Economic geography is concerned with the spatial patterns of production, distribution and consumption of goods and services, and with the areal variation of economic activities over the surface of the earth. The spatial arrangement of industrial activity is know as industrial geography. Industrial geographers seek to apply theory and models towards the explanation of the structure within which the functions of control and decision making are exercised in the process of industrial production. The organization of production is the key to understanding the location of economic activities.

I am an economic geographer with a specialization in industrial location. My interests are in the producer services that support other sectors, federal, state, local government, and economic activities in private households. Within the realm of services, I am interested in high-tech services, particularly software production and design. Geographers have looked at the spatial development of the high-tech industry and found agglomeration in California, Arizona, Texas, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. However, the main focus has been on the spatial diffusion of high-tech hardware production. Even though the software industry is the largest growing service sector in the United States' economy, it has been ignored in geographic literature.

I wish to develop an aggregate level analysis of the intermetropolitan location of computer programming, data processing, and other computer related services (SIC 737). I will use the economic census to show regional trends of employment and revenue. Methodologically, I use quantitative analysis, including factor, multi-variate, and logit analysis, to identify and explain agglomeration of computer software firms. My goal is to answer the following questions:

Are software firms fixed geographically? If so, is it because they're tied to a type of human resource or industry? And, is there a intermetropolitan locational difference between business and individual oriented software production?