Economic Geography

16 Manufacturing, corporate
dynamics, and regional
economic change
H. Doug Watts
Introduction
It can be argued that one of the central aims of economic geography is to
describe changes in regional economic structures and to understand why such
changes takes place. This is most frequently explored in terms of jobs gained and
lost rather than in terms of output. A focus on jobs rather than output arises
from both the ready availability of regional employment data and a desire to link
economic geography with public concerns about geographical variations in job
opportunities. Within the wider concern with regional economic change, a partic-
ularly important group of studies focus upon the role of large multi-regional firms
in guiding the geographies of the manufacturing sector. This reflects a fascination
with the ways in which such firms shape the economic landscape
Over the last 50 years both theoretical and empirical investigations into the
geographies of large multi-regional firms have become more sophisticated.
Theoretically, the strong neo-classical economic approaches of the early part of
the period have been complemented by analyses from the political economy and
institutional economics viewpoints to which have been added, over the past
decade, the ‘cultural turn’. Space limitations restrict the discussion of empirical
work mainly to studies of changing employment patterns and the factors which
influence them rather than the ways in which each establishment/region can be
linked by traded and untraded interdependencies into local, regional, national
and international systems.
This chapter is in four parts. The first sets the context for this review and takes
a broad look at changes in manufacturing and their effects on research into corpo-
rate dynamics and regional change. The second explores the changing theoretical
perspectives of the last 50 years. The third looks specifically at attempts to under-
stand patterns of employment change within large multi-regional manufacturing
firms. This draws upon both empirical studies and new theoretical perspectives. The
fourth and final section explores new avenues for research and the ways in which our
research can feed into the policy community. The overall aim of the chapter is to
reflect upon the literature within economic geography that has examined the
spatial organisation of production within multi-regional firms. It is a personal

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reflection on over 30 years of published research in the area varying from an
exploration of oligopolistic behaviour in the United Kingdom sugar beet process-
ing industry (Watts 1971) to the European wide restructuring of production by
United States and European multinationals (Watts 2003).