2025/01/12 by Ilse van Liempt, Michiel van Meeteren · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice #Social Science and Policy Research #Critical Realism in Sociology
paper · doi:10.1111/tesg.12663
openalex publication_date 2025/01/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/14
The year 2025 is set to be defined by profound uncertainty. The most visible immediate factor is the outcome of the US elections. The return of Trump heralds a proliferation of autocratic regimes making their own alliances, upending geopolitical stability. The devastating wars in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and elsewhere in the world will also continue to cast their long shadow over the entire globe. This is not a great start for an editorial, but we think it is important to present the first issue of TESG of 2025 in a context of changing politics where academic knowledge is increasingly undermined. With universities under attack in many countries, including the Netherlands, stably running an academic journal and maintaining our values, quality, and integrity becomes an even greater responsibility. We want to take the opportunity in this first editorial of 2025 to thank everybody who is involved in making TESG the journal it is. We look back at the first year where Michiel van Meeteren and Ilse van Liempt have been jointly editing the journal, together with Willem Boterman as executive editor and an amazing editorial board. We also want to take a special moment to thank our reviewers. As anyone involved in academic publishing knows reviewers are quintessential to the process of publishing. However, in a neoliberal system where academics are under high pressure, it is increasingly difficult to find reviewers who can spend time reading and commenting on other people's work. 2024 was also the year where TESG moved to a fully online journal. As editorial board, we believe it is still of high value to group papers into separate issues, even when these issues no longer appear on paper. To publish papers as a set, smaller dossiers or larger special issues makes the sum greater than its constituent parts. Even when it is only for us to be able to write editorials where we can reflect on the connections between papers and our academic community. What are our ambitions for 2025? We are anticipating to publish the 2025 TESG lecture by Maria Abreu that was delivered at the Regional Studies Association Conference in Florence in June 2024. Maria reflected on the position of universities as entrepreneurial organizations in the regional context as well as in relation to teaching, research, knowledge commercialization and civic engagement. In the paper, co-authored with Vadim Grinevich, they show how university missions are often contradictory and that one mission can come at the expense of others. We are already planning our next TESG lecture at the RGS this summer in Birmingham. Moreover, we have a Forum lined up around the work of Rob Tamsma (1922–2005), an economic geographer from Groningen University. Tamsma was a former editor-in-chief of TESG and wrote on regional inequalities, development policy and energy politics in the Netherlands. Given all the attention to “left behind places” and energy transitions in contemporary geography, Tamsma's pioneering work from the 1970s can provide an interesting perspective to interject in those present debates. Something to look forward to as well is the new section that we are preparing around cartographic work. Those of you who have been following TESG for longer might remember ‘the Netherlands in Maps’. This section, started and maintained by Rob Tamsma and continued by Piet Pellenbarg and Jan van Steen after Tamsma's retirement, was for a long time a trusted source of knowledge of the Netherlands. The section became somewhat obsolete when digital maps and GIS took over the cartographic imagination and put mapmaking power in the hands of the many. However, we find that since we dropped our regularized commitment to cartographic visualization, our standards and visual vigilance have deteriorated. Resultantly, we plan to reserve more journal space not only for maps, but also for stories around maps and creative ways of visualizing geographical information. In a forthcoming issue, we hope to reveal more about this new section. The first issue of 2025 has a strong economic geography flavour including several food-related papers. Zhi Han from the University of Surrey has co-authored an article for this issue together with Steve Wood, Neil Coe and Andrew Alexander on the transformation of food retailing in China. Their focus is on the giant platform business groups Alibaba and Tencent-JD who propose different models of how to dominate food retailing. These Chinese-originated economic geographies provide a window into how digitization may transform the most material and sustenance-related set of economic activities: how we procure our daily meals. Han et al.'s (2025) article is contrasted with a paper written by Utku Eren Bağci and Martin Franz (Bağci & Franz 2025) on the competitive strategies of Turkish grocers in how they respond to changes in the German retail market. This paper revisits the debate on how important mixed embeddedness is to successfully make the cross-cultural translation in retail and to cope with changes in the global retail landscape. Together, these papers suggest an imminent new round of glocalization in the retail sphere. From the retail side of food geographers, we move back to where our sustenance originates: the farm. Peter Garber and Sarah Turner's (Garber & Turner 2025) article is based on creative fieldwork where drawing elicitation is used in upland Vietnam with farmers in the northern borderlands. The research focuses on the relationship between humans and animals in the changing circumstances where animal husbandry is increasingly commodified. Drawing elicitation as a method is reflected upon and it turns out to be an appropriate method for capturing emotions in human-animal entanglements. Staying in the rural, but moving to Poland, Agnieszka Latocha-Wites, Katarzyna Kajdanek, Dominik Sikorski and Robert Szmytkie write about an ambiguous and complex rural revival process in the context of depopulation (Latocha-Wites et al. 2025). Mixed methods research shows that there is potential to rejuvenate regional development but that the drivers and perceptions of rural transformations vary greatly across regions which makes it difficult to assess, evaluate and forecast rural transformations. Geographies thus matter! Regional development trajectories have historically been associated with firm location decisions and the conditions that drive those decisions. Josep-Maria Arauzo-Carod (2025) examines these decisions for Catalonia. The paper shows that agglomeration economies are far stronger drivers than cultural considerations, for instance on attitudes towards sustainability. The strength of agglomeration economies is further explored in two articles again situated in China. The paper by Peiyuan Zhang, Jiaming Li and Wenzhong Zhang (Zhang et al. 2025) explores firm decision making and location strategies in high-tech manufacturing relocation in Bejing. Their lifecycle perspective focuses on various stages of firm development. Their findings show that larger firms with more employers and higher property income are more willing to relocate to metropolitan areas while smaller firms are more likely to end up outside these large agglomerations. The research reaffirms the situated importance of rootedness and co-location with similar firms when understanding development trajectories. These findings dovetail with insights in our final regular paper by Xiaoqi Zhou, Rongjun Ao, Xiaojing Li and Jing Chen. Zhou et al. (2025) write about the interaction between industries and occupations in explaining regional diversifications among Chinese cities. They find that the role of self-relatedness is more significant in small-sized cities whereas the association between cross-relatedness and industry-occupation co-evolution is more prominent in large cities. The first issue of 2025 started and ended in China, but did make us travel across the world to understand global economic transformations and development paths. We finish this first issue of 2025 with a book review that fits the opening of this editorial. It is a book review on nationalism as a global phenomenon. Jaap Van Slageren's (2025) book review of David Kaplan and Kathryn Hannum's latest book reminds us that nationalism is the dominant political force in the modern world and that global economic geographies are always refracted through their social, cultural and political counterparts.