ABSTRACT
As Castells’s (2000) The Network Society and Sassen’s (2001) The Global City are so influential, path-breaking and omnipresent in current globalization and world city discourses, little value would be taken from (yet another) critical analysis of the space of flows and the ‘global city thesis’ (see for example Beaverstock et al. 2000), especially when Taylor’s (2004) World City Network has firmly squared all the circles in his reading of the Castellian and Sassen spatial logic. From Castells (2000:443) we already know that the third layer of the space of flows is composed of ‘the dominant managerial elites’, who occupy the command and control func-tions of global cities. In a similar vein, Sassen (2000) has discussed how the concentration of advanced producer services in ‘the new production complex’ (2000:71) constitutes a significant reproductive synergy for the intensification and concentration of command and control in the global city. Such an argument gives credence not only to the productive nature of ‘face-to-face’ contact, where ‘time replaces weight…as a force of agglomeration’ (ibid.: 72), but also to intercity relations, both virtual and physical, as it is now a requirement for a professional workforce to deliver accurate information, advice, solutions and specialism across borders in the knowledge service economy (Beaverstock 2002). But, after briefly airing the main propositions of the new relational spatial logic of understanding world cities in a connected society, in the rest of this chapter it is important to bring value to the debate which unpicks one significant agent of inter-city relations: the firm. My intervention in this edited collection, therefore, is to discuss inter-city relations through the organizational role of the advanced producer service firm, which will add process-led ‘flesh’ to the skeletal frame of the world city network (Beaverstock et al. 2000; Taylor 2004). In my reading of inter-city relations, it is the firm and their client-supplier relations that are the dynamic ‘shakers and movers’ of the world city network, who have agency because they cannot ply their global business without expert labour fixed and fluid at the point of demand, interfacing with a global clientele where they sell expertise, bespoke solutions and reputation (see Beaverstock et al. 2002).
