Collaborative Research on the Geography of High-Technology Industry in Japan

随着第二次世界大战以来工业增长和发展的新模式的出现，学者们发展了新的理论框架来描述和解释这些模式。一条研究路线试图检验不同行业不断变化的劳动力需求的后果，而其他社会科学家则关注技术创新的制度层面。这个合作项目旨在通过详细研究日本四个高科技工业部门——半导体、计算机、生物技术和软件——的选址决策，综合这些方法和其他方法。在日本学者的协助下，主要研究人员将收集关于这些工业的地点和生产综合体中有关活动的数据，这将使他们能够绘制高技术工业和综合体的地理格局地图。这些地图将为第二阶段的研究提供基础，第二阶段的研究将包括对导致日本高技术公司发展新活动模式的过程和条件进行一系列有关的调查。这些调查的核心是对精心挑选的公司官员样本进行结构化访谈。将分析这些访谈和其他来源的数据，以检验有关工业组织和业务与地点模式和进程的假设。这项研究将在许多不同的方面做出重大贡献。通过对日本一组产业的仔细分析，可以评估并可能协调当前每种主要理论观点的相对贡献。该研究也将为在任何环境下研究当代工业地理学的人，特别是为那些寻求更全面地理解现代日本经济组织的独特特征的人，提供有价值的经验数据和价值解释。

As new patterns of industrial growth and development have emerged since World War II, scholars have developed new theoretical frameworks to describe and explain these patterns. One line of inquiry has sought to examine the ramifications of changing labor requirements of different industries, while other social scientists have focused on institutional dimensions of technological innovation. This collaborative project aims to synthesize these and other approaches through detailed study of the locational decisions made by four high- technology industrial sectors in Japan -- semiconductors, computers, biotechnology, and software. With the assistance of scholars in Japan, the principal investigators will gather data on the location of these industries and of related activities in production complexes, which will enable them to produce maps of the geographic patterns of high-technology industries and complexes. These maps will provide the bases for a second stage of research, which will consist of a set of related inquiries into the processes and conditions that have led Japanese high-technology firms to develop new patterns of activity. Central to these inquiries are the conduct of structured interviews with a carefully selected sample of corporate officials. Data from these interviews and from other sources will be analyzed to test hypotheses relating industrial organization and operations with locational patterns and processes. This research will make significant contributions in a number of diverse ways. Through careful analysis of one set of industries in Japan, the relative contributions of each of the major current theoretical perspectives can be assessed and possibly reconciled. The research also will provide valuable empirical data and interpretations of value for those studying contemporary industrial geography in any setting, and especially for those seeking more complete understandings of the distinctive character of modern Japanese economic organization.