Exploring uneven development in producer service sectors: detailed evidence from the computer service industry in Britain

In this paper I investigate the nature of uneven development in the computer service sector in Britain by using results from a four-county interview survey of 173 firms. The research adds constructively to the large literature on producer services by providing detailed empirical evidence on the key regional variations within a leading growth sector. First, analysis of the survey data illustrates that new-firm formation processes, which vary both quantitatively and qualitatively across Great Britain, underlie the highly uneven spatial distribution of computer service employment. In particular, rates of entrepreneurship, the sector of origin, and the mode of start-up appear to vary regionally, with growth becoming relatively self-generating in the South East where the computer industry as a whole has traditionally been well represented. Second, through an examination of the backward (supplier), horizontal (joint venture), and in particular the market linkages of the surveyed computer service firms, the evidence gained suggests that, although regional, status, and subsectoral variations in the nature of market linkages both are indicative of, and contribute to, uneven development in this sector, backward and horizontal linkages are of less importance.