Thus the abstract, the necessary, the social and the global melt into one another; likewise the concrete, the contingent, the spatial and the local. While Andrew Sayer cannot be held responsible for these leakages, they have been encouraged by the way that, through his highly influential work (Sayer, 1984: 132-135; 1985), he appears to condone limiting explanations of spatial relations to concrete analyses. A position parallel to Sayer’s is viewed by some as characteristic of several contemporary approaches to locality studies. According to Smith, locality researchers have tended to canonize the locality as the sphere of the concrete, and as ”hardly accessible to abstract theory” (1987: 65).