Economic Geography

Conclusion
It has been suggested that even though economic geography must by definition
embrace service industries within its research agenda it has largely neglected
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them as a category worthy of direct attention. Indeed, many of the lasting and
significant theoretical and empirical contributions to our understanding of the
role performed by services in the economy and development are attributable to
scholars in disciplines other than economic geography. For activities whose
behaviour is closely linked to factors such as accessibility, proximity, clustering
and other geographical concepts this is perhaps surprising or perhaps a missed
opportunity. Yet there are a number of milestones in the evolution of service
industry studies involving groups of economic geographers or certain individu-
als that do represent a response to the general acceptance of the argument that
services cannot be ignored. In this regard it is encouraging to note the recent
attention devoted to charting future research directions, partly stimulated by the
rise of the so-called ‘new economy’ (Beyers 2002b; Daniels 2004; Wood 2002b).
One example will suffice.
Research on the relationship between developments in information and
communications technology (ICT) and the supply, demand, quality and 
spatial distribution services is far from exhausted, not least as offshoring and
outsourcing of both routine and higher-order service tasks presents economic
challenges to some developed economies and opportunities for newly emerging
economies. In addition, the widespread adoption by business and professional
service (BPS) firms of ICT increases the potential for dispersal of the workforce
and individualisation of work, including activities such as teleworking. It poten-
tially undermines at least one of the rationales for the city. Their role as an 
intermediate source of knowledge and expertise is critical to sustaining local 
and regional economic performance; but their distribution is geographically
uneven with significant concentration in regional cities with dispersed, low density
patterns across city regions as a whole. With ICT increasingly mediating BPS
production and distribution, as well as firm–client interaction, there is scope for
established intra-urban and intra-regional location patterns of BPS to change
over the next 10–20 years. Although the importance of face-to-face interaction
and the need for BPS firms to complement underlying industrial specialisation
still encourages agglomeration, some types of BPS are already becoming more
dispersed, including home-based businesses. There is evidence that single-
owner/SME production of BPS is important but the role of property and infra-
structure in the ICT–BPS interface (especially for SMEs) and way in which
economic and organisational factors interact to drive property and ICT demands
in the BPS sector are not adequately understood and require more empirical
research.
There have been very few occasions since the early 1980s when the annual
meeting of the Association of American Geographers has not included at least
one special session devoted to research on some aspect of services (the same
cannot be said about the equivalent annual meeting of the RGS/IBG in the
UK). The constituency has, however, been somewhat narrow and ‘greying’; a
relative absence in recent years of ‘new blood’ is a source of some concern as to
whether the services dimension of economic geography is sustainable in the
medium- to long-term.
On services and economic geography
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