The Decision-Making Process of Relocations: What, Where, How and Why?

In the recent years, the qualitative evolution of relocations (from low cost offshoring to more technological intensive relocations) became a new concern in the political debate. Focusing these new trends, the aim of this paper is to better understand relocations from the firms’ point of view within their regional and sectoral contexts. In the first part, we reformulate relocations by adopting a broad definition of them, considered as a specific dimension of firms’ mobility. Considering that relocation is a temporal and a decision-making process we then cross three analytical dimensions (referring to three analytical spaces): relocations as a productive problem (“relational space” for coordination); relocations in a territorial dimension (“geographical space”) and relocations as a complex decision process (“political space”). The relational space for coordination is analysed in the second part through the concepts of the economics of proximity. We then cross this approach with an institutional conception of the firm by articulating the four main relations at the firm and sectoral levels (financial, labour, commercial and purchasing relations). The grid is finally applied to the specific case of Aquitaine in order to identify the conditions of anchoring and mobility of firms in space.