The geography of corporate production: Urban,industrial, and organizational systems

This paper examines how the territorial organization of corporate production — the extent to which firms connect places in the city system through intraorganizational relationships of ownership and control — is shaped by urban, industrial, and organization factors. Specifically, we study the determinants of the dispersion of corporate production facilities in the U.S. urban system. We analyze the number of U.S. cities and states in which the largest 500 industrial corporations operated plants in 1964 as a function of the characteristics of the location of the corporate headquarters, the predominant industries in which their plants produce, and their organizational structure. We find that corporate dispersion is shaped by some of the same factors that have been shown to organize the market-based territorial division of labor — the size and functional specialization of cities and the locational requirements of industry. But in addition, organizational attributes — a firm's industrial diversity, its age, and the extent to which it is controlled by families as opposed to managerial coalitions — also influence its geographic dispersion.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1983 annual meetings of the American Sociological Association in Detroit, Michigan.