Entropy as a Measure of the Areal Concentration of Water-Oriented Industry

The concepts of entropy and numbers equivalent are applied to the configuration of water intensive and non-water intensive employment data by county in the Tennessee Valley region to provide an overall measure of the areal concentration of employment and population. If the underlying distribution of employees is assumed to be governed by the multinomial distribution, it is shown that there have been shifts in microlocational characteristics, since the role chance can play is minimal. Non-water intensive manufacturing employment has become much more areally dispersed over the study period 1959–1968, but it appears that there has been neither a decrease nor an increase in concentration in water intensive employment. Finally, the two types of employment are concentrated to markedly different degrees.