Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
from components that are the special domain of individual countries or regions.
This was a particular direction taken by Ford in the 1980s.
In the last two decades, a fifth stage may be added to these four. With the
partial failure of the global car idea of Ford, there has been reconcentration of
production for some countries and firms, following the Japanese system of “just
in time”. This relies on close contacts between manufacturers of cars and their
components, small inventories, rapid communication of technical information,
and close control over quality, all of these elements needing a physical location
in proximity to other producers. This system reverses the geographical trends of
all the previous stages, and would seem to question the whole product cycle idea.
Putting the product cycle into practice
The last statement, about the continuity of a single centre or central region,
illustrates a general point to be made about the product cycle. Although it
describes the evolution of production tendencies for individual standard items, for
many more complex consumer goods like cars or computers, there are many
individual elements which can each change in technology and process of
production, at different rates. It is at the major centres of technological advance,
once they have become established, that the changes tend to occur. For some
capital goods such as fertilizer manufacture, the pace of technological change is
slower, and investments in production equipment are made for longer periods of
time without change. In this case, we should expect the product cycle to work.
Product cycles operate most obviously for individual products such as electrical
generators for cars, first made only in the central countries, then moved out to
many LDCS, and finally replaced in modern cars from the early 1960s onwards
by alternators. In a large industry sector such as textiles, there are different
evolutions for different products (van Geenhuizen & van der Knaap 1994). In
Holland, in the face of rising costs of production, the knitted goods industry has
moved out to lower labour-cost countries overseas. The carpet industry adopted a
strategy of technological innovation to produce goods for which there was a special
scarcity value; and in weaving and finishing industries, there has been a strategy
of acquisitions by the biggest firms, and a partial adoption of flexible production
(see below).
If we represent the four stages of Table 3.1 as a production curve over time
( Fig. 3.1 ), it is possible to visualize various ways in which the simple growth and
decline pattern can be bypassed, even for a single item. A first possibility is that
the whole cycle can be curtailed by a substitute product coming in and replacing
the original. Thus, in internal combustion engines, alternators suddenly replaced
generators of electricity from 1960. Another possibility is a revival through
finding new applications for the original product. In textiles, the underfelt for
carpets finds new applications as a mulch around garden plants, and sites subject
to erosion are covered with plastic mesh to retain soil and vegetation. There are a
variety of other geotextiles coming into use. Other possibilities are changes in
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