Introduction

In this chapter we will consider how one particular local economy within Britain has been reorganized over the past twenty or thirty years. We will suggest that this reorganization, reflected in the apparently simple changes in the relative size of manufacturing and service employment, is in fact the product of complex relationships between the underlying ‘restructuring’ of the various industrial sectors pertinent to the locality. Thus, industrial location and employment changes are not simply the consequence of certain general processes which are merely developed to a lesser or greater extent in any particular local economy. Any such economy must rather be seen as a specific conjuncture, in both time and space, of the particular forms of capitalist and state restructuring within manufacturing and service industries. As Massey argues,

There are three important implications of this ‘structural’ approach for the analysis of industrial location and employment change. First, the changing forms of the spatial division of labour, especially the shift away from a high degree of regional specialization, derive from new patterns of capital accumulation. In particular, they reflect the internationalization of capitalist accumulation and the development of ‘neo-Fordist’ methods by which the labour process is controlled.