Setting Shari’a standards: On the role, power and spatialities of interlocking Shari’a boards in Islamic financial services

This paper aims to refine earlier research on the geographies of Islamic financial services (IFS) through a study of how cities are being connected through interlocking directorates in Shari’a advisory boards of IFS firms. The relevance of this analysis is discussed against the backdrop of recent critiques of mainstream ‘world cities’ research because of structuralist and universalizing tendencies. By applying a network concept to the relationalities of world cities within financial circuits, we explore the nested city/firm/actor structure behind Shari’a board membership, and reassess the connectivity of cities in the IFS network in terms of the role and spatialities of interlocking Shari’a boards. The results show that Gulf cities, most notably Manama, Dubai and Kuwait City are particularly well-connected, while also mainstay financial centres outside the Middle East, such as London and New York are networked by interlocking board memberships of a global Shari’a elite. The dominant position of Manama is traced back to its role as a standard-setting city for Shari’a-compliant investments, which materializes through the enacted presence of an array of highly interlocked regulatory bodies and mediating elites.     

Navigating the terrains of transnational education: Children of Chinese ‘study mothers’ in Singapore

This paper demonstrates the value of child-centred migration studies which highlight children’s role in shaping the migration journeys of their families, as well as their own projected journeyings. It examines the case of children from China who move to Singapore, an aspiring global education hub, expressly for the purpose of an overseas education that will facilitate longer-term migration and life goals. Focus is given specifically to the children of ‘study mothers’ or peidu mama (literally: ‘mothers accompanying their children who are studying’). Through interviews with the teenagers and the conceptual optic of ‘social navigation’, our paper demonstrates that children are resilient and creative beings able to navigate the twists and turns of their immediate trajectories, as well as develop their own goals and projected destinations for their futures. The paper calls for a refinement in the way we understand children’s mobilities. First, in arguing that their spatial journeying across the terrains of transnational education cannot be decoupled from their process of social becoming and emotional development from passive followers to active negotiators, we wish to disrupt hegemonic discourses and dominant representations of children in migration as simply ‘migrant’s children’ and restore them to the status of ‘migrant children’. Second, adopting the concept of social navigation as an analytical lens allows us to highlight the fluid ways that young people think about their futures and the different pathways by which they can get there. This leads us to conceive of social and cultural capital accumulation through transnational education as a process with many more degrees of provisionality than what is often presented in the literature as a ‘strategic project’ with a fixed and abstract goal.     

Relational networks of knowledge production in transnational law firms

For geographers, debates surrounding the knowledge economy have reinvigorated interest in the geographies of learning and knowledge production. Particularly topical are discussions of the possibility of spatially stretched (global) learning, something especially relevant to professional service firms where the production and management of knowledge across transnational organizational networks is essential. Taking this as its starting point, the paper explores the way knowledge is produced and circulated in transnational legal professional service firms. Drawing on the ideas of relational economic geography to analyse original empirical material, it highlights the way relational networks are socially constructed to allow learning to be stretched across space. The paper then goes on to identify the ‘politics’ of inclusion in these networks and the exclusivity of membership. It also highlights the geographies of power that influence the nature and effect of the knowledge produced and circulated. It does this by examining the role of relational knowledge networks in the ‘Americanization’ of legal practice in Europe and the impacts of such changes on national institutional and regulatory contexts. It is, therefore, argued that transnational corporate networks need to be viewed as heterogeneous and ‘embedded spaces of social practice’. It is shown that studying the actors and their interactions across relational networks is vital to fully understand how global relational forms are constructed and to understand their structuring effects on the global economy.     

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.     

The `global city' misconceived: the myth of `global management' in transnational service firms

The `global city hypothesis' proposed by Saskia Sassen - and subsequently developed by Manuel Castells and others in the theory of a globalized urban network - has in recent years formed the basis for the argument that power and control in transnational firms (TNCs) is primarily situated in global head-offices. Such offices are located in key urban centres such as London, New York or Tokyo where global managerial power is ultimately wielded and where senior managers make strategic decisions about transnational business activity. This paper takes issue with this theoretical legacy, arguing that the idea of strong centralised managerial power and control in contemporary TNCs is far more complex than this literature suggests. It explores how managerial control in some of the supposedly most globalized of business service industries - investment banking and management consultancy - cannot be understood as being centralised in global headquarter offices, and nor does it purely reside with a few senior managers at the top of the transnational organisation. Rather, it argues that managerial control in TNCs is diffused throughout a transnational network of management-level employees, and that strategic power in transnational firms resides with a larger and more dispersed group of actors than has been previously suggested. These arguments are developed through analysis of qualitative research into the managerial strategies and practices of senior business practitioners in the transnational investment banking and management consultancy industries. In presenting qualitative data from interviews with senior management in transnational corporate head offices, the paper thus examines the decision-making process of global management practice and unpacks the complex context in which transnational corporate strategy develops in such firms.     

