A Requiem for Corporate Geography: New Directions in Industrial Organization, the Production of Place and the Uneven Development

Abstract

The grand claims once made for the geography of enterprise have faded for lack of supporting evidence and clear theoretical separation of the casual powers of large firms from those of capitalist development in general. Four major hypotheses of corporate geography must be greatly toned down or rejected altogether: The large-firm bias in facility siting, a corporation-dominated spatial division of labor, the geographic importance of branch plants, and a distinctive mode of corporate spatial expansion. Industrial geography has moved beyond recognizing the place of large firms in the space-economy to new concerns embraced by the term “geographical industrialization”. It now takes in alternative forms of industrial organization and their spatial configurations, along with the possibility of multiple and changing ways of integrating complex production systems. The new industrial geography also stresses the dynamics of capitalist growth and the way industrialization creates places at the same time as it implants production units. The recent insights of industrial geography with its emphasis on production, need to be joined more fruitfully with the spatial theories of capital accumulation developed by David Harvey, however.