ABSTRACT
The last chapter explored the theories that have been developed to explain the shift towards service employment. The service employment shift has been explored by economists and economic geographers, but also by local as well as national governments. During the economic recession of the 1930s, as well as the crisis experienced by Fordism during the 1960s, politicians and academics became concerned about the role services played in local, regional and national economies. During the nineteenth century, economists like Adam Smith considered that services performed a non-basic role in the economy and did not engage in basic (export) activity. The implication of this conceptualisation is that services do not create surplus value, or wealth but, rather, are engaged only in acquiring profits that are made in the wealth-producing parts of the economy — manufacturing and primary production (agriculture and mining). As manufacturing employment continued to decline from the 1960s, a debate started concerning the role services played in the economy. Could an economy survive without manufacturing employment? Could a service economy create the necessary wealth to support a population? Geographers played an important role in this debate as they were concerned with charting and exploring the crisis of the regions, typified by the experience of the American Midwest (the rust belt) or the UK's manufacturing heartland — the West Midlands (Bacon and Eltis, 1978; Urry, 1987; Daniels, 1991a, b and c). The answers to these questions appear to be ‘yes’. A service economy is currently sustainable as long as it supports manufacturing production that is taking place elsewhere.
