methods, but the disciplinary norm tended to
meticulous, empirically descriptive case stud-
ies of one firm, industry or industrial region or
another. Iconic male-dominated industries
such as sawmilling, iron and steel, and auto-
mobile assembly were the primary subject-
matter; the field was thus marked by
masculinism, reflecting the gender of the
discipline’s practitioners and their substantive
interests (a version of ‘toys for boys’), and
generally uncritical methods.
In 1910, economic geographer George
Chisholm drew upon the German location
theorist Alfred Weber to explain ‘the seats of
industry’. In the late 1950s and much of the
1960s, industrial geographers rediscovered
Weber and other members of the German
location school (seelocation theory), and
turned toneoclassical economictheories of
rational choiceand maximizing behaviour
(Smith, 1981a [1971]) to explain industrial
location. Propelling this disciplinary intellec-
tual move was a combination of thequantita-
tive revolutionin human geography, which
emphasized the importance of rigour and
abstraction, and the influence ofregional
science, which applied neoclassical theory to
thespace-economy, including to the optimal
location of industry (Isard, 1956). However,
even at the time, it was unclear exactly how
many industrial geographers were convinced
of the need for this more formal theorization,
and most of the practitioners lacked the neces-
sary skill set to apply it. Within a decade,
neoclassical formalism was criticized by: (1) a
behavioural approach (following economists
such as Herbert Simon), which stressed sub-
optimal outcomes (‘satisficing’) rather than
maximization (Pred, 1967, 1969: seedecision-
making); and (2) an institutional approach –
known initially as the ‘geography of enterprise’
and later ‘corporate geography’ – which treated
the firm as a complex entity, like an organism,
that evolved, adapted and struggled in a larger
competitive setting, was often not rational, and
whose inner workings defied formalization
(McNee, 1960).
The high-water mark of the field was from
the late 1970s to the end of the 1980s, when
disciplinary intellectual ferment matched fer-
ment on the ground. Not only was the intel-
lectual environment changing, so too was the
very object of investigation. It was then that
seemingly entrenched Western industrial re-
gions were beset by gales ofdeindustrializa-
tion, industrial restructuring and corporate
hollowing-out, which both destroyed and cre-
ated anew. Hitherto bread-and-butter indus-
tries of Western economies, such as iron and
steel, shipbuilding and textile manufacturing,
were subject to severe economic trauma as
firms went bankrupt, moved offshore, or
turned lean and mean. Millions of traditional
manufacturing jobs were lost.
Events on the ground produced new theory
and new methods in industrial geography, and
even began to challenge the discipline’s mas-
culinism. Scholars began to turn toradical
geography. In the UK, Doreen Massey’s
watershed book, Spatial divisions of labour
(1984), provided original theoretical explan-
ation and trenchant empirical analysis: in
the USA, Allen Scott’s (1988b)transactions
costsapproach to the firm was the exemplar.
Both resulted in impressive empirical work:
Massey’s led to the Britishlocalityproject
(Cooke, 1989), and Scott’s to case studies
based in California, especially on the vibrant
high-tech andfilmindustries. Both bodies of
work were influenced bypolitical economy,
as well as a new methodological sensibility,
critical realism(especially true in the UK,
where critical realism became the unofficial
methodology of the discipline). Codified
and circulated primarily by Andrew Sayer
(1992 [1984]), critical realism suggested in-
dustrial geography proceed methodologically
by ‘intensive’, on-the-ground, case studies of
specific industries and their geographical sites.
Not everyone accepted ‘critical realism’,
however, with critics complaining it was only
another version of the old disciplinary sin
ofempiricismand was producing geographic-
ally parochial studies. Moreover, there was
also an underlying clash between the UK
version of industrial geography emphasizing
capitalism’s decline and fall, and the US (Cali-
fornian) version highlighting capitalism’s vital-
ity. However, the UK and US versions came
together in the late 1980s throughregulation
theory,and which set the sub-disciplinary
intellectualagendafor the following decade.
Developed to explain why capitalism survived
in spite of Marx’s best prediction of its
demise, regulation theory introduced ideas of
fordistandpost-fordist(see alsoflexible
accumulation) modes of production, and the
fraught transition between them. What the
distinction made clear was that while British
industrial geographers had been documenting
the disintegration of an older Fordist industry,
US industrial geographers had been examin-
ing the formation of a brand new one, post-
Fordism. They were different sides of the
same Janus face of industrial capitalism
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