World cities and territorial states under conditions of contemporary globalization II: Looking forward, looking ahead

The influence of globalization on the future study of political geography is investigated through research on world cities. It is argued that political geography, like most social science, has been excessively state-centric in its organisation and that this will not help in understanding new transnational processes within contemporary globalization. Study of the state should not be abandoned, of course, but it must be set in a new context where much politics takes place beyond the state. This is illustrated through using the world city network as an alternative spatial framework to the world political map. The political geography of the twenty first century will have to incorporate traditional concern for political areas with new concerns for power networks in more subtle geographies than heretofore.     

Global production networks in the passenger aviation industry

Although the number of directions which geographical research on transport is taking has recently increased, the extent to which transport geography capitalises on theoretical advancements made in other sub-disciplines of human geography is still fairly limited. This especially pertains to economic geography which, in contrast to the predominantly positivist and quantitative transport geography, has developed over the last few decades a more post-positivist and qualitative profile. By means of focusing on passenger air transport – one of the most neglected industries in economic geography – this paper aims to help bridge this gap. Three under-researched aspects of air transport are identified and a combination of two economic-geographical approaches – global production networks (GPN) and evolutionary economic geography (EEG) – is advocated as a useful conceptual basis for further, more qualitative and more critical research on this dynamic sector. The paper argues that GPN and EEG would help research on air transport to: (1) employ network thinking beyond the infrastructural understanding of networks of air connections and thus better explain the multi-actor nature of the aviation sector, (2) complement the research on supra-national and national regulatory frameworks with more attention to the array of sub-national environments that shape the aviation industry ‘from below’, and (3) explore how the relations between aviation and economic development are moulded by different place-specific institutional factors. To lay foundations under further research the paper conceptualises the aviation industry as a global production network and uses the example of Polish passenger air transport to highlight the paper’s key empirical implications.     

Corporate knowledge transfer via interlocking directorates: a network analysis approach

This paper explores spatial changes to knowledge transfer by Canadian and American corporate networks from 1976 to 1996. Results support facets of a World Cities approach for Canada. Toronto lies at the top of the hierarchy, while Montreal, Calgary, and Vancouver fall into a third tier of specialized regional cities. The American knowledge network also possesses facets of the world cities approach. The world city, New York, lies at the top of the hierarchy. Further down, Chicago is a specialized national city, while a number of regional centers have emerged to play a larger role over the twenty-year study period. A third tier of cities has emerged to play the critical role of specialized regional cities. This geographical phenomenon can be explained in terms of industry, headquarters locations, and network maturity. Finance, insurance and real estate, as well as “other manufacturing” are three sectors of the economy that are prominent in the network. In Canada, these sectors have increasingly centralized in Toronto while decentralizing in the United States. Similarly, the headquarters location of American firms is decentralizing from New York and Chicago, while Canadian headquarters continue to be centralized in Toronto. Finally, results indicate that the potential for knowledge transfer depends upon maturity of the system under investigation. The mature US network with a large pool of qualified business individuals is better suited for knowledge transfer at the regional level. The Canadian network is less developed and not appropriate for regional systems of knowledge transfer. The result is a Canadian corporate knowledge threshold that encompasses the entire country while a number of much smaller corporate knowledge thresholds appear across the United States.     

Network configurations and R&D activities of the ICT industry in Suzhou municipality, China

This paper analyzes the network structure and R&D activities of the information and communication technology (ICT) industry in Suzhou municipality, known previously for its local state-directed Sunan model of development. Suzhou, however, has been undergoing dramatic restructuring to remake itself into a globalizing production center. We highlight the significance of the Chinese state and local/regional assets in shaping the trajectories of globalization and regional development, and the increasing importance of domestic markets and regional clusters/agglomeration for foreign ventures. We have found that Suzhou’s development path, heavily dependent on external forces, has made Suzhou a TNC (transnational corporation) satellite district. We also find that the ICT industry in Suzhou has a dual-structure, segmented between foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs) and domestic firms. TNCs tend to network among themselves and their interfirm networks are increasingly domestic and regionally embedded in the Yangtze River Delta, while the linkages between TNCs and local firms are weak. We argue that there is a series of technological, structural, spatial, and institutional “mismatches” that limits the establishment of “global pipelines” of knowledge exchange. We hold that the nature of global-local networks is contingent upon regional endogenous capacities and the specific ways in which global capital interacts with local institutions. Therefore, perspectives on TNCs’ local embeddedness must be positioned in their regional/external networks. We also analyze the constraints placed on Suzhou’s development into an innovative city and promote the integration of global and local/regional assets through development of indigenous capacities.     

