ABSTRACT
It has been argued that employment decline can result from a range of different forms of production reorganization, and that these can themselves be adopted in order to cope with a range of different circumstances. This is interesting because it indicates that job loss may have a number of different implications for what is going on in production and for the state of economic health of the industries and areas affected. Now, in part 3, we aim to demonstrate that the identification and explanation of the different mechanisms can also make a significant contribution to the understanding of the geography of employment decline. All too often, attempts to explain the geography of employment decline – why some parts of the country lose more jobs than others – have concentrated on trying to find an association between the map of employment decline and the characteristics of different areas. We argue that this is not enough. First, it is analytically inadequate; the form of production change through which jobs are lost may be at least as important for an understanding of the geographical pattern as the locational characteristics, and even locational characteristics may vary in the way they operate, depending on the kind of production change. Second, the difference between the two approaches is politically important. The approach which looks immediately for a correlation with the characteristics of declining regions tends more easily to slip into an argument which essentially ‘blames the victim’. What we argue here is, not that such geographical characteristics are unimportant, but that their degree of importance, and the way in which they operate, depend on the kinds of production change that are causing the job loss. It is not enough to go straight from the geography of decline to seek its explanation in geographical characteristics (‘Merseysiders go on strike more often’ for example). It is also necessary to understand the reasons why, and the processes by which, the jobs are being lost in the first place.
