A Tale of Twelve Cities: Metropolitan Employment Change in Dynamic Industries in the 1980s

The last 15 years have seen considerable debate over what constitutes the export-oriented motor of regional economies. Three kinds of activity are cited as the new generators of growth: industries handling information and advanced management functions, which we term “intellectual capital” industries; high technology, or what we term “innovation-based” industries; and a group of flexible manufacturing industries with high levels of product differentiation, relatively short production runs, and lower levels of mechanization than mass-production industries, which we call “variety-based manufacturing.” This paper reports on research measuring and then describing the growth of these three major industry ensembles in 12 metropolitan areas across the United States between 1977 and 1987. Our results reveal major interregional differences in patterns of growth, decline, and specialization and suggest that the sources of employment growth characterizing the 1980s may no longer be those of the 1990s. Variety-based manufacturing, as defined here, declined in importance and is not becoming a motor of growth in the United States, as some literature on post-Fordism suggests. The fastest growing metropolitan areas are specialized in innovation-based production, although employment in these industries peaked in the mid-1980s. Intellectual capital industries grew in all areas studied, even those without any specialization in these industries. Do these industries have a low propensity to agglomerate? Or is the telecommunications revolution making possible a less agglomerated growth pattern? Much more work is needed on changes in organization, linkage patterns, and geographic tendencies of the intellectual capital industries to answer these questions.