Moving players,traversing perspectives: Global value chains,production networks and Ghanaian football labour migration

This article examines the production and transnational export of Ghanaian football labour. It does so via a cross-disciplinary approach that utilises perspectives rooted in the sociology of development (global value chains) and economic geography (global production networks). The article is underpinned by two central arguments. Firstly, it contends that the GVC framework is useful in accounting for how Ghanaian players are produced and prepared for the international market, identifying the key agents and agencies involved, mapping the geography of production and export and assessing the institutional context within which the trade operates locally, nationally and internationally. The second draws on the GPN perspective to argue that while Ghanaian football labour migration remains a process contoured by uneven asymmetries of power that favour actors, stakeholders and entities in the global North, there are currently segments of the production–export chain where power is much more diffuse and some benefits are captured in the global South. The paper draws on interview data and observations gleaned from four periods of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Ghana between January 2008 and June 2011.     

Transaction links through cities: ‘decision cities’ and ‘service cities’ in outsourcing by leading Brazilian firms

Most world city studies focus on where the provision of advanced producer services takes place, but in this study the location of the service clients are also taken into account. Production-service transactions are identified as links between ‘service city’ and ‘decision city’ (client HQ) and classified as intra-city (where a firms uses local (same city) services) and inter-city which may be domestic or foreign depending on whether the client uses services in or out of the country. Sampling the leading firms in Brazil, 218 transaction links are described and analysed in terms of cities, firm sectors, ownership and market. The analyses are used to inform a rereading of gateway city functions that takes into account the concentration/dispersal nexus in economic globalization. Thus, whereas the dominance of Sao Paulo in the Brazilian economy is confirmed, this is not interpreted as a simple gateway function with this one city ‘articulating’ the national economy into the world economy. A much more complex situation is revealed with by-passing of the gateway also much in evidence. The conclusion is that this shows concentration and dispersion of economic activity happening simultaneously in Brazil.     

Transnational entrepreneurs,global pipelines and shifting production patterns. The example of the Palanpuris in the diamond sector

Building on the buzz-and-pipelines model of regional clusters, the paper shows that transnational entrepreneurs play an important role in the construction of external cluster relations and hence influence both the dynamics of regional clusters and global production settings. Unlike most studies on the economic implications of transnational migrants, the paper deals with a labor intensive manufacturing sector. In detail, diamond dealers from the Indian city of Palanpur will be conceptualized as transnational entrepreneurs who, in the past, were able to cover certain locations of the diamond value added chain with family members. The global relations set up by these families at the same time formed business networks allowing for an intense global exchange of knowledge and artifacts (diamonds). In the long run, these patterns implied a change of the overall production structures: in Antwerp, a traditional diamond trading and cutting center, the Indian dealers developed to strong competitors in the smaller stones segment and as such contributed to the fading away of the historically grown industrial base. In addition, the institutional support structures were partly dismantled. On the other hand, in India, a new cluster in diamond cutting emerged. The findings suggest that transnational entrepreneurs can contribute to a weakening of traditional cluster structures and therefore call for a more differentiated view as evoked by the one-sided focus of studies on returnee migrants in the high-tech sector.     

Everyday effects, practices and causal mechanisms of ‘cultural embeddedness’: Learning from Utah’s high tech regional economy

In recent years, economic geographers have drawn extensively upon notions of ‘cultural embeddedness’ to explore how spatially variable sets of cultural conventions, norms, values and beliefs shape firms’ innovative performance in dynamic regional economies. However, our understanding of these causal links remains partial, reinforced by an ‘over-territorialised’ conception of cultural embeddedness which sidelines the role of institutional actors operating outside and across the boundaries of ‘the local’. So motivated, this paper offers a theoretically-informed - and theoretically informing - empirical analysis of the high tech regional economy in Salt Lake City, Utah to explore the everyday causal mechanisms, practices and processes - both local and extra-local - through which firms’ cultural embedding within the region is manifested, performed and (un)intentionally (re)produced. In so doing, this paper aims to further our understanding of the constitutive entanglement and complex interweaving of cultural/economic practices, and to contribute to the development of an in-depth empirical corpus of work which compliments the exciting conceptual developments that have largely dominated cultural economic geography over the last decade.     

