response, there has been a turn to both and the social construction of the market, networks institutions and culture. As Keating (2001) points and the learning region (Keating, 1998). At the same out, ‘institutional arrangements matter’. But time the new regionalist orthodoxy has been accused institutions retain their conceptual separation from of blurring the boundary between analysis and culture. Culture tends to be viewed as a resource, as advocacy and being insufficiently critical of a set of values productive of, or inimical to, regional dominant political narratives, under-theorizing the development. ‘Culture is important not so much in power relations that lie behind regionalist projects itself but in the way it is used’ (Keating, 2001: 220). European Urban and Regional Studies 11(3): 213–225 Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications 10.1177/0969776404044018 London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, www.sagepublications.com Downloaded from eur.sagepub.com at University of Exeter on November 22, 2015 214 EUROPEAN URBAN AND REGIONAL STUDIES 11(3) Institutions can act upon culture and culture may Two other theoretical approaches might help us affect behaviour and relationships within the region. supplement the insights of Paasi and the new What is less apparent from this approach is how regional geography. One approach that combines institutions are themselves cultural and how culture culture and institutions is historical institutionalism is implicated in the process of regional formation. (Hall and Taylor, 1996). This defines institutions Keating (2001) calls for a more sensitive widely, as standard operating practices and informal constructionist approach to regions in order to interaction as much as formal organizations and escape the multiple temptations offered by teleology, rules. Institutions are thus seen as having a cultural functionalism or determinism. This has been taken logic; they become ‘normative vessels’, bearers of up by those writing within the ‘new regional scripts and categories for actors both inside and geography’, who call for more diachronic readings outside formal institutions (March and Olsen, of institutional formation and the ideology of place 1984). And not just bearers. ‘Institutions create and region underpinning regional governance theories about themselves which have, in turn, (MacLeod, 1999). Over a decade ago, Murphy (1991) consequences for the interactions of actors’ pointed out that there exists a gap between the theory (Jachtenfuchs, 1997: 47). In this way institutions and practice of regions. The regional context was lock into place and create path dependencies, in the taken for granted as scholars concentrated on regional process helping to reproduce representations of the attributes to the exclusion of the regionalization region as an ‘imagined community’. process, on the what of regions rather than the how. Identifying representations of the ‘region’ in a Paasi (1986; 1991) built upon this insight, using the specific location moves us towards the analysis of concept of spatial socialization to produce a model the regional ‘discourse’. Thrift (1991) has called for of regional production. Regions appear as the more consideration of the forms of knowledge that condensation of a ‘whole complex of economic, are made available through discourse, while political and social processes into a specific cultural MacLeod and Jones (2001: 675) echo this by image’ (1991: 241). Central to this process is the role encouraging ‘a deeper appreciation of these of institutionalization, during which regions gain an contested representations and subjectivities [that] identity. For Paasi questions of culture and identity can help us to advance a thorough reconsideration of intricately interpenetrate issues of regional how regions are formed and are subsequently to formation. develop unevenly’. A discourse is a particular way of MacLeod and Jones (2001) have attempted to understanding the world. However, such a ‘transcend the straightjacket of “crude” new deceptively simple definition has spawned a regionalist discourse and practice’ by applying complex body of discourse theory. Paasi’s model to a case-study of the North of Eschewing the further poststructuralist shores of England.1 Paasi’s stages of institutionalization assist discourse theory, Fairclough’s critical discourse them to ‘unravel the culturally embedded analysis perhaps offers the most relevant entry point institutionalisation’ of ‘the North’ and its changing for a preliminary investigation of how discourses of construction in the light of shifting economic, the region are being shaped in everyday practice. In political and cultural pressures. Paasi’s model thus this approach discourses are not totally constitutive provides both a valuable antidote to unreflective (cf. Laclau and Mouffe, 1985) but have a dialectical accounts of regions as pre-given entities and a relationship with other social practices. Fairclough framework for conceptualizing the structures within (1995) argues that discourses both constitute the which regions emerge and are established. social world and are constituted by other social Nonetheless, this framework, although convincingly practices, thus opening the way to a combination of identifying the structural parameters of the process, linguistic-discursive analysis and other processes says less about the everyday reproduction of the emanating from the economic and political spheres. concepts and symbols of the region. The role of the Discourses are articulated in a ‘communicative agents embedded in the regional institutions is left event’, such as a text or an interview, and inhabit an opaque and the precise ways in which ideas of the ‘order of discourse’, containing those discourses and region become sedimented in everyday life remain genres used within a social institution or field. unexplored. There are thus three dimensions to discourse: the European Urban and Regional Studies 2004 11(3) Downloaded from eur.sagepub.com at University of Exeter on November 22, 2015 DEACON: UNDER CONSTRUCTION 215 text itself, the production and consumption of texts declarations of support (Sandford, 2002). While (what Fairclough calls the ‘discursive practice’), and being studiously ignored in the Government’s 2002 the wider social practice which the discourse works White Paper on the English Regions to reproduce or restructure (Fairclough, 1992: 73). (DTLR/Cabinet Office, 2002), this ‘inconvenient Thus, once established, a discourse of the region periphery’ (Payton, 2002) provides one of the few produces a set of assumptions about what can be explicit examples in England of a struggle over meaningfully taken as a region and has scale. As Swyngedouw (2000) reminds us, ‘social repercussions for the conduct of people, organizing scale has to