Labor, Geography of

Historical Roots

There is a long intellectual history leading to the placement of labor at the center of geographical analysis. Early-20th-century geography's dark flirtation with environmental determinism linked the ability to engage in productive work to climatic conditions. Later, rich descriptions of how people struggle to reproduce themselves by altering and adapting to their environments were central to traditional regional geography. The post–World War II quantitative revolution ushered in a scientific paradigm that attempted to mathematically model location decisions of firms by reducing labor to one of several least-cost variables; in this view, labor was not substantively different from other inputs such as land or capital.

In the 1970s, classical location theory was challenged by a new generation of radical geographers influenced by theoretical Marxism and the political events of the 1960s. These radical scholars were dissatisfied with the theoretical limits of quantitative models based in neoclassical economics. Critiques of traditional location theory challenged the abstraction of firms and workers to mere variables and argued that any discussion of the location of production must consider adversarial relations within broader capitalist processes (e.g., the labor process and [Page 1676]industrial restructuring). Throughout the 1980s, the new conceptual position increasingly centered the labor process in analytical frameworks examining local labor market formation and patterns of (dis)investment. Local labor militancy in the face of industrial transformation was traced to the legacies of previous “layers of investment” and past struggles with capital. Discussions of regional economic restructuring at the national scale (e.g., shifts in investment from the Rust Belt to the Sunbelt in the United States) or the global scale (e.g., the rise of export processing zones) were largely in terms of the “capitalist imperative” to locate or create increasingly flexible labor markets as a response to falling rates of profit. While industrial conflict and the emergence of new labor processes became central to economic geography, explanatory accounts still remained very much focused on the power of capital to restructure economies.

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