Tar Heel industry on parade.

• Position: Business and industry in North Carolina

These days, in so many ways, the economy marches to a different drummer.

Tobacco and textile mills, agriculture and manufacturing. Then probably basketball and Air Jordan. Those are the knee-jerk responses you'd likely get if you asked a Californian or a Northerner what North Carolina brings to mind. But His Airness has retired, at least from hoops, and switched to baseball. North Carolina's economy is switching, too.

Back in 1972, 6.7% of the state's jobs were tied to the land. Agriculture provided paychecks for 175,000 Tar Heels. Twenty years later, that percentage had dropped to 2.4% while employment had grown 53% as more than 1.35 million new jobs were created. Manufacturing accounted for 74,000 of them. But its share shrank from 30% to 21% as retail and service saw their slices of the pie increase by 3.8% and 7.1% respectively.

So even though manufacturing is the biggest employer in 53 of the state's 100 counties, there are 30,000 more service than factory jobs statewide. And that doesn't include those often grouped in with the service sector - the military, government (including public schools), utilities, wholesale and retail sales.

It's no surprise service jobs dominate the urban areas, but some rural counties have seen a spurt in service growth - from Camden, Chowan and Currituck in the northeast to Clay and Macon in the southwest. Two decades ago, Camden, Clay and Currituck were farming counties, and Chowan's largest employment was in manufacturing. Macon was the only service county of the five.

This is not to say that manufacturing and agriculture are no longer vital to the state's economy. A...