Corporate Space Preferences: A New Zealand Example

The paper demonstrates the problems encountered in the measurement of corporate space preferences which are not present in the residential space preference context—most notably the assignment of people to levels in a decisionmaking hierarchy, and the weighting that is necessary to reflect the contribution that each level makes to any final decision. The greater complexity of the corporate situation highlights the conceptual inadequacy of the principal components technique for the construction of mental maps, with a simple psychological scaling technique appearing to be conceptually more adequate and equally as effective. But, it is the number of items on which data are collected which emerges as the issue of greatest consequence in this type of study, the suggestion having been made that respondents should not be asked to select more than say nine or ten locations from a list of alternatives. The example of a corporate mental map, constructed in the light of the methodological discussion, was shown to have important implications for the spatial learning model proposed by Taylor (1975b), which had been derived from industrial linkage studies. Instead it was suggested that a metric reflecting the organisation of a national space economy into a series of hierarchically arranged and reasonably discrete regional space economies should replace simple euclidean measures of distance (that is, geographic space) within the model.