ABSTRACT
The significant rise in global commodity trade, foreign direct investment, and global financial exchange during the 1980s was a key impetus to the contemporaneous sharp jump in attention of urban geographers and other social scientists to conceptualizing and empirically examining the global network of cities. Scholars accepted an assumption that the new international division of labor recast global relations, and this has not been questioned subsequently. Research during the 1980s focused on global corporations, corporate services, financial institutions, telecommunications, and transportation as actors or modes of linking global cities. 218This broad coverage framed subsequent research to the present, but the theory of the global network of cities did not advance much beyond the initial formulations. After 1990 some embellishments were made to the theory, and these were widely accepted. Although other theoretical proposals were made, none gained wide acceptance; nevertheless, scholars made some progress in clarifying the behavior of business actors. Researchers accumulated rich empirical evidence about the global network of cities, including extensive evidence on network relations. If scholars are to make greater progress in understanding the global network of cities, the theory needs deepening. A reexamination of the assumption that the new international division of labor has recast global relations might encourage greater emphasis on the principles of the intermediary behavior of the actors most responsible for global network relations.
