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Personal and Intangible Factors

Several communities may remain in the running at the end of the plant location evaluation process. It is at this point that the personal and intangible attributes of communities under consideration come into prominence. These attributes can be described best in terms of community leadership and attitudes, housing, schools, recreation, shopping, and overall community image. Most large companies are also concerned about their corporate image, and they want to be a good corporate neighbor. Their impressions of a potential location can be greatly enhanced if community leaders create an image of acceptance, cooperation, and fairness. This is a much easier task if community leaders can exhibit a history of creating a favorable environment for existing industrial plants. This is one factor that a community or area has a great deal of control. Personal factors have become increasingly important in recent years with the shift in industrial organization away from owner-manager firms and toward the corporate structure. In modern corporations, management and ownership are separated. Corporation owners (stockholders) do not make location decisions, managers do. Managers live with the plants, owners do not. Clearly, corporation management must select plant locations that will be profitable and earn sufficient net revenues for long term growth of the firm and to yield stockholders a satisfactory and competitive return to their investments. Beyond this constraint of a satisfactory profit, corporate managers may tend to emphasize personal factors rather than maximizing profits. The modern decision-making framework tends to increase the influence of desirable characteristics of plant location as a place to live and work more than would be expected in the owner-manager framework of the past. Worker productivity is always affected by these personal factors and can lead to attracting quality labor and management to a particular geographic area. Management is aware of these factors when considering plant location.
Making a community more attractive to industry also creates a better place to live for existing residents. Thus, even if a new industry does not come, the community reaps the benefit of its efforts.