it is clear that within human geography during the past decade or so a great deal of attention has been paid to the politics of discourse concerning scale, that is to say how the local and the global (and other scales) are talked about and represented. Centred upon the work of writers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, and others, much of this ‘postpositivist’ concern with language has focused upon the metaphors used to describe and make sense of the world, for metaphors can be powerful shapers of how we understand things.