Spatial Divisionsof Labour A/so by Doreen Massey CAPITAL AND LAND (with Alejandrina Catalano) THE GEOGRAPHY OF INDUSTRIAL REORGANISATION (with Richard Meegan) THE ANATOMY OF JOB LOSS(with Richard Meegan) GEOGRAPHY MATTERS!(edited with John Allen) POLITICS AND METHOD (edited with Richard Meegan) THE ECONOMY IN QUESTION (edited withJohn Allen) UNEVEN RE-DEVELOPMENT (edited withJohn Allen) HIGH-TECH FANTASIES (with Paul Quintas and David Wield) SPACE, PLACE AND GENDER Spatial Divisions of Labour Social Structures and the Geography of Production SECOND EDITION Doreen Massey palgrave macmillan © Doreen Massey 1984, 1995 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may bemade without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions ofthe Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms ofany licencepermitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90Tottenham Court Road, London WIP 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminalprosecutionand civil claims for damages. First edition 1984 Reprinted 1985,1987, 1990 Second edition 1995 Published by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN978-0-333-59494-0 ISBN978-1-349-24059-3(eBook) 001 10.1007/978-1-349-24059-3 A catalogue record for this book isavailable from the British Library. Thisbookisprintedonpapersuitableforrecyclingandmadefromfully managedandsustainedforestsources.Logging,pulpingandmanufacturing processesareexpectedtoconformtotheenvironmentalregulationsofthe countryoforigin. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97 96 95 Copy-edited and typeset by Povey-Edmondson Okehampton and Rochdale, England FOR NANCY AND JACK with many thanks and much love Contents Preface to the First Edition x Preface to the Second Edition xii List ofTables xiv List ofFigures xv List ofAbbreviations xvi 1. The Issues 1 2. Social RelationsandSpatial Organisation 12 2.1 The debate 12 2.2 Characterising capital 17 The problem 17 Place in economic structure 19 Contrasts in labour process 22 The organisational structure of capital 25 Some conclusions 28 2.3 Social structures and capitalist relations of production 30 A framework 30 Elaborations 39 Reflections 43 2.4 The social and the spatial: an impossible dichotomy 49 Geography matters 49 Places and politics 56 2.5 An example 61 3. UnevenDevelopment andSpatial Structures 65 3.1 The approach 65 3.2 Spatial structures ofcapitalist production 68 Conceptualising the spatial organisation of production 68 Some issues 80 An example 90 3.3 Spatial structures ofproduction and geographical inequality 96 VII VIlJ Contents Not two-dimensional patterns, but underlying relations 96 Spatial structures and social structures 106 3.4 The uniqueness ofplace 113 4. Some ChangingSpatialStructuresinthe United Kingdom 121 4.1 Setting the scene 121 The inheritance: social and spatial 121 The fifties: a wasted decade 127 The cracks begin to show 128 4.2 Electronics and instruments industries 132 The character ofthe industry 132 Labour as a 'location factor': a social process 135 Spatial structures oflarge firms 140 Spatial structures ofsmall firms 145 4.3 Clothing and footwear 148 The character ofthe industry: increasing pressures 148 The search for new labour: two different strategies 155 Spatial structures of big firms 159 The impact on national geography 164 Methodological reflections 166 4.4 Services 169 The industry: what are 'services' anyway? 169 Self-employment and family enterprises 170 Other consumer services: private capital and the State 175 Producer services 178 An emerging spatial structure 183 5. The Effects on Local Areas: Class and Gender Relations 187 5.1 The general and the unique 187 5.2 The coalfield areas 188 The pre-existing structure 188 The impact, or 'the combination of layers' 196 5.3 A different kind of'periphery': the case of Cornwall 215 The pre-existing structure 215 The impact, or 'the combination oflayers' 218 Contents ix 6. Class, Politics and the Geographyof Employment 226 6.1 Spatial structures and spatial divisions oflabour 226 6.2 Uneven development and national politics 228 Modernisation 228 Muddling through 245 Monetarism 255 6.3 Changes in the geography ofclass relations 264 The geography ofthe ownership ofproduction 264 White-collar hierarchies 276 Social and spatial restructuring in the working class 281 7. The Reproductionof Inequality:AQuestion of Politics 287 8. Reflectionson Debates overa Decade 296 8.1 Themes 296 8.2 Marxism and the analysis ofcapitalism 297 Capitalism 297 Structures, laws and tendencies 301 Flows ofvalue and the analysis ofclass relations 307 8.3 Explanation 311 Outcomes and causes 312 Articulation/thinking in terms ofrelations 315 A final note on variety and specificity 324 8.4 The conceptualisation ofspace 326 The geography ofthe relations ofproduction 326 Broadening the analysis 332 A concluding note on spatial structures 339 8.5 Gender and feminism 341 Recapitulation ofthemes 342 A question ofconceptual approach 349 Notes and References 355 Bibliography 368 Author Index 382 Subject Index 386 Preface to the First Edition This book has been a long time in the making. It began life as a contribution to a debate within the branch of geography known as 'industrial location theory' - as what I hoped would be a trenchant critique of all, or pretty much all, that had gone before, together with a second halfwhichwould present 'an alternativeapproach'.A number of things have happened in the period since then. I got bored with the critique. The second 'hair became the length of a book in itself, and it also changed its nature. From being a schematic outline it became increasingly grounded in what was going on in Britain and in other advanced capitalist countries. But more than anything else I became increasingly convinced of the importance of the issues involved and of the fact that they should have a wider audience. My basic aim had been to link the geography of industry and employment to the wider, and under lying,structures ofsociety. And one of the things Ido in the book is present an approach which, I hope, makes that possible. The initial intention, in other words, was to start from the characteristics of economy and society, and proceed to explain their geography. But the more I got involved in the subject, the more it seemed that the process was not just one way. It isalso the case- I would argue that understanding geographical organisation is fundamental to understanding an economy and a society. The geography of a society makes a difference to the way it works. If this istrue analytically,it isalso true politically.Forthere to be any hope of altering the fundamentally unequal geography of British economy and society (and that of other capitalist coun tries, too), a politics is necessary which links questions of geogra phical distribution to those of social and economic organisation. Effectivelyto confront the spatial inequality in Britain today means takingon much thesame battles- and much thesame socialstrata asisnecessary to winany widerprogressive change.But itisequally true that any wider national political strategy must be sensitive to the variations in economic structure, in occupations, in political tradition and in the fabric of day-to-day life which exist between different parts of the country. x