SERVICES AND NATIONAL ACCUMULATION

It has been a common supposition among social scientists that services have exhibited parallel paths of development and played common roles in the transformation of modern capitalist economies. What has been less well recognized is that at the level of individual nation-states there is considerable diversity in how services relate to social and economic transformation. Rather than take for granted the implication from theories on services development that universal patterns would be evident in any one economy, this paper explores the distinction between the systemic relationships between the growth and differentiation of services and capitalist accumulation in general. and the considerable variation in the composition and structural conditions surrounding services found at the national level. This distinction is of considerable importance when trying to account, for example. for the role and dynamics of services in patterns of accumulation occurring in a national territory or urban region. or the role of specific states and their services industries within the international division of labour.