INTRODUCTION

As this collection so amply demonstrates, Doreen was a complete geographer whose relational approach to understanding space and places transcended intradisciplinary divides. Her initial path-breaking contribution to the discipline was in economic geography, however, initially through research on the geography of industrial restructuring and the book that the editors of a recent collection of essays on research design and methodology in the subdiscipline claimed “transformed the field … and triggered one of the sharpest paradigmatic shifts in contemporary economic geography” (Barnes et al. 2007: 2) – Spatial Divisions of Labour (Massey 1984b).

UNDERSTANDING UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT: INDUSTRIAL RESTRUCTURING AND SPATIAL DIVISIONS OF LABOUR

Doreen’s early work on the geography of industrial reorganization laid the intellectual foundations for Spatial Divisions of Labour with its overarching argument that space is not passive in processes of industrial restructuring. Early applications of the approach focused on the industrial restructuring of particular sectors (Massey & Meegan 1979). The title of one of the papers from this early research – “Industrial Restructuring versus the Cities” – captures its basic theoretical argument: shifting explanation of employment change away from a purely locational explanation (the characteristics of cities and their residents) to the macro-economy and process of capital accumulation (Massey & Meegan 1978). The same argument was powerfully reiterated in an early use of her notion of “spatial divisions of labour” to understand the UK’s “regional problem” (Massey 1979).

Later work attempted to formalize some of the initial findings on production reorganization through an extension of the empirical research to a range of industries cutting jobs in the UK in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Massey & Meegan 1982). A trinity of forms of production reorganization (“rationalization”, “intensification” and “investment and technical change”), each with potentially distinct uses of space, was identified and used to support the argument that spatial outcomes – the geography of job loss – needed to be understood in the broad causal chain emanating from the macro-economy and process of capital accumulation.