Economic Geography

Frontier (Jackson 1987); take heed, newly minted PhDs! As a result, I was never
categorized as an Urban Geographer. Such are the vagaries of the disciplinary life.
I jumped into the field of economic geography in the early 1980s, thanks 
to visiting stints at Berkeley by Doreen Massey and Bennett Harrison and a 

---

spectacular group of students in City Planning and Geography at Berkeley, which
included AnnaLee Saxenian, Meric Gertler, Erica Schoenberger, Kristin Nelson
and Amy Glasmeier. The mass plant closures of that era in Britain and the United
States were the catalyst to rethinking industrial location theory (‘New Industrial
Geography’) – just as the urban crisis of the 1960s had influenced Harvey and
others to rethink cities.
I began writing with Michael Storper, one of many amazing graduate students
I have collaborated with, and we did a series of articles that culminated in The
Capitalist Imperative (1989). That book was meant to be an answer to the 
neo-classical, equilibrium location theory that had ruled the roost since Walter
Isard. It took on board seminal contributions by Lloyd and Dicken (1977), Doreen
Massey (1984), Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison (1982), and Allen Scott
(1988). But it rested on a wider foundation drawn from reading in economic
theory, industrial history, and labor studies.
The major arguments of The Capitalist Imperative were of two kinds. On 
the one hand, it emphasized the dynamics of economic growth rather than the
static allocation models of location coming out of the (Alfred) Weber tradition.
Growth is driven by capital investment, strong competition, and pervasive dis-
equilibrium. The model of growth was a Marx-Schumpeter-Keynes hybrid. At the
same time, the model of ‘geographical industrialization’ rested on a firm basis in
production, including technology, labor process and the division of labor.
It bothered me that Neil Smith (1984) and David Harvey’s (1982, 1990) ideas
on economy and geography gained such currency while our theme of ‘geograph-
ical industrialization’ was not widely taken up. Smith and Harvey kept to the
realm of high abstraction of capital theory without ever descending into the nuts
and bolts of production, meaning that they played loose and fast with industrial
history and spatial patterns. The geography of production is so much more
dynamic, varied and interesting than concepts like ‘uneven development’, ‘spatial
fix’, and ‘flexible accumulation’ imply. My views on this have not changed much,
as can be seen from my chapter on production in Sheppard and Barnes (2000).
In the 1990s, Michael Storper went on to collaborate with Allen Scott at
UCLA, pursuing a dense regional analysis. I was less enamored of the liberalism
of the New Institutionalism and its epigones such as Charles Sabel, Michael
Porter, and Robert Putnam. Class conflict, capital accumulation, and state power
were left out of the equation. Instead, I wrote articles on the failings of flexible
specialization theory, on value theory, and on the economic role of technical
change (1985, 1988, 1989, 1995a). I further developed my ideas about the 
division of labor in The New Social Economy (1992), written with geography’s
leading philosopher (also part economic geographer) Andrew Sayer. This was 
an occasion to rethink such large economic topics as the definition of services
versus production, comparative industrial systems, business organization, and
class formation (things I had begun writing about in the 1980s). The result was,
again, somewhat disappointing in that our reflections intrigued readers but 
did not become a part of the collective imagination of economic geographers 
(let alone sociologists and the rest).