Peter Dicken

An internationally renowned economic geographer and ‘guru’ of globalization, Dicken spent his early career researching the clothing industry of the Northwest of England. In 1972, he published Location in Space: A Theoretical Approach to Economic Geography with Peter Lloyd, but began to question the neoclassical approach to economic geography during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Adopting a more ‘behaviorist’ approach, he developed a global perspective to explain regional and local economic change through the action of the firm, and transnational corporation. Dicken has worked on many different topics, including transnational corporations and territorial redevelopment; Japanese foreign direct investment and the sogo shosha; the study of firm business strategy and behavior; and more recently, global production networks and relationality in globalization. He is widely known as the author of one of the most influential textbooks in economic geography – Global Shift: Industrial Change in a Turbulent World – which became a forerunner for studying contemporary economic globalization.