ABSTRACT

In this study I have analysed some of the social and spatial processes associated with the globalisation of the American semiconductor industry. Distinguishing between the internally necessary and historically and spatially contingent determinants of the industry’s growth and evolution, I have shown how they articulated to produce the world’s first semiconductor production complex, Silicon Valley, California. The continued development of those determinants, however, generated contradictions in Silicon Valley and elsewhere in the United States. Growing Japanese competition in transistor markets ensured that the industry could no longer survive without significantly restructuring its organisational form. Given that its labour processes were technically disarticulated, the US semiconductor industry was able to restructure by means of taking the global option. In the context of favourable US import regulations, its labour-intensive, low value-added labour processes were dispersed to selected Third World sites, particularly in East Asia, in order to take advantage of their supplies of cheap labour. Later, certain high value-added and capital-intensive labour processes were internationalised partly in order to penetrate major, but protected, markets. The emergence of US semiconductor production in Europe was a case in point. By the mid-1970s, semiconductor production had become a paradigmatic example of an industrial branch managerially, technically, and spatially organised broadly according to the principles identified by the ‘new’ international divison of labour thesis.