ABSTRACT
The title of our recent book on job loss was originally ‘The Geography of Employment Decline’. On further thought, however, it was finally changed to ‘The Anatomy of Job Loss’ (Massey and Meegan 1982). This was a significant change, for the basic argument in the book is that it is not possible really to understand the geographical pattern of employment decline without going behind this pattern to an understanding of the underlying structure and mechanisms of the processes creating job losshence the also carefully selected sub-title: ‘the how, why and where of employment decline’. To explain ‘where’ you must also be able to understand and explain ‘why’ and ‘how’. And the analytical framework and methodology we adopted to study the geography of job loss were designed precisely to make these connections.
