Economic Geography

Agenda diversification mid 1990s onwards
Another more general legacy of the PSWP (Marshall et al. 1988) did not really
become evident until after the mid 1990s. Its message about the scale of the
contribution of service activities to national GDP and competitiveness, their
rapidly expanding share of employment and role as an alternative driver of
change in cities undergoing serious industrial restructuring, or the burgeoning
presence of services in processes of globalisation, international trade foreign
direct investment, took a while to disseminate. But since the mid 1990s there 
has been a notable drilling down of the, still admittedly limited, scope of services
research and writing by economic geographers. The enthusiasm for understand-
ing the role performed by producer services in, for example, the global network
of cities (Beaverstock et al. 1999) or in international business and trade (Bagchi
Sen 1997; O’Connor and Daniels 2001) has been sustained and complemented
with a plea for a more holistic view that incorporates consumer services 
(Williams 1997). At the same time there has been much more interest in explor-
ing the characteristics and behaviour of particular sub-classes of services as a 
way of understanding their significance for spatial patterns of development or 
the socio-economic outcomes of, for example, the shift to service work. A few
examples include computer services (Coe 2000), financial services (Bagchi-Sen
1995; Leyshon and Thrift 1997); cultural and media services (Beyers 2002a; 
Pratt 2000; Scott 1997), design services (Bryson and Daniels 2005; O’Connor
1996), or business and professional services (Bryson 1997; Daniels and Bryson
2005).
The other key dimension of services research by economic geographers during
the last decade has been the emphasis on exploring processes mediated or shaped
by inputs of the knowledge and expertise provided by these activities. Innovation
by, and as a result of utilising, services has become a key contributor to corpo-
rate productivity and competitiveness in all sectors and in markets that are not
only more global than ever before but also shaped by consumer needs and prior-
ities (Howells 2002; Macpherson 1997). Knowledge-intensive business services
continue to grow faster than most other activities in the economy; access to them
by other firms and their role in the dynamics of the clusters within which many
of them are embedded are crucial to the relative performance of local as well as
national economies (Bryson and Daniels 1998a; Keeble 2002; Lindahl and
Beyers 1999; Wood 2002a). Processes such as the changing nature and spatial
redistribution of service work (Beyers and Lindahl 1996; Glasmeier and Howland
1995; Richardson 1999) also provide economic geographers with a rich vein for 
service-informed analyses of the changing balance of economic activity within and
between national economies.