COMPUTER-TECHNOLOGY AND THE LOCATION OF ECONOMIC-ACTIVITY

Throughout history, major changes in technology have had significant impacts on the location of economic activity, on the structure of industrial organization, and on the organization of work. The advent of power-driven machine production and the resultant replacement of spatially dispersed handicraft and hand-operated production processes with spatially concentrated factory processes is a good example. Notwithstanding this, little attention has been focused on the implications of computer technology for the location of economic activity. This article explores the possible effects of integrated and interactive computer/communications systems on the location of production processes and on the organization of work. It is concluded that there will be global dispersion of production processes, spatial concentration of management, increasing use of human surrogates in production processes, progressively more people-systems interface, and increasing dispersion of human participation in work processes.