Skip Navigation


Journal of Economic Geography Advance Access originally published online on June 9, 2009
Journal of Economic Geography 2009 9(5):663-677; doi:10.1093/jeg/lbp025
This Article
Right arrow Full Text
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
9/5/663    most recent
lbp025v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Muellerleile, C. M.
Related Collections
Right arrow G34 - Mergers; Acquisitions; Restructuring; Corporate Governance
Right arrow L21 - Business Objectives of the Firm
Right arrow L93 - Air Transportation
Right arrow O16 - Economic Development: Financial Markets; Saving and Capital Investment; Corporate Finance and Governance
Right arrow O18 - Regional, Urban, and Rural Analyses
Right arrow R11 - Regional Economic Activity: Growth, Development, and Changes
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?


© The Author (2009). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Financialization takes off at Boeing

Christopher M. Muellerleile*

*Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA. email <cmuellerleil{at}wisc.edu>

JEL classifications: G34, L21, L93, O16, O18, R11

This article examines the 2001 dislocation of the headquarters of the iconic US aerospace company, Boeing, out of the Puget Sound region of the State of Washington, its ancestral manufacturing base. It argues the rationale for the exit was the desire on the part of Boeing's increasingly finance-focused executives to detach and disembed the ‘brains’ of the company from the product-focused, engineering-based corporate culture embedded in Puget Sound. The article attempts to ground the logic of financialization by examining how it emerged at, and was shaped by one particular company. I employ economic geographers’ conceptions of place-based corporate culture, and societal, territorial and network embeddedness (Hess, 2004, Progress in Human Geography, 28: 165–186) to explain how financialization and corporate dislocation can enable each other. The article also briefly discusses Boeing's eventual decision to re-embed its headquarters in downtown Chicago, Illinois.

Keywords: Boeing, financialization, embeddedness, corporate culture, Puget Sound, Chicago
Date submitted: 3 November 2008     Date accepted: 1 May 2009


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?




Disclaimer: Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.