ABSTRACT
This chapter is based on an exploratory study of transnational architects and related professionals working in the building-design industry. The latter constitutes merely one sector where a growing number of companies flourish in what Sassen (2000) calls the 'producer service industries'. These have become "a central feature of current growth in developed societies" (ibid: 61) as the degree of 'service intensity' (Sassen, 2002: 16) required in all industries and sectors has grown. At the same time, firms in these producer service industries are responding to economic globalization, the de-regulatory, market-opening consequences of neo-liberal policies and the rise ofpost-Fordist flexible capitalism worldwide. Thus, they seek to extend their provision of essential support services made available not only for the benefit of transnational corporations (TNCs), as the latter spread their operations globally, but also for other producer service firms in adjacent sectors - such as certain law firms which have followed not just their corporate manufacturing but also their accountancy and banking clients across the world (Beaverstock, Smith and Taylor, 1999, 2000). Like other businesses providing producer services, the assets and investments of firms in the building-design industry are grounded primarily in human skills rather than in material assets; in intellectual or symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1984). As such, they are quintessentially at the heart of the symbolic-wealth economy.
