Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
primacy of global cities such as Amsterdam, London, and New York has changed
little over the last 500 years. While Polanyi's distinction has been mapped onto the
global economy (Maskell and Malmberg
1999
), such works typically focus on
industry and have paid scant attention to the globalization of services.
The continued importance of global cities in the face of a networked space of
flows is worth emphasizing. Repeated proclamations that telecommunications
would allow everyone to engage in telecommuting, dispersing all functions and
spelling the obsolescence of cities (O'Brien
1992
; Cairncross
1997
) and leading to
a ''borderless world'' (Ohmae
1990
), have fallen flat in the face of the persistence
of growth in dense urbanized places. In fact, telecommunications are a rather poor
substitute for face-to-face meetings, the medium through which sensitive corporate
interactions occur, particularly when the information involved is irregular,
proprietary, and unstandardized in nature. Most managers spend the bulk of their
working time engaged in face-to-face contact, such as in meetings, and no elec-
tronic technology can yet allow for the subtlety and nuances critical to such
encounters. Indeed, financial and business services firms not only pay high rents to
be near city centers, and endure the congestion such locations entail, but spend
lavishly to fly their executives around the world to meet with their counterparts in
person. Even electronic conferencing, such as that offered by Skype, has been
unable to substitute entirely for direct personal contact. For this reason, a century
of technological change, from the telephone to fiber optics, has left most high-
wage, white collar, administrative command and control functions clustered in
downtown areas. In contrast, telecommunications are ideally suited for the
transmission of routinized, standardized forms of data, facilitating the dispersal of
functions involved with their processing (i.e., back offices) to low-wage regions.
Jones (
2002
) offers an insightful critique of the global cities thesis, noting that it
tends to oversimplify the nature of corporate command and control functions by
privileging physical location over networks, i.e., by focusing on the concentration
of head offices. Rather, he argues, corporate power is wielded throughout the
networks of international firms. He argues (p. 343) that ''to use physical locations
as an epistemological framework for theorizing command and control is to a large
extent arbitrary and obfuscates the socially constituted complexity of managerial
power within the transnational firm.'' The corporate decision making process is
deeply embedded in various layers of the firm, including localized forms of
knowledge not available at headquarters, and is often a negotiated outcome of
groups involved in constant interaction with one another. Thus, by refocusing
attention on the social practices that constitute multinational firms, actor-network
theory has led the global cities literature to become more sensitive to issues of
power and scale. In this light, all cities are global cities in that they are all
enveloped in worldwide networks of goods, people, capital, and information.
In short, despite the near ubiquity of the internet in economically advanced
countries, global cities retain their importance, and continue to exert hegemony,
precisely because they facilitate the sorts of interactions that cannot be conducted
easily over the web.