Mobilizing the ethical consumer in South Africa

This paper presents a critical engagement with current initiatives for ethically-labeled goods in South Africa, thus offering an intervention in a literature on ethical consumption that has previously prioritized the global North. Through an interview-based methodology supported by focus groups in the Western Cape, the paper attends specifically to the strategies shaping recent forms of ethical consumption in South Africa on the part of business and civil society. Campaigns and strategies associated with three of the most prominent ethical labeling initiatives in South Africa—Proudly South African, Fairtrade Label South Africa and the Southern African Sustainable Seafood Initiative (SASSI)—are evaluated. Barnett et al.’s (2011: 90) notion of “mobilizing the ethical consumer” is brought into conversation with ethical consumption literature on local embeddedness in order to assess the ways in which the organizations responsible for these initiatives combine globalizing business and political networks of responsibility with local institutions and values in South Africa. The role played by the discursive construction of a growing South African ‘middle class’ is also acknowledged as part of the process of encouraging ethical consumption on the part of these actors. In conclusion, it is suggested that understanding ethical consumption in South Africa, as elsewhere, requires sensitivity to both transnational networks of globalizing responsibility and localized expressions of ethical consumption.     

Identifying China’s leading world city: a network approach

This paper reports our research on China’s world cities. Formal network analysis of air passenger linkages for recent years among China’s most populous cities and among many of the world’s largest cities allows us to identify the country’s leading world city from among the leading Mainland candidates, Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. We theorize our findings about China’s world cities in relation to both global forces (and China’s increasing entanglement with them) and the policies and actions of the national state. We examine the national and global urban network through a longitudinal, two-level analysis of airline passenger travel for four time points between about 1990 and 2005. We show that Beijing was China’s leading world city at the beginning of the time period, a status it lost nationally in as early as 1995, and then globally 10 years later. On the other hand Shanghai became China’s leading world city, and it acquired this status first nationally in 2000, and then globally in 2005. The changing status of the Chinese capital corresponds to the country’s increasing involvement with the capitalist world economy. Shanghai’s ascendance as the leading world city in China may indicate that global forces have come to play an increasingly important role relative to that of the developmental state.

Biosecurity and the multiplication of crises in the Egyptian agri-food industry

Through a case study of Egypt’s agri-food industry this paper examines biosecurity as a set of technologies, institutions, and practices that attempt to govern national agri-food industries and global agri-food trade by marrying a political economy perspective and an analysis of ‘nature–society relations’. Consistent with other agri-food industries in the global South, Egypt’s agri-food industry has undergone waves of corporate consolidation during the neoliberal period. By detailing the growth of the poultry industry and the endemic spread of HPAI H5N1 (avian flu), this paper presents an argument that the industry grew and consolidated through emergent and recurrent zoonotic and plant diseases, the management of which has been governed in part by biosecurity measures.     

The enlargement of local power in trans-scalar strategies of planning: recent tendencies in two European cases

The increasing ‘trans-scalar’ conditions of urbanity imply unique opportunities and threats for urban policies. When drawing up strategic urban policies, cities are confronted with the dominance of higher level policy programmes and even more so with the hegemonic power of globalizing markets. Could urban policies also undergo a similar change and actively pursue the enlargement of local power and energies by becoming actively involved in the higher level scaled networks? By building on useful concepts of urban regime theory and more recent rescaling theories, the authors argue that this element of ‘foreign policy’ should be integrated in the core analysis of urban policy approaches. The case is explored and illustrated in two European examples of strategic urban planning, namely Barcelona and Copenhagen. The cases provide evidence of the enlargement of local power via active trans-scalar policies. For civic groups, however, this strategy still appears to be a bridge too far in both cases.     

