James O. Wheeler

Corporate Headquarters Relocation and Changes in Metropolitan Corporate Dominance, 1980–1987

During the last 30 years, U.S. metropolitan economies have experienced tremendous restructuring, and the locations of corporate headquarters have increasingly exhibited spatial shifts, both deconcentrating and dispersing. Theoretical explanations have suggested that the United States is entering the third of four stages, in which we are now witnessing the drive to regional maturity with no dominant regional center. Changes in the distribution of metropolitan corporate dominance between 1980 and 1987 are examined and related to two sets of explanatory frameworks, one spatial and the other structural. Changes in metropolitan corporate dominance were strongly related to spatial shifts in headquarters and asset location, especially shifts due to merger and acquisition activity. Changes in dominance were less strongly related to structural factors reflecting the degree of transition to the emerging service-based economy, even though population and location relative to New York were important. Finally, the effe...

A Spatial and Temporal Model of Foreign Direct Investment in the United States

This study analyzes the spatial distribution of foreign direct investment among metropolitan areas in the United States for the periods 1974–1978 and 1979–1983. A model is developed to test the importance of population size, population growth rate, and per capita retail sales in determining levels of foreign investment. Casettis expansion method is used to test whether or not the regression parameters of the explanatory variables are spatially and temporally unstable. The results indicate that the model varies both spatially and over time. Heavily concentrated in northeastern metropolitan areas in 1974–1978, especially New York, foreign direct investment dispersed widely to the south and west in 1979–1983. In keeping with the general transformation of the U.S. metropolitan economy, foreign direct investment shifted noticeably from the manufacturing sector to the service sector during the study period.

Politics and Method: Contrasting Studies in Industrial Geography

1. Introduction: The debate Doreen Massey and Richard Meegan 2. Recession and restructuring in the North-West region, 1974-82: the implications of recent events Peter Lloyd and John Shutt 3.An approach to the analysis of redundancies in the UK (post- 1976): some methodological problems and policy implications Alan Townsend and Francis Peck 4.Ideology and methods in industrial location research Stephen Fothergill and Graham Gudgin 5.Profits and job loss Doreen Massey and Richard Meegan 6. A modern industry in a declining region: Links between method, theory and policy Andrew Sayer and Kevin Morgan 7. Doing research Doreen Massey and Richard Meegan

Spatial Ownership Links of Major Corporations: The Dallas and Pittsburgh Examples

This study focuses on the spatial ownership links between parent companies headquartered in Dallas and Pittsburgh and their subsidiaries. It also examines ownership links between subsidiaries located in these two centers and their parent companies. By several measures, Dallas and Pittsburgh function as command and control centers, i.e., they exert greater external control than they are controlled externally. In both centers, the ownership links are national but with a regional component. Pittsburgh shows a somewhat more dispersed pattern of external ownership than Dallas. Large corporations in these two centers demonstrate the interdependence of metropolitan economies by their dispersed set of ownership links and concomitant information linkages and control.

CORPORATE ROLE OF NEW YORK CITY IN THE METROPOLITAN HIERARCHY

This article examines two related components of the preeminence of New York City as a concentration of corporate headquarters: the spatial own- ership links between major corporations with headquarters in the city and their subsidiaries, and the links between subsidiaries located in the city and the sites of their parent firms. New York City-based parent companies locate their sub- sidiaries primarily in the largest metropolitan centers, irrespective of distance. Parent firms with subsidiaries in the city have headquarters near it, are in both small and large metropolitan centers, and are more likely than New York-based firms to be in relatively isolated centers. IT is well known that the New York metropolitan area is the dominant corporate command-and-control center in the urban system of the United States. The role of the city as a focus of corporate headquarters and the degree to which decisions made there reverberate throughout the system and the world have been widely studied. The purpose of this article is to examine, in the context of the American urban hierarchy, the spatial own- ership links between major corporations with headquarters there and their subsidiaries, the connections between subsidiaries there and the sites of parent firms, and the degree to which these links are biased by distance. The population size of a metropolitan area is the surrogate for market sales level and, in general, corporate infrastructure. Because New York City is the principal command-and-control center in the United States and thus stands at the highest level of the urban hierarchy, one task is to establish how the city is tied spatially to the rest of the metropolitan hierarchy. Data are from Dun and Bradstreet (1989) and include all parent companies that had 1988 assets greater than one-half million dollars, that conducted business from two or more locations, and that either had headquarters in Manhattan and owned one or more subsidiaries or had headquarters elsewhere but had subsidiaries in the borough. In this sense, the use of New York City in this article is synonymous with Manhattan. CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK As telecommunications technology continues to improve and as the use of technology becomes increasingly commonplace, the intraorganizational and multilocational structure of corporations takes on new configurations (Hepworth 1990). The long-term trend toward time-space convergence ap- plies not only to cities but also to multilocational firms and highlights the reduced importance of distance. Nevertheless, direct, face-to-face contacts

Effects of Geographical Scale on Location Decisions in Manufacturing: The Atlanta Example

Manufacturing plants have different locational requirements and characteristics based on whether their locational decision primarily involved a spatial search at the national, regional, or local level. The analysis is derived from questionnaire data for the fifteen-county Atlanta, Georgia, metropolitan area. Nationally oriented plants are larger, more recently established, and more likely to be branch plants, and are more strongly represented in types of manufacturing in which the South has recognized locational advantages. Plants locating as a result of national searches obtain materials from a greater distance and serve wider markets.

Locational Dimensions of Urban Highway Impact: An Empirical Analysis

It is widely recognized that the impact of a new highway affects people both positively and negatively. This research examines the attitudes of residents in neighborhoods in an area in which an urb...

An urban geographer before his time: C. Warren Thornthwaite's 1930 doctoral dissertation

In 1930, a time when human geography was not considered to be among the emerging analytic social sciences and when urban geography barely existed as an identifiable subfield, C. Warren Thornthwaite, later a gargantuan figure in American climatology, was awarded a doctorate under Carl O. Sauer at the University of California, Berkeley. In his dissertation, ‘Louisville, Kentucky: a study in urban geography’, Thornthwaite analysed land-use zonation, commercial strip development, daytime–night-time populations, community formation, elevation and land values, functional regions and cultural areas, spatial competition and optimal location, buying power and residential distribution. Thornthwaites urban geography was centered unmistakably in the spatial tradition, and his innovative research – based on aerial photographs, intensive field observations, city directories and detailed mapping – treated concepts that were to become central to urban geography as it developed in the late 1950s and the 1960s. Urban geography, however, evolved independently of Thornthwaites contributions. Thornthwaite directed no graduate students, and his unpublished dissertation was not cited until a perfunctory reference in 1954. A second citation, not appearing until almost 30 years later, described it as ‘a major synthesis’. Thornthwaites dissertation was not only an anomaly in the career of its author but also an anachronism in the history of urban geography.