Towards A Critique of Industrial Location Theory (1973)

INTRODUCTION In attempting a critique of a discipline, the fundamental problem always arises that the very concept and definition of disciplines are themselves functions of a particular ideology and epistemology. From the point of view of the critique presented here, the separate existence of an entity called industrial location theory is itself open to question. In different ways, many of the classic theories of industrial location have proceeded as though the object of study was an abstract firm – one without effective structural relationships to the rest of the economy. The specific problem of idealised abstraction will be dealt with later. The immediate question is the related one of the presumed separation of spatial behaviour from the economic system as a whole. In fact, of course, the two are intimately related at all levels. In the first place it is rarely valid to retain a complete distinction between the specifically locational decision of the firm and all its other economic decisions. Secondly there is the fact that the nature of a firm’s behaviour will be influenced by its position within the total economic structure. And thirdly, at a more aggregated level, the spatial shape of the economy is the result not only of specifically spatial forces, but also of the a-spatial dynamic of the economic system having a spatial manifestation. It is, then, impossible realistically to treat “the spatial” as a closed system. Certainly industrial location theory does not have an object of its own, and in that sense there could never be an autonomous dynamic theory of industrial location. Not all of the work considered here is in contradiction with this view, but the point needs to be borne in mind throughout the following discussion since many elements of the critique spring directly from it. Nonetheless, there is a body of knowledge called “industrial location theory”, and the spatial expression of the economic system does have to be analysed. Given that, this critique seems a valid exercise to undertake. The bulk of industrial location theory is in fact closely related to economics but only in the sense that it derives very directly from neo-classical marginalist economic theory, sharing its ideology, and consequently its epistemological approach.

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