EXPLAINING THE CONTEMPORARY SPATIAL STRUCTURE OF HIGH-TECHNOLOGY EMPLOYMENT IN TEXAS

Abstract

The paper presents a snapshot of the current employment distribution of high-technology industry among Texas's major metropolitan areas and links the broad outlines of that distribution to the particular production context(s) that emerged in those cities during their formative years. High-technology employment is concentrated in four CMSAs. Dallas-Fort Worth has the largest and most diverse employment base. Employment in Houston, the second largest center, is concentrated in the petroleum and petrochemicals industries. Austin's focus is in computers and electronics, while San Antonio, the fourth largest high-technology center, has a number of minor clusters of high-technology employment but dominates in no individual industry. Industrialization developed in many of these cities simultaneously with initial growth. With varying degrees of effort and success, the early economic and political elites of each city attempted various strategies, particularly large civic infrastructural projects, to stimulate indigenous growth and attract northern investment capital. From these initial experiences, prevailing business and political traditions about how development could occur emerged in each city. These traditions represented local experience about the appropriate ways to promote growth that would affect how entrepreneurs perceived and acted on the new opportunities of the 20th century. Among the more important early 20th century potential opportunities were oil exploration and refining, airplane manufacture (during the 1920s and again during the defense buildup of the late 1930s), and petrochemicals. The broad industrial character of current high-technology employment is linked to the emergence of these traditions. The most successful cities were those whose entrepreneurs harnessed the resources of both the public and private sectors to promote a continuous, aggressive, unified, and narrow progrowth agenda.