Managing global cities through corporate network analysis

Today, academics and policymakers generally concentrate on subnational regions as the essential unit of economic activity, and most studies fail to adequately conceptualize urban regional development in an era of globalization (Dicken and Malmberg 2001). It is arguable, however, that global production networks and regional assets need to be coupled, mediating activities across different geographical and organizational scales (Coe et al. 2004; Dicken et al. 2001). This concept is not entirely new. Friedmann and Wolff (1982) conceptualized global cities as “command centers”, regulating the “international division of labor”, and Gereffi et al. (1994) defined global commodity chains as interorganizational networks of products that increasingly tie enterprises and states together within the world economy. These initial approaches have led to various studies on cities and globalization (e.g. Sassen 1991; Amin and Thrift 1992; Castells 1996; Cohen 1981; Meijer 1993; Abbott 1997; Godfrey and Zhou 1999), but the number of empirical global-city network studies remains quite limited. It is said that this is due to scarcity of “relational” data (Smith and Timberlake 1995; Taylor et al. 2002). To date, only a handful of relational studies exist — for example, on international banks (Meyer 1986), advanced producer firms (Taylor 2004), multinational corporation (MNC) governance (Rozenblat and Pumain 2006; Alderson and Beckfield 2004; Wall 2009), and corporate directorates (Carroll 2007). These studies attempt to understand the significance of corporate ownership without privileging one particular geographic scale (Coe et al. 2004).

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