Roger Hayter

The dynamics of industrial location : the factory, the firm and the production system

Part 1: The Problem of Industrial Transformation Industrial Geography Manufacturing Change in Historical Perspective The Geography of Manufacturing. Part 2: The Location of Factories Location Conditions and Location Factors Factory Location as a Cost Minimizing Exercise Factory Location as a Decision Making Process Factory Location as a Strategic (Bargaining) Process. Part 3: The Manufacturing Firm and its Geography The Size Distribution of Firms - Geographical Perspectives The Formation and Function of New (and Small) Firms Medium Size Firms, Big Firms Locally The Growth of Multi-National Firms Corporate Restructuring and Employment Flexibility. Part 4 Production Systems and Local Development Production Systems and Industrial Districts Core Firm-Based Production Systems and the Japanese Auto Industry Production Systems in Home and Host Economies Deindustrialized Districts - Restructured - and Rejuvenating? Industrial Transformation and Jobs - Contemporary Dilemmas.

“The War in the Woods”: Post-Fordist Restructuring, Globalization, and the Contested Remapping of British Columbia's Forest Economy

Abstract Resource peripheries that are geographically remote from “core economies” are also peripheral to contemporary theorizing in economic geography, and requires higher profile within economic geographys research agenda. The restructuring qua remapping of resource peripheries is collectively shaped by institutional forces unleashed by post-Fordism and globalization that are fundamentally different from the restructuring of cores. As industrial regions, resource peripheries must negotiate the imperatives of flexibility and neoliberalism from vulnerable, dependent positions on geographic margins. For many resource peripheries, neoliberalism has been perversely associated with trade protectionism. As resource regions, the restructuring of resource peripheries has been further complicated by resource-cycle dynamics and radically new social attitudes toward the exploitation of resources that have helped spawn the politics of environmentalism and aboriginalism. Trade, environmental, and aboriginal politics have clashed around the world to contest vested industrial interests and remap resource peripheries in terms of their value systems. British Columbias forest economy illustrates this contested remapping. For two decades, the powerful forces of neoliberalism, environmentalism, and aboriginalism have institutionalized a “war in the woods” of British Columbia that is sustained by shared criticism of provincial policy and disagreement over how remapping should proceed. The authority of the provincial government, which controls British Columbias forests, has been undermined, but it remains vital to socially acceptable remapping. Meanwhile, the enduring war in the woods testifies that geography matters on the periphery.

Relocating resource peripheries to the core of economic geography's theorizing: rationale and agenda

Theorizing in economic geography has focused on core regions, industrial and non-industrial, old and new. Indeed, contemplation of the idea of globalization has reinforced this quest. This paper disputes this blinkered thinking that peripheralizes resource peripheries, and seeks to re-position and emphasize resource peripheries within economic geography’s theoretical agenda, specifically that associated with the new ‘institutional’ approach. A truly ‘global’ economic geography cannot afford to ignore resource peripheries. In particular, we argue that characterizing resource peripheries, and making them distinct from cores, is the intersection of four sets of institutional values or dimensions which we summarize in terms of industrialism (economic dimension), environmentalism (environmental dimension), aboriginalism (cultural dimension) and imperialism (geopolitical dimension). This admittedly preliminary framework underlies our hypothesis that resource peripheries around the world have become deeply contested spaces, much more so than those found in cores.

Economic Geography as Dissenting Institutionalism: The Embeddedness, Evolution and Differentiation of Regions

Abstract This paper endorses recent pleas for an ‘institutional turn’ within economic geography. In particular, it reveals and connects the coherence and distinctiveness of dissenting institutional economics as a way of thinking for economic geography. Economic geographers have recognized this tradition but its continuity and compass is not fully appreciated. To provide such an appreciation, this paper argues that the paradigmatic distinctiveness of dissenting institutionalism rests especially on its recognition that real world economies are embedded, have histories or evolve, and are different. The discussion is based around these three cornerstone principles of embeddedness, evolution and difference. For the future, greater attention to the region as an institution, albeit a complex one, along with greater attention to the synthesis of multi‐dimensional processes that are normally analyzes as separate conceptual categories, is encouraged.

Stormy Weather: Cyclones, Harold Innis, and Port Alberni, BC:

This paper uses the work of the Canadian economic historian, Harold Innis, to reflect on the nature of resource economies and the single-industry towns that form their backbone. For Innis resource or staple economies are subject to extreme spatial and temporal disruptions that are both creative and destructive. Single-industry towns are on the front line of both that creativity and that destructiveness. They enjoy rapid growth when a new resource is found, but are equally hastily abandoned when resources run out, or prices fall. Innis used the metaphor of the cyclone to depict this pattern of staples accumulation and consequent crisis. This paper will, first, elaborate on Inniss general cyclonic scheme that joins space, time, and staples production, and second, provide a case study of the forest-industry town of Port Alberni, British Columbia, to exemplify his argument.

Labour Market Segmentation, Flexibility, and Recession: A British Columbian Case Study

The purpose in this paper is to examine theories of labour market segmentation within the context of the early 1980s recession, and its immediate aftermath, in British Columbia, Canada. In particular, the conclusions are based on a large sample of firms in the manufacturing, wholesale, and producer service sectors for the period 1981–86. The paper is divided into four parts: First is a review of Doeringers and Piores classic presentation of segmentation theory focusing on the Fordist firm, and a comparison of it with more recent statements on labour markets made by Atkinson in connection with his work on the flexible firm. Second is a brief description of the recent changes affecting the economy in British Columbia over the last decade or so. Third, employment change and labour segmentation are examined in terms of occupational, gender, and industry characteristics for manufacturing, wholesaling, and producer service sectors in British Columbia. Last, given that the authorss evidence is in terms of aggregate trends, the fourth section provides three case studies, one drawn from each sector.

Foreign Direct Investment and the Flying Geese Model: Japanese Electronics Firms in Asia-Pacific

This paper is a critical examination of the ‘flying geese’ and ‘billiard ball’ models of foreign direct investment (FDI) and their ability to explain the spatial expansion of Japanese electronics multinationals (MNCs) in Asia-Pacific countries from 1985 to 1996. Data on Japanese FDI are analyzed in this region at the aggregate, sectoral, and firm level. The paper commences with a review of the flying geese model, especially that version which interprets Japanese FDI as a catalyst for Asian development, and the billiard ball metaphor which suggests a mechanism for host countries to ‘catch up’ with Japan. The authors then turn to an analysis of Japanese FDI in Asia-Pacific together with employment data for fourteen major firms. This allows an evaluation of the two models in terms of recent geographical patterns of investment and employment growth by electronics MNCs. A special case study of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd (MEI) helps flesh out the evolving geography of Japanese electronics firms in Asia-Pacific. Although the results support the overall patterns suggested by the two models, the authors argue that metaphors and analogies such as flying geese and billiard balls should not be used casually and as a substitute for analysis.

Environmental Bargaining and Boundary Organizations: Remapping British Columbia's Great Bear Rainforest

In recent decades, the creation of conservation areas has been a significant and contested trend in resource peripheries around the globe, embracing the “remapping” of resource extents, tenures, and values and thereby land use patterns and regional development trajectories. Environmental nongovernmental organizations (ENGOs) have emerged as key actors in the conflicts underlying this remapping, as advocates of environmental values and opponents of vested economic and political interests engaged in large-scale resource commodification. Remapping is contentious because it is inescapably normative, rendering moral judgments and alterations of property rights and the meaning of sustainable development. The outcomes of remapping are highly contingent, driven by environmental bargaining processes that describe the formal and informal interactions among ENGOs, industrial interests, different levels of government, and other actors with conflicting interests, strategies, and alliances. This article explores how conflicts were resolved in the creation of the Great Bear Rainforest on British Columbias central coast. Conceptually, the stakeholder model approach to resource conflict is elaborated by emphasizing the roles of ENGOs as advocates and representatives of environmental values within scientific boundary organizations created specifically to be key facilitators in the bargaining process. The study draws on forest policy documents, records of negotiation, surveys of the regions ecological and socioeconomic structures, and field visits. The analysis reveals the Coast Information Team as the multirepresentative scientific boundary organization that developed a shared, accepted multilayered geographic information system of the region. This map provided a “shared currency” and the basis for agreement regarding (1) land use zoning at multiple scales, (2) ecosystem-based management, and (3) conservation mapping.

Neoliberalization and Its Geographic Limits: Comparative Reflections from Forest Peripheries in the Global North

Abstract Recently, a number of economic geography studies have emphasized that when neoliberalism is grounded in particular places, it takes on hybrid forms, a result of local contingencies that are found at those sites. This article contributes to this literature by explicating the processes by which hybridization occurs by drawing on a comparative study of neoliberalism in three contemporary forest-based regions in the Global North: British Columbia, Canada; Tasmania, Australia; and the North Island, New Zealand. A key term for us is geographic limits, by which we mean regionally specific constellations (assemblages) of institutional and material forms that resist; hybridize; or, at junctures, even offset neoliberalism with alternative agendas. In turn, our idea of geographic limits is derived from our larger conceptual framework that integrates Anna Tsing’s (2005) concept of friction with the notion of remapping and a four-leg stakeholder model that consists of different, albeit overlapping, institutional agencies that represent the political, the industrial, the environmental, and the cultural. These institutions provide the animus for a remapping that variously implements, modifies, and occasionally counters neoliberalism.

Japanese direct foreign investment and the Asian financial crisis

Abstract This paper examines the extent to which the Asian currency crisis of 1997–1998 impacted upon the behaviour of Japanese foreign direct investment (FDI) in the manufacturing sector. Much literature has claimed that transnational corporations (TNCs) are unlikely to be firmly embedded in the host countries where they operate. If this is the case, then Japanese firms in Asia might have exhibited a high degree of disinvestment or plant closure and transfer of operations to other countries following the onset of the financial crisis. Although the events surrounding the Asian crisis and subsequent recovery are still unfolding, FDI data, surveys of Japanese firms, and initial reactions by Toyota Motor Corporation and Matsushita Electric Industrial were reviewed to examine this proposition. In general, the evidence suggests that Japanese TNCs have not fled Asia bur rather they responded in the following manner. First, flows of Japanese FDI into Asia overall held steady throughout fiscal year 1997–1998, although it was set to decline thereafter, at least for the short term. Second, at the level of individual corporations, there is some evidence to show that major firms have maintained their operations, and that they have shifted to an export-orientation so as to earn income from their Asian production in overseas currencies. Third, the survey evidence points to a long-term commitment to Asia by Japanese transnationals.