Geography Reference
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occur, particularly when the information involved is irregular, proprietary,
and unstandardized in nature. Most managers spend the bulk of their work-
ing 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 (Storper and Venables 2004). Indeed,
fi
financial and business ser-
vices
firms not only pay high rents to be near city centers, and endure the
severe congestion such locations often entail, but spend lavishly to
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fly their
executives around the world to meet with their counterparts in person. Even
electronic conferencing has been unable to substitute for direct personal
contact. In this vein, McDowell and Court (1994a, 1994b) showed that gen-
der is important to the performativity of actors engaged in the provision of
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fl
financial services in London, which largely hinge on the networks of trust
among white businessmen, a process in which the appearance and behavior
of actors is critical to the reproduction both of global banking systems and
the City's premier position within them. Gender roles thus cemented rela-
tions among male actors and worked to marginalize the attempts of women
to “break into the club.” Such a line of thought does not collapse the import-
ance of regional production systems to the socio-psychology of individuals;
on the other hand, as the literatures on
flexible production and actor-network
theory demonstrate, neither can the functionality of large agglomerative
complexes exist without precisely those types of interactions. For this reason,
a century of technological change, from the telephone to
fl
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, facili-
tating the dispersal of functions involved with their processing (i.e., back
o
fi
ces) to low-wage regions.
Global cities thus “fold” space and time around the world to their advan-
tage; they are simultaneously global and local, as actor-network theory sug-
gests. Murdoch (1998: 362) notes that this view “directs our attention to the
means by which scale becomes de
ned within particular networks. Spatial
scales are marked out and distinguished in line with the priorities for action
which prevail within networks.” Jones (2002) of
fi
ers 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 of
ff
ces. Rather,
he argues (p. 343), corporate power is wielded throughout the networks of
international
firms: “to use physical locations as an epistemological frame-
work for theorizing command and control is to a large extent arbitrary and
obfuscates the socially constituted complexity of managerial power within
the transnational
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firm.” The corporate decision-making process is deeply
embedded in various layers of the
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firm, including localized forms of know-
ledge not available at headquarters, and is often a negotiated outcome of
groups involved in constant interaction with one another. Thus, by refocus-
ing attention on the social practices that constitute multinational
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fi
rms,
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