RWS Core Concepts
Selective Territorialization · Regionalization · Organizations · Knowledge · Materiality · Regional Capacities
The core concepts of Regional Development in World Society (RWS) specify how heterogeneous world-societal processes become territorially relevant, interact with historically accumulated regional structures and contribute to differentiated regional development.
These six concepts form the current core conceptual architecture of RWS.
Selective Territorialization
Selective Territorialization →
How world-societal processes acquire territorial relevance without becoming territorially contained.
Regionalization
How newly territorialized processes become related to historically accumulated regional structures, organizations, institutional arrangements and material conditions.
Organizations & Regional Structures
Organizations & Regional Structures →
How organizations observe, select and process heterogeneous societal expectations through decisions, contributing to the stabilization of regional structures.
Knowledge, Measurement & Decision Relevance
Knowledge, Measurement & Decision Relevance →
How knowledge, indicators, standards and measurement practices make territorial conditions visible, comparable and decision-relevant.
Materiality
How ecological, infrastructural, technological and resource-related conditions shape regional development without determining its outcomes.
Regional Capacities & Asymmetries
Regional Capacities & Asymmetries →
How differentiated organizational, institutional, knowledge-related, financial and material capacities shape unequal regional possibilities and trajectories.
Conceptual Architecture
The six concepts are analytically distinct but closely connected.
A simplified representation is:
World-societal processes
↓
Selective Territorialization
↓
Territorial Relevance
↓
Regionalization
These processes are shaped and stabilized through:
Organizations · Knowledge & Measurement · Materiality · Institutional Arrangements
and are associated with differentiated:
Regional Capacities · Dependencies · Vulnerabilities · Asymmetries
This should be understood as an analytical architecture rather than a universal linear sequence.
Relation to RWS
Within RWS, regions are understood as:
Regions emerge as historically contingent configurations in which heterogeneous world-societal processes become selectively connected, organizationally stabilized, materially conditioned and institutionally condensed.
The core concepts specify different elements of this proposition and provide the analytical vocabulary through which regional development can be examined empirically.
Related Sections
Regional Development in World Society →
RWS Core Concept — part of the conceptual architecture of Regional Development in World Society.