Economic Geography

20 Technology, knowledge,
and jobs
Edward J. Malecki
Introduction
Technology, knowledge and jobs are key ideas in the field of regional develop-
ment. The unrelenting shift toward the service sector and toward high-technol-
ogy and knowledge-oriented work is evidence that technology is changing. Many
changes attributed to globalization are really outcomes of technological change
– a result of enabling digital technologies, managerial techniques, and financial
innovations. A recent innovation, the Internet, has loosened information asym-
metries (if knowledge is power, many more are now powerful) and transformed
shopping. Scholars, too, have benefited from the Internet and access to efficient
communication and information. Google, the firm whose name we now use as a
verb for searching the web, began only in 1998 (Google 2004).
I was fortunate to be among the (at that time) young ‘industrial geographers’
who attempted to remake economic geography during the late 1970s and early
1980s, integrating theory, largely from economics and management, with empir-
ical analysis. Whether focusing on technology, as I and others did, or restructuring
of the spatial division of labor, the goal we all sought was to understand better
regional disparities in economic phenomena, such as employment, corporate
facilities of different kinds, and entrepreneurial firms.
Many of these ideas were avant-garde in the late 1970s. More common at the
time were studies of where companies – especially large companies – were located
and how those locations changed over time, rather than of how companies them-
selves changed internally, with impacts on location, employment, and linkages. For
myself and a few others, technology – or more precisely, technological change –
was the principal answer. The places where firms did their research and development
(R&D) were more likely to create and retain jobs than were places involved in
routine manufacturing. This generalization continues largely to hold, in large part
because the knowledge workers (as we call them today) involved in R&D have the
intellectual, social, and financial wherewithal to innovate and assemble the resources
needed to start new enterprises.
My contribution has been to understand how regional development is shaped
by technology, including an array of indirect changes within firms and other
organizations, in the networks that link organizations, and in the outcomes of

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these decisions on work and workers. My research has run the gamut from large
secondary data sets to interviews with corporate executives, employees, and
entrepreneurs, but with a common goal: to understand better how firms make
decisions regarding their corporate facilities, how entrepreneurs make use of
resources in both their local and non-local environments, and how small firms
organize and manage inter-firm networks of suppliers, customers, and competi-
tors. These questions can be answered only with data that are expensive and
time-consuming to obtain.
My more recent work has been on the Internet and how firms and places use
technology to manage and communicate across space. A web site is now a (not
inexpensive) necessity for firms to attract customers, for places to attract tourists
and investors, and more generally as proof of one’s existence. If you can’t be
‘googled’, you don’t exist to growing numbers of people (Malecki 2002).