Economic Geography

The 1980s and early 1990s surge
Although only a crude indicator, the number of books (authored or edited) by
economic geographers solely concerned with service industries can be counted
on one hand. Most have been published by economic geographers based in
Europe, provide syntheses of some of the relevant international non-geographi-
cal and geographical literature, and reflect a shifting emphasis from a concern
with theories of service sector development or the production and location of
services during the 1980s and early 1990s (Bryson and Daniels 1998b; Bryson
et al. 2004; Daniels 1985, 1991, 1993; Daniels et al. 2005; Illeris 1996; Marshall
and Wood 1995). This does not stand comparison with the output from other
disciplines and, although incorporating a ‘geographical approach’, it is probably
fair to suggest that these texts have not shifted to any marked degree the agenda
On services and economic geography
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or the thinking by scholars or policymakers alike about the importance of incor-
porating or managing the part played by services in, for example, contemporary
economic development.
This rather depressing conclusion must, however, be qualified in the light of
some contributions by economic geographers that have challenged longstanding
assumptions or highlighted significant developments that have reverberated
beyond the discipline. A relatively early example is the research undertaken in the
Puget Sound Region (Beyers 1986; Beyers and Alvine 1985) that demonstrated
that services performed more than just a non-basic role (as widely assumed in the
standard economic base model) in regional economic development; using an
analysis of input–output data combined with a survey of individual service firms
undertaken during the late 1970s, Beyers and Alvine were able to demonstrate
that some 28 per cent of sales revenue was generated by transactions with clients
in other parts of the United States and overseas. Furthermore, the share of 
non-regional sales revenue had increased from 18 per cent in 1958. The idea 
that some service industry output is tradable had been signalled by Greenfield
(1966) but it had not been backed up with firm-level data. The Puget 
Sound Region research coincided with a number of similar studies in Europe 
that came to broadly similar conclusions. It also highlighted the fact that
producer services are the key to understanding the basic function of services in
urban or regional economies. Everyone recognises that many services such 
as personal, health or social services are largely non-basic but given that 
producer services have evolved into important sources of knowledge and expert-
ise in the modern economy their share of total activity has expanded, making
their tradability and availability a factor in the relative economic performance 
of places.
The ‘discovery’ of producer services provided a platform for the establishment
in 1984 of the Producer Services Working Party (PSWP) with support from the
Institute of British Geographers and the ESRC. It brought together a number of
UK-based economic geographers as well as colleagues from other disciplines who
set out to ‘produce a state of the art review of research on producer services,
examine secondary source evidence on their location and role, conduct a short
research investigation into selected aspects of producer services, and to outline
priorities for further research’ (Marshall et al. 1988). Their documentation of
many of the key aspects of producer services relied heavily on secondary sources
and this only served to demonstrate how little was actually known about the
dynamics of producer services, not least at the international level where their
tradability was also an advantage. With secondary information widely acknowl-
edged to be insufficiently disaggregated or lacking in coverage, the PSWP stim-
ulated a whole new wave of investigations; it ‘provided a means of thinking about
service location . . . but . . . only described economic processes and the way they
affect places in a very general way’ (Marshall et al. 1988: 252). Nevertheless, its
analysis of structural changes in the markets for producer services provoked a
checklist that guided subsequent research, at least for much of the 1990s. 
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Peter W. Daniels

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On services and economic geography
119
It included: identifying the strategic economic role of producer services in rela-
tion to production, consumption, and to other producer services; analysing in
more detail the changing structure of demand for white- and blue-collar services;
the basis for in-house versus externalisation decisions taken by different manufac-
turing, private, and public service firms; and the spatial implications of the reor-
ganisation taking place in dominant firms (in finance, professional, and business
services for example). The list goes on to include: the dynamics of the growth of
small producer service firms (by far the most numerous in spite of the visibility
of the larger, transnational firms); the types of producer services used as inputs
at various stages of production (across all sectors), in the performance of various
consumption functions or by customer organisations (in home markets or over-
seas); the processes of employment change, including gender issues and skilled
versus unskilled human resources; the impact of information technology on the
geographical disposition of service functions, on the demand for services, or on
the nature of service organisation and delivery. Readers familiar with the research
output of economic geographers undertaking research on services (in the sense
used here) throughout the 1990s will hopefully recognise some relationship
between the agenda set out by the PSWP and what actually happened (see for
example Tickell 1999).
This is not to suggest that the group’s work was the only source of 
inspiration (and indeed others may not see it this way at all) but it did help 
to focus the effort. Thus, in 1987 a group of French researchers (including 
a number of geographers) interested in pan-European comparative research 
on services and spatial development, but concerned about the scope for duplica-
tion of effort and a generally low level of research, convened a seminar in Paris to
which they invited colleagues with cognate interests (from the UK, Italy,
Denmark, Spain for example). The common sense of purpose engendered by the
initial Paris meeting and later ones held in Lyon, culminated in the formation in
1988 of the European Research Network on Services and Space (RESER). 
At that time, very few researchers were involved in the conceptualisation 
(theoretical and empirical) of the role played by service activities, especially
producer services, in regional or local growth. It has since expanded to incorpo-
rate 20 research groups or individuals (including economic geographers) active
in services research and policy formulation located in 11 European countries
(http://www.reser.net/). Via its annual conferences, publications (including
annual reviews of services research in partner countries and selected papers 
from its meetings in the The Service Industries Journal and Economie et Sociétés),
collaborative research activities (some funded by external bodies), or involve-
ment of its members in major EU initiatives such as the Forum on Business-
related Services (2004–5), the Network has kept alive the spirit of the PSWP
while also adjusting its horizons to reflect changes in services research priorities
at the start of the twenty-first century. Later initiatives, such as the North
American Service Industries Research Network (NASIRN), unfortunately proved
difficult to sustain.

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