Building the ‘competitive city’: labour and Toronto’s bid to host the Olympic games

Toronto’s quest to host the Summer Olympic Games has dominated both contemporary planning discourse and practice. For some, the pursuit of the games embodies Toronto’s transformation into a ‘competitive’ global city. Relatively unexplored in this discourse are the contradictory roles that labour plays in contemporary urban development. I argue that the new labour geography can provide some interesting insights into such processes. Specifically, labour geographers have given workers with divergent interests greater agency in shaping economic landscapes and have noted the multi-scalar organisation of labour. The paper looks at the contradictory and conflicting positions held by different labour unions in Toronto toward the city’s bid to host the 2008 Olympics. The case study suggests that labour is an active agent in processes shaping contemporary Toronto and support the bid for complex reasons ranging from the promise of jobs to potential future organising opportunities.     

Reconstruction in Moscow's historic centre: conservation, planning and finance strategies – the example of the Ostozhenka district

Reconstruction of the historic centre of Moscow and the construction of apartment blocks on the citys outskirts are the citys two main programmes within what must be regarded as its urban policy. With these priorities, the strategy of relying on a mixture of city and private investments, the city governments policies contribute to an increasing exclusiveness of the city centre. This process, which includes a process of gentrification, reflects the impact of the transition to a free-market economy. City planning and reconstruction projects are subject to the new, still chaotic, market opportunities and constraints while the soviet planning principles and organizations have not yet been replaced by efficient new ones. There is a lack of control and regulation, as well as a concentration of power in the mayoral cabinet on the one hand, but on the other hand, the finance strategies make large-scale regeneration possible. With entering the global economy, post-soviet Moscow is acquiring more traits of western, capitalist cities. These include marketing the centres historic character, subsidising private investment, and a new residential segregation based on capital.     

Transnational elites in global cities: British expatriates in Singapore's financial district

Skilled international migration is as an important process of both contemporary globalization and the global city. The establishment of a transnational elite of expatriate labour in international finance plays a vital part in the accumulation of capital within international financial centres (IFCs). Expatriate labour has become a major determinant of the IFC, creating financial capital through complex social relations, knowledge networks, practices and discourses. The principal argument being made in this paper is that expatriates are major agents in the accumulation and transfer of financial knowledge in the IFC, and that such processes are undertaken through expatriate global–local knowledge networks and other social practices. The paper is divided into three major parts. Following a discussion of transnational elites as expatriates in global cities, which also conceptualises their contribution to the spatialization of financial knowledge networks, the empirical study investigates the working, social and cultural knowledge networks and practices of British expatriates in Singapore. Finally, the paper revisits the conceptual work on transnational elites and suggests that expatriates were deeply embedded in global–local relations in the workplace and the business/social sphere through interaction with local ‘western educated/experienced' Singaporeans, but were disembedded from the local in the home and other household social spaces due to the invisibility of the local population in their interactions. Both the theoretical and empirical analyses suggests that expatriates are flow in the Castellian spatial logic of the network society.     

Integrating the geographic information system and predictive data mining techniques to model effects of compound disasters in Taipei

Located in the circum-Pacific seismic zone, Taiwan is continually threatened by such natural disasters as typhoons, floods, landslides, and earthquakes, which increase risk of property loss and severely endanger public safety. Taipei City, the political and economic capital of Taiwan, must address disaster prevention and relief operations for compound disasters and extreme climatic events in addition to existing metropolitan disaster prevention operations. This study formulates 48 compound-disaster scenarios based on threats to Taipei City due to heavy rainfall and surrounding faults. Hydrology and flood analysis results and the Taiwan earthquake loss estimation system are utilized to assess the potential for compound disasters and the number of people they would displace in Taipei’s administrative districts. Analytical results can be used to create a pre-disaster static potential diagram and a refuge or shelter capacity assessment table. The disaster potential diagram is adopted to conduct geographic information system spatial and data analysis, and temporary refuges or shelters planned by the city government are integrated for shelter capacity comparison. Furthermore, a dynamic assessment curve for the number of displaced people during a disaster is plotted using data mining and attribute filtering. Subsequently, a cross table is obtained and employed to predict the number of refugees in the various administrative districts. Finally, conclusions and recommendations are provided for making disaster prevention and relief decisions simultaneously concerning earthquakes and flooding.     

The potential and prospect for global cities in China: in the context of the world system

Over the last two decades, accompanying their rapid economic development, many `mega-cities' in China have devoted themselves to changing their relationships to the global economy and some have aimed at attaining global (world) city status as a key future development goal. This paper examines the relationship between global (world) city status and the emerging world economic system, and discusses the intense competition between `mega-cities' in the Asia-Pacific region that Chinese cities will face in the 21st century, especially after the Asia financial crisis. It also explores the potential and possibility of achieving global or world city status in China. The main arguments are that only Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing have the possibