The Electronics Industry in Southern California: Growth and Spatial Development From 1945 To 1989

Abstract

In this paper we provide a broad empirical description of the growth and locational structure of the electronics industry in Southern California. The paper is a companion piece to a recent study of the aircraft and parts industry in the same region (Scott and Mattingly, 1989). Together, these two papers provide an empirical foundation for further investigations of the growth of high technology industry in Southern California. This growth has been especially stimulated by federal spending for defense purposes. The defense-oriented manufacturing complex that has evolved in the region in the post-War decades is locationally organized within a series of specialized industrial districts (or technopoles) scattered across the entire landscape. Within these technopoles we typically find bifurcated local labor markets and intense local interlinkage of individual manufacturing establishments forming a transactions-intensive system of production.