Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

In this paper the relationship between air service connectivity and a subset of professional employment as defined by administrative and auxiliary workers for the fifty-nine largest metropolitan areas in the USA for the period 1978–88 is examined. The importance of airline service connectivity as an industrial location factor for company facilities is highlighted. Restructuring of the air service network and the emergence of the postderegulation hub-and-spoke system are also discussed. It is argued that connectivity affects, and is simultaneously affected by, administrative and auxiliary employment levels. Empirical findings suggest that changes in connectivity have a greater influence on administrative and auxiliary employment levels than changes in administrative and auxiliary employment have on connectivity.

Existing experimentally based decompositional models of housing preferences and choice behavior do not account for possible substitution or context dependencies among choice alternatives. These authors seek to extend existing models by demonstrating how discrete choice experiments may be used to develop housing choice models that allow one to test for possible context dependencies. The design strategy and model specification are discussed. The modelling approach is illustrated in the context of simulated housing choices of divorcees. The results indicate that context dependencies play a significant role in the understanding of these people's housing preferences and choices.

The author focuses on the issue of flexibility in production using a particular historical example: that of the poultry meat industry in Greece. The case study material is presented as an example of the advantages of theoretically informed empirical research and realist methodology for studying uneven capitalist development and the enormous range of contrasting configurations of capitalist production and its spatial distribution. The poultry meat industry in Greece, although showing the characteristics of an extreme flexibility in production (which is primarily the result of an extensive subcontracting system), shows developments that cannot be interpreted within the theoretical framework of the school of flexible specialization. This allows the author to suggest that the eagerness of flexible specialization theorists (Piore and Sabel, Freeman and Perez, et al) to prescribe new technoeconomic futures hinders their appreciation of sociospatial complexity in capitalist development and encourages them to persist with models of industrial transformation of limited relevance. The points that are raised must also be seen as a reply to those in Greece—researchers and politicians—who argue in favour of a flexible specialization strategy as a means of modernizing the structure of Greek industry.

Areal interpolation involves the transfer of data (often socioeconomic statistics and especially population data) from one zonation of a region to another, where the two zonations are geographically incompatible. This process is inevitably imprecise and is subject to a number of possible errors depending on the assumptions inherent in the methods used. Previous analysts have had only limited information with which to compare the results of interpolation and so assess the errors. In this paper a Monte Carlo simulation method based on modifiable areal units is employed. This allows multiple interpolations of population to be conducted from a single set of source zones to numerous sets of target zones. The properties of the full error distribution associated with a particular interpolation model can then be examined. The method based on dasymetric mapping consistently gave the highest accuracy of those tested, whereas the areal weighting method gave the lowest. More important than the results presented is the potential for future testing of other methods in increasingly complex situations.

In Great Britain, the 1980s were marked by an increasing involvement of the independent sector in the provision of long-term institutional care resources for the elderly. In this paper, spatial and structural changes in the provision of all categories of residential and nursing beds in the South East region of England between 1987 and 1990 are investigated. The data were obtained from a variety of sources including directories of private institutional care facilities, the Department of Health, and the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys. Separate analyses of change were conducted for (a) the public and private residential care sectors, and (b) all categories of independent care (that is, residential and nursing) resources, at both regional and local scales. The results disclose that the 1987–90 period witnessed continued rapid growth of institutional care resources in the South East region, although public-sector involvement in the provision of residential care beds declined. An analysis of spatial shifts of independent residential and nursing beds at the county level of resolution does not reveal appreciable changes in their overall levels of geographical concentration in the region. However, the provision of independent care beds may be approaching saturation level in some coastal retirement communities, with part of the relatively rapid growth shifting locally to surrounding, mainly inland, areas that have recently experienced notable gains in their elderly population. Analysis of structural growth components indicates that disclosed changes in the spatial distribution of independent care beds are attributable to both the opening of new homes and the expansion of existing premises.

The biotechnology sector is a revolutionary industrial sector and promises significant innovations in medicine, veterinary care, plant agriculture, food processing, and environmental industries. Within the United States, biotechnology firms have generally agglomerated in existing regional high-technology complexes. In this paper empirical evidence is presented on the formation, evolution, financial sources, and educational relationships of thirty-three commercial biotechnology firms in the Greater Seattle metropolitan region, a leading US biotechnology concentration. Data were collected through extensive personal interviews, and these biotechnology organizations are compared across the following organizational incubators of the founder(s): academic or other research institution, academic or other research institution and business, biotechnology firm spin-off, and nonbiotechnology firm spin-off. Findings show the significance of local universities, research institutions, and existing biotechnology organizations in developing and sustaining biotechnology investment and employment. Comparisons across the organizational origins of these firms indicate major differences in financial structure and in affiliations with educational institutions for resources and research collaborations. Results also highlight several issues concerning regional economic development and biotechnology enterprises.

In this paper recent considerations of the human subject and of the nature and uses of theory are convened around the work of Marxist theorist David Harvey. This is done to contest two prevailing views of his work and to explore critically two alternative readings. The first view suggests that Harvey is exclusively a theorist of the capitalist space economy; against this it is suggested that he offers one of the most ambitious readings of subjectivity within human geography. The second view suggests that Harvey is a ‘modern’ theorist, whose preoccupation with economy and class leads him into the perils of theoretical authoritarianism, exclusivity, and abstraction; against this it is suggested that Harvey's Marxism claims to be intrinsically reflexive. More particularly, the thesis that there is an essential, rather than contingent, relation between Harvey's theorisation of ‘the subject of capital’ and his own practices as a theorist is explored: given that Harvey claims ‘the subject of capital’ is but one subject-position, to what extent, it is asked, is he in practice aware of the limits of his own theoretical propositions? At the same time, an examination of the degree to which Harvey's reading of subjectivity is sufficiently cogent to contribute to an ecumenical, ‘post-modern’ project to make sense of subjection and agency within contemporary Western societies is presented.

The author analyses the relative role of protection (or damage mitigation) expenditures within the total costs associated with raised sea levels induced by climate change. A rule of thumb is derived to approximate the optimal level of protection. Economic efficiency requires that protection expenditures are designed such that the sum of protection costs plus remaining land-loss damage is minimised. The optimal protection level will depend on the relative importance of dryland loss compared with the costs of accelerated wetland loss plus protection expenditures. This framework is then used to estimate the damage-cost functions associated with a sea-level rise for the countries of the OECD.

The author examines the impact of the internationalisation of automobile production on the local production system in Spain, with emphasis on the relationship between the assembly and supply industries. After an introduction to the issue of linkage formation in the automobile industry, a historical overview of the development of the Spanish production system since the 1950s is presented. This is followed by an analysis of recent changes in the production and procurement strategies of international producers, in particular the process of rationalisation and the implementation of just-in-time supply systems. It is concluded that the process of internationalisation has brought on a radical transformation of the local production system. This has had serious consequences for the position of certain parts of the production system, notably the indigenous suppliers; such negative effects, however, should be weighed against the fact that internationalisation has also produced rapid growth and modernisation of Spanish industry in the last two decades.