ABSTRACT
A great deal of optimism has been placed on the rise in service sector employment since the early 1980s. It was felt that the rise of this alternative sector might offset the losses experienced in the industrial sector in many cities of Europe, North America and Australia. However, the rise of services was sectorally, socially and geographically specific. Not only were they unable to fully compensate for loss of manufacturing jobs but also the places and people who benefited from them were very different from those who bore the brunt of manufacturing deindustrialisation (Hudson and Williams 1986: 112; Allen 1988). Service sector employment rose for a number of reasons in the early 1980s, these included the demands of businesses for specialised financial and legal services, the co-ordination required to orchestrate spatially dispersed economic activities within companies and the increased demands of households for services. Between 1945 and 1990 service sector employment grew by approximately 75 per cent. This growth was sectorally uneven with particularly rapid growth in the distributive and banking and insurance producer services (Cameron 1980; Allen 1988; see Table 4.1). The absolute rise in the number of service sector jobs has been significantly less than the absolute number of jobs lost in the manufacturing sector. This is reflected in rises in the total number of
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unemployed people. This is clearly demonstrated by the case of the UK economy which, despite a significant rise in service sector employment, suffered a rise in the total unemployed between 1981 and 1991. What these absolute figures fail to demonstrate, however, are the resultant social and spatial dimensions of the change in the composition of employment.
