In what sense a region? Place hybridity, symbolic shape, and institutional formation in (post-)modern Scotland

Throughout the 1990s, many social scientists have been heralding the region as a key site for the effective governance of economic development. Increasingly, such debates have sought to consider the constitutive effect of political, institutional, and cultural processes upon a region's economic development, and its particular blend of governance. Straddling this, a number of human geographers have been keen to stress that a region is neither reducible to an empirical given nor merely a 'container' for social processes. One of the most explicit statements in this 'reconstructed regional geography' emanates from Anssi Paasi, who seeks to develop a framework for understanding how regions emerge, and are continually reproduced and transformed in and through the practices of individuals and institutions at a variety of spatial levels. This emphasis on the wider sociospatial structure and collective consciousness of 'society' helps to foreground issues of spatial scale, boundaries, institutional formation and cultural identity. The author deploys Paasi's framework in an effort to provide some conceptual inroads towards our understanding of modern Scotland as a distinct territorial unit, and of its contemporary institutional expression for governing economic development. The paper is thus an endeavor to provide a historical and spatially sensitive analysis of Scotland's peculiar institutional form as a 'stateless nation' or 'national region', and its associated 'difference' from other regions vis-ti-vis the United Kingdom's landscape of political opportunity. These social forces have indeed come to the fore in the recent debate surrounding the proposal for a devolved Parliament for Scotland. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.