ABSTRACT
Service industries are everywhere, yet nowhere, in economic geography. Adam Smith and other classical economists promulgated the notion that service workers lack economic and social productivity. This has permeated writing and thinking about service industries and the economy to this day with ‘the result that there is, scattered about in the literature, a sizeable number of writings that contain sharp insights but that, taken without careful analysis and interpretation, may appear confusing and even contradictory’ (Stanback, Foreword to Delaunay and Gadrey 1992). Its impact is reflected in the visibility of services in contemporary economic geography; a quick scan of the contents list of some of the major recent collections of writings within the sub-discipline amply demonstrates the point (Barnes et al. 2004; Clark 2001; Sheppard and Barnes 2003). Apart from a seminal paper (Walker 1985) included in Barnes et al. (2004), papers directly focused on services as a distinguishable category of economic activity are notable by their absence. Yet they are almost certainly implicated in, for example, the numerous contributions to the discourses on realms of production, resource and social worlds, or global economic integration that populate each of these volumes.
