Beschreibung:
Data on production and management practices across firms are scarce.Therefore studies of rural and urban industrial development have usually abstracted from this issue or have invoked product cycle theory to explain comparative urban and rural productive ingenuity. Several qualitative studies of rural production have contradicted the product cycle hypotheses, but attempts to generalize these results have not succeeded. An attempt is made here to test the product cycle explanation of industrial location using the registry of firms with ISO 9000 certification in nine southern states. These data suggest a bifurcation of rural counties. Urban and rural counties containing certified firms have been much more likely to increase the number of such firms, but in those counties without certified firms the probability of new certified firms has declined