The ordinary economy: tangled up in values and geography

Economic geographies involve the struggle to consume, exchange and produce value through the social construction of material circuits of value capable of being sustained across space and time. They are performed and practised through a constant tension between certain material imperatives of societal reproduction, the potentially infinite, day‐to‐day variability of economic practice, social relations and conceptions of value, and the regulatory and calculable frame of ‘the economy’. Thus economic geographies are subject to more – or less – politically reflexive modes of evaluation and regulation involving multiple, simultaneously‐practised forms and relations of value. They are, therefore, part and parcel of everyday social life, always hybrid and always in a state of becoming. Three vignettes illustrate economic geographies as complex social practices with a constant tendency to incoherence. They demonstrate, thereby, the ordinariness of economies.