Theorising middle class consumption from the global South: A study of everyday ethics in South Africa’s Western Cape

Emerging research on the increasing significance of consumption in the global South is concerned with its links to the globalizing middle classes. Against the backdrop of optimism invested in the new global middle classes to fuel consumption-led growth, this paper contributes to new debate about the articulations and significance of ethical consumption in the global South. Missing from much current mainstream policy, media and academic debate is acknowledgement of the diversity of the global middle classes and an understanding of how ethical interpretations and behaviour differ in various consumer markets around the world. In response, this paper draws on qualitative research in South Africa’s Western Cape to explore the cultural significance of everyday ethical realities in shaping consumption in the global South. In addition to addressing the relative absence of research into ethical consumption in global South contexts, the paper makes two key contributions based our findings. First, it challenges the tendency, particularly in economic discourses, to generalise about the ‘new’ global middle class consumers by highlighting the significance of locality and context in shaping consumption practices in the Western Cape; specifically it finds that, for diverse middle class consumers, thrift is an important ethical choice and practice determining consumption patterns. Second, it highlights the significance of everyday ethical practices in shaping consumption in the Western Cape, focusing specifically on how thrift is imbricated in concerns with not just economic constraint, but also care, habit and aspiration. The paper concludes with reflections on the wider implications of these findings and suggests that they illustrate a need to theorise ethical consumption from contexts in the global South, on their own terms.     

A thousand years of loneliness? Globalization from the perspective of a city in a European periphery

Most cities face the challenge of increasing global and local change. Much of what has been said about cities in a globalized world has been concerned with large metropolitan cites. It has been postulated that increased competitiveness is the relevant response, and that urban governance has to change from managerialism to entrepeneurialism in order to cope with this challenge. The first part of the paper discusses some aspects of this body of theory, and the relevance for sub-national regional capitals. It also discusses how the scope of strategies depend on changing national and regional policies. The second part uses the case of Trondheim to discuss how these cities perceive and deal with globalization. Four policy options are discussed; the clientist strategy, the competitive strategy, the isolationist strategy and finally the option of doing nothing at all. The article concludes that global challenges will force local government in small cities to forge new strategies, but the preferred option is a clientist strategy rather than an entrepreneurial one, and the scope of strategy is national rather than global. Thus, when dealing with small peripheral cities and globalization, the range of perspectives must be extended beyond entrepreneurialism and competitiveness.     

Living it up: Super-rich enclave and transnational elite urbanism in Singapore

Notwithstanding the burgeoning scholarship on enclave urbanism, urban gating has often been pigeonholed as an intra-urban development that is somewhat ‘epiphenomenal’ to wider global processes. Overlooked in the literature is how gated communities as globally-oriented spaces are intertwined with the transnational lifeworlds of its elite inhabitants. As key sites where transnational super-rich elites organize their consumption and reproduce their purportedly global lifestyle, gated communities are now emerging as a new ‘meta-geographical form’ that circulates in and around rapidly globalizing cities. Drawing on the case study of Sentosa Cove, an exclusive waterfront gated community in Singapore catering to ‘high net-worth’ residents, this paper critically examines how elite localities and transnationalism are being socially and spatially reproduced in the city-state. To this end, the paper makes a distinct contribution by bringing to bear critical transnationalism perspectives in the understanding of urban gating and the privileged geographies of the global super-rich.     

