By 1970, the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War legacies had provoked new forms of scholarship and novel approaches to regional and industrial planning. Bennett Harrison was a key figure in the shift from regional science toward a politically committed scholarship that incorporated new radical and institutionalist theories with creative empirical analyses and links to real world practice in economic development. Harrison, I argue, saw regions as loci of capitalist conflict and change, not as the rarified analytical units of regional science or as the faceless regional actors of the “new regionalism.” The actions of corporations and labor unions and the conflict between firms and between capital and labor were central to his interpretation of regions, which he approached in an unabashedly inductive manner. In this article, I review Harrison’s regional writings and make the case for the durability of his insights and his path-making contributions to the field.
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