Economic Geography

Economic geographers and services
The contribution of scholars from other disciplines to the analysis and interpre-
tation of service industries in economic development during the second half of
the twentieth century has been considerable. The examples outlined above are
by no means exhaustive and do not include research with roots in other disci-
plines such as business or management studies (Berry 1999) or urban and
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Peter W. Daniels

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regional planning. Although the above hardly does justice to the range of work
on services by other disciplines, it does provide a backcloth for examining the
question: how have economic geographers contributed to research on service
industries over the same period? The answer partly depends on whether their
contribution is assessed as direct or indirect. Although such a dichotomy is
vulnerable to the charge of over-simplification, there are undoubtedly numerous
economic geographers who have used service activities such as retailing, tourism,
transport, warehousing, research and development, or ecommerce as a means to
an end: such as searching for explanations for changes in the organisation and
location of production, the form and structure of cities, deindustrialisation,
addressing problems in regional development, or understanding the changing
relationship between consumption and production. Few, if any of them, would
claim to be economic geographers with a curiosity about services. They have
been, and continue to be, less interested in service industries per se as a category
of activities and functions that, however heterogeneous, have together re-shaped
ideas about how economies at scales from the micro to the macro evolve over
time and the influence of services relative to the erstwhile drivers of growth and
change: the manufacturing and primary sectors.
Some economic geographers remain implacably doubtful about services 
being anything other than subservient to manufacturing (or industrial) production.
The best known is Walker (1985, see also Sayer and Walker 1992) who vigorously
argue for an inclusive approach, whereby many services are only accessible or
made possible by their incorporation within or justification through goods
production. Some examples are transport, computer software, film, a consultancy
report, or food outlets. The value of services is therefore dependent on material
goods; this was possibly defensible a decade ago but is probably less the case
today because certain information-intensive services such as computer software,
film, publications of various kinds can be downloaded, stored and used without
the need for storage on a material good such as computer disc. It is still necessary
for a material good such as a computer to provide access to these services but, it
could be argued, to a much lesser degree than before.