Labor geographies in a time of early globalization: Strikes against Singer in Scotland and Russia in the early 20th century

This essay provides analyses of labor strikes at two early sites (first quarter of the 20th century) of the global production line – Singer Manufacturing Company’s factories at Clydebank, Scotland and Podolsk, Russia – and the labor management strategies that led to and resulted from these particular enactments of power. I focus on the degree to which Singer and its employees were embedded in local, regional and national contexts, and how and why workers’ agency mattered to the course of early globalization. I also suggest that such analyses provide significant understanding of how and why early global production was both different from and similar to contemporary globalization. By so doing, this analysis contributes to theoretical discussions concerning degrees of territorial embeddedness of transnational corporations, particularly in regard to changes over time as well as geographic scale, and adds historical nuance to theoretical questions concerning labor geographies under conditions of globalization.     

Policy mobilities,territorial knowledge dynamics and the role of KIBS: Exploring conceptual synergies of formerly discrete approaches

Although contemporary policy making is substantially affected by consultants, little is known about the interconnection of their role inside policy making networks and their key product – knowledge. This paper matches the approaches on Policy Mobilities (PM) and Territorial Knowledge Dynamics (TKD) to fill this theoretical gap. By exploring the synergies of both concepts, a research agenda is suggested that enables to investigate the multi-facetted entanglements of knowledge and policy making dynamics as well as what stake consultants have in this complex assemblage. Accordingly, this paper claims appreciation of ‘variegated consultocracies’ rather than global homogeneity of consultants’ engagement in policy making processes by explicating better integration of ‘scale, ‘time’, and actors’ embeddedness into PM. The paper thus primarily aims to provide a solid theoretical and methodological basis for exploring the complex dynamics consultants take part in, and how they in turn impact policy making processes.     

Community resilience,globalization, and transitional pathways of decision-making

This article investigates the impacts of globalization processes on community resilience. It argues that theoretical concepts such as transition theory can provide a lens through which resilience pathways at community level can be better understood, and proposes a framework focused on a social resilience approach for understanding community resilience as the conceptual space at the intersection between economic, social and environmental capital. It argues that certain types of communities are losing resilience through increased embeddedness into globalized pathways of decision-making, while other communities may be gaining resilience, although not one system is either totally resilient or totally vulnerable. Striking the right ‘balance’ between communities and their scalar interactions with the global level is key for maximization of community resilience: while too much isolation of a community may be bad in light of over-dependency on local resources, skills and people, ‘over-globalization’, with possible loss of autonomy and identity, may be equally fraught with problems. In particular, relocalized communities have, so far, not shown much tangible success, as almost all members of the relocalization process at community level are simultaneously embedded within the global capitalist system through their dependencies on global economic processes.     

Repackaging globalization: A case study of the advertising industry in China

This paper analyzes the transformation of China’s advertising industry as a result of China’s economic reforms and the globalization of the advertising industry. Spatially clustered in the city-regions of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, the industry has been structurally and operationally integrated with the global advertising giants, as well as developing local strategies to attract the interest of local consumer markets. While the entry of global multinational advertising businesses has compelled China’s advertisers to accept and adapt to the industry’s globalized institutions, standards, operational procedures and corporate culture, the transformation of China’s advertising industry is best understood as a consequence of the interaction between globalization and localization.     

Torched Earth: Dimensions of extraterritorial nationalism in the Chinese and Russian Olympic torch relays

Spanning tens of thousands of kilometers around the world, the torch relays for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics and the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics were the two longest in history and arguably some of the most provocative. As spectacles designed by committees with close affiliations to the state in both China and Russia, the relays also constituted state-orchestrated extraterritorial displays of nationalism. This paper uses these events as case studies to theorize the role of spaces beyond a country’s borders in state performances and mobilization of nationalism. I first sketch out the evolving relationships between the state, space, and nationalism in Russia and China while paying close attention to how longstanding narratives of universal and civilizational nationalism in each country are unfolding in a globalizing, deterritorializing world. Then, I examine how the international legs of the Olympic torch relays provided opportunities for the Chinese and Russian states to expand the national geo-body significantly outside state borders in a variety of dimensions. The Beijing relay passed through cities important for the Chinese diaspora and trade routes while the Sochi relay traveled to the global commons of the North Pole and outer space. Both of these state displays of nationalism supported the extraterritorial expansion of a nation’s geo-body and socio-spatial consciousness, suggesting the creation of a more spatially unbounded national identity not necessarily linked to the contained territory over which the state exercises sovereignty.     

Immigrants and world cities: from the hyper-diverse to the bypassed

A relationship between globalization, cities and immigration is increasingly apparent. Whether one is trying to understand Dubai, Toronto, or London, immigrants are culturally, economically, and spatially changing cities in significant ways. This study compares the roster of world cities with that of major urban immigrant destinations. The number of major urban immigrant destinations is growing due to the acceleration of immigration driven by income differentials, social networks and various state and local policies to recruit skilled and unskilled labor and replenish population. This study will present urban-level data on the foreign-born for 145 metropolitan areas of over 1 million people. It will focus on the world’s 19 metropolitan areas with over 1 million foreign-born residents. Analysis of the data suggests that there is a range of destination types. Although not all world cities are immigrant gateways, many are.     

The Asia-Pacific Rim's transport and telecommunications systems: spatial structure and corporate control since the mid-1980s

There is a need to move from discussing the Asia-Pacific Rim's leading port cities as shipping centres measured by container throughput. This shift in focus involves examining how different transport and telecommunications systems are interacting with each other at an international scale under the power and control of major world operators. Using a three-level network framework an attempt is made to illustrate and explain the formation of multilayered trade/communications corridors and hubs/headquarters in the Asia-Pacific Rim since the mid-1980s and to identify the factors affecting them. From this examination of spatial structure and corporate control three levels of cities in the Asia-Pacific Rim are recognised: first level cities with strong corporate representation in container shipping, air cargo, air passenger and telecommunications; second level cities with marked corporate representation in one but not all four modes; and third level cities with no marked corporate representation in any mode but with strong throughput. The third level includes the Asia-Pacific Rim's ‘true’ port cities. Perhaps the ambiguous category ‘port city’ should be reserved for them. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Neo-liberalising corporate social responsibility: A political economy of corporate citizenship

In this paper we situate the rise of corporate social responsibility in the context of a re-casting of the boundaries between corporate- and state-centred regulation. We argue that this process can be understood in a theoretical framework of “rolling-out” neoliberalisation. We focus firstly upon an emergent CSR consultancy industry within the UK context, demonstrating that there is now a network of organisations dedicated to making profit out of socially-responsible corporate behaviour. These organisations have helped to re-define the nature and meaning of the private sector. Then we interpret global framework agreements on corporate behaviour (such as the UN Global Compact, the Equator Principles, and the World Economic Forum’s Global Corporate Citizenship Initiative) as examples of how neoliberalism is created in and through new “in-between” spaces that set the rules of political action. Subsequently, we note that some NGOs have recently recognised the limits on campaigning for more socially responsible corporate activity, and re-connect these concerns with longer-term debates on corporate voluntarism versus state-centred regulation. We conclude that demonstrating how hegemony is constructed in and through neo-liberalising corporate social responsibility remains to be fully explored, but argue that it is beneficial to consider the diversity of political projects involved in this ongoing process.     

The evolution of the electronics industry in Johor (Malaysia): Strategic coupling,adaptiveness, adaptation,and the role of agency

Bringing together concepts from the global production networks and evolutionary economic geography literature, this article empirically examines the trajectory of the electrical and electronics industry in Johor (Malaysia). Based on trends in firm entries and exit as well as interviews with companies, we find limited robustness in the industry’s trajectory. While there is evidence of the role of ‘structure’ in this outcome, we argue that human agency – particularly the actions of subnational policy-makers – is key. This is manifest in a preference for fostering regional ‘adaptiveness’ through the often uncritical promotion of a diversity of economic sectors. This compromises the meaningful pursuit of regional ‘adaptation’ in the form of new and more complex branches emerging from existing industries. This arrested development, in turn, hinders an effective strategic coupling between the regional economy and multinational corporations, thus undermining regional resilience.