Capital and industrial location

Abstract

Traditional industrial location theory has been based on variants of neoclassical economics, wether partial equilibrium and cost minimizing (weberian) or general equilibrium and revenue maximizing (central place theory). This tradition has fallen into disfavour with a wide range of geographers and as a result industrial geographers have continued to push ahead with empirical research into industrial location while searching for theoretical guidance from new quarters. Models have been built on such things as the product cycle, innovation diffusion, regional imbalanced growth, marginal decision-making, organizational structure, environment-response and linkages. This effort falls short on a number of counts, however: principally the misspecification of the economy as an industrial system, focus on technical change as the main process at work, limited conception of economic structure in terms of linkages, and relegation of the social and the contradictory to the external environment of the system.

An alternative source of integrative theory is marxism. Recently some industrial geographers have begun to look at Marx and marxists have begun to look at industrial location. The gist of marxism is that the structural requirement of capitalist society is the expanded reproduction of capital and capitalist social relations; therefore, the principal object of industrial location analysis must be that structural dynamic rather than either «industry» or «location» (space) or any single component thereof, such as the market, the firm, management decisions, technology or physical geography.