I30 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 



categories in the sense that every industrial organisation must have some 

 variety of structure, of administration, and of technique. This paper 

 is mainly concerned with the category of structural policies. These fall, 

 to follow my model, into three sub-categories which can be succinctly 

 summed up as problems of site, size and scope. They form categories 

 of structure, again, in the sense that every industrial structure must 

 have some site, some size and some scope. 



§ 2. The Industrial Site. 



The problem of site has always exercised a business organisation when- 

 ever it planned to move or to open a new plant or branih. Recently 

 the State has become interested in the siting or ' location ' of industry 

 through its policy of helping distressed areas by encouraging firms to 

 * site ' new plants there, and the Commissioner for the Special Areas of 

 England and Wales has gone as far as to suggest placing Greater London 

 out of bounds for further factory construction, unless good reasons to the 

 contrary were adduced. This policy, as the Commissioner points out, 

 would involve the licensing of new factories and of extensions to 

 old factories in the London area.^ This year a Royal Commission has 

 been appointed to ' enquire into the causes which have influenced the 

 present geographical distribution of the industrial population of Great 

 Britain and the probable direction of any change in that distribution in 

 the future ; to consider what social, economic or strategical advantages 

 arise from the concentration of industries or of the industrial population 

 in large towns or in particular areas of the country ; and to report what 

 remedial measures, if any, should be taken in the national interest.' 



The national value of a careful choice of the location of industry, a 

 choice making full use of research, has nowhere been more precisely 

 put than in the Second Industrial Survey of South Wales : ^ ' The working 

 of economic forces will eventually bankrupt any concerns which have 

 made a wrong choice and will thus ensure for the community the opti- 

 mum distribution of its resources, but only after an interval of confusion, 

 and possibly after the creation of fresh pools of stagnant labour unable to 

 find an outlet. A better choice made now would ensure the earlier 

 attainment of the optimum location of resources, and would eliminate 

 much confusion and waste. Though in form a wisely conceived State 

 direction of location might appear to be an interference with the working 

 of" natural " forces, it might in fact prove to have been only a short cut 

 to the equilibrium which ihe free working of those forces would eventually 

 ensure.' 



In recent years considerable research has been devoted to this problem 

 of siting or location of industry. Theoretical economists with the almost 

 single exception of Alfred Weber have been content till recently to give 

 the problem but a passing reference. Weber's Uber den Standort der 

 Industrien, however, suffers from the usual limitations of a deductive 

 approach that its assumptions are unreal and its argument over-simplified. 

 Examining the more recent theoretical contributions of Ohlin and Predohl 



2 Third Report, p. 8. ^ Vol. I., p. 397. 



