In this study an empirically based examination of the importance of the labor environment, defined in terms of late-stage product-cycle expectations, to the location of branch plants in the nonmetropolitan US South is presented. The data were derived from a questionnaire-based survey of selected branch-plant managers in eight southern states. The findings suggest that labor factors have been important to the location of branch plants, and that the product-cycle explanation has merit; however, the findings also suggest that the locational behavior of these plants has been a response to conditions not clearly embraced by the product-cycle conceptualization, leading to the conclusion that a more comprehensive model is required to explain industrial location in the rural South.
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