PRE-PUBLICATION VERSION Lajos L. Brons INDIRECT MEASUREMENT OF REGIONAL CULTURE IN THE NETHERLANDS ABSTRACT Culture is a key concept in contemporary cultural and economic geography, but geographical research on culture is thus far mainly limited to case studies. To supplement this qualitative approach with a quantitative analysis of cultural causes and effects of geographic phenomena a data set is needed that somehow measures culture. This paper presents an attempt at such a measurement at the spatial scale of Dutch municipalities . Culture as a ‘map for behaviour’ is measured here indirectly, by means of factor analysis. Five dimensions of Dutch regional culture were found in this way: (1) post-materialism; (2) Protestant conservatism; (3) classical individualism; (4) egalitarian anti-conservatism; and (5) dissatisfaction. Although the regional differences in these dimensions are to a considerable extent related to differences in urbanisation, income and education rather than to some historical cultural geography, the measurement is shown to be empirically relevant and can be used in further research on culture in geography. INTRODUCTION ‘ Culture’ has been an important concept in human geography ever (or at least) since Sauer (1925) introduced cultural geography, although the use of term remained mostly limited to that field for long. In the 1980s and especially the 1990s, however, geographical thought experienced a ‘cultural turn’ (Crang 1997), resulting in the ‘culturalisation’ of the whole of the discipline. The most conspicuous manifestation of the cultural turn is the rather abundant use of the adjective ‘new’: new cultural geography (e.g. Kong 1997); new regional geography (e.g. Gilbert 1988); and new economic geography (e.g. Amin & Thrift 2000). The latter should not be confused with Krugman’s (1991) revitalisation of regional science, which has relatively little to do with geography (Martin 1999). Key concepts in the new cultural geography – besides ‘culture’ – are ‘identity’ and ‘meaning’ (e.g. Foote et al. eds. 1994). The new regional geography reconceptualised the ‘region’ as a social and cultural process (Gilbert 1988), echoing Vidal de la Blache’s (1911) genre de vie and Sauer’s (1925) cultural landscape. Most notable, however, was the cultural turn in economic geography (Barnes 1995; Thrift & Olds 1996; Lee & Wills eds. 1997; Amin & Thrift 2000; Barnes 2001; Brons & Pellenbarg 2003). Spatial and regional differences and particularities are increasingly explained as the effects of cultural differences. Inspired by the field of cultural studies, this new economic geography adopted an idiographic focus on the local specificity of ‘real’ places (Rodríguez-Pose 2001; Boschma & Frenken 2004). Consequently, there is no 1