Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
people work for Nike in Beaverton, not a single individual in Oregon is directly
involved in the process of putting a shoe together. Worldwide, some 30,000 people
work directly for Nike today, and according to Nike, upwards of 800,000 workers
are employed by Nike's almost 700 contract factories in 52 countries. Nike began
production in the 1960s by contracting with an Asian fi rm to manufa c ture its
shoes. In 1974, Nike set up its fi rst domestic shoe manufacturing facility in the
small town of Exeter, New Hampshire. By the end of that year, Nike's workforce
was still modest in number. The Oregon contingent concentrated on running the
company and expanding sales, while the New Hampshire and the Asian contin-
gents focused primarily on the production of shoes.
As Nike grew to become the world's leading manufacturer of athletic shoes
with almost a 40 percent share of the world's athletic shoe market, its employ-
ment numbers skyrocketed and many new manufacturing plants were established
in Asia and beyond. This transformation did not translate into manufacturing jobs
in Beave r ton, Or e gon, however. The employment opportunities now provided by
Nike at its world headquarters are for the fi nancial administrators, marketing and
sales specialists, information technology directors, computer technicians, law-
yers, and support personnel needed to run an international company with over
$19 billion in annual revenues. The local social and economic geography of
Beaverton bears little resemblance to what one might have expected in a town
housing an important shoe company 85 years ago.
Eighty-fi ve years ago, economic geographer J. Russel Smith reported that
“three hundred shoe factories have sales offi ces located within a few blocks of
each other in Boston.” In a leather district close to the city, hides were imported
from around the world, and tanneries prepared the hides. In a ring of suburbs
around Boston, great “shoe towns” such as Haverhill, Brockton, and Lynn had fac-
tories specializing in both men's and women's shoes. Writing in 1925, Smith
described the process of shoe production in the shoe factory town of Lynn:
Walking the streets of Lynn one realizes what concentration an industry can have; the
signs upon the places of business read—heels, welts, insoles, uppers, eyelets, thread,
etc., etc. It is an astonishing proof of the degree to which even a simple commodity
like a shoe, so long made by one man, can be subdivided and become the work of
scores of industries and thousands of people.
Shoe salespeople periodically fl ocked to shoe company headquarters in Boston to
learn about the company's newest offerings and fi lled their sample suitcases with
shoes to show their clients as they made the rounds of their sales territories.
Today, the production and marketing of Nike shoes and apparel involves an elab-
orate global network of international manufacturing and sales. The global processes
have local consequences, as each node of the Nike network is functionally specialized,
dependent on other nodes, and infl uenced by the niche it occupies in the network.
The contemporary geography of industry and services is a product of shifting
forces that have shaped production and consumption over time. In this chapter,
we begin by looking at the origins of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain and
its diffusion into mainland Europe. In addition, we look at the rise of manufactur-
ing belts in Europe, Asia, and North America. We then explore how industrializa-
tion has changed, focusing on the emergence of global labor networks and such
concepts as fl exible production and the global division of labor. We also consider
how the expanding service economy is changing the nature of employment and
the economic bases of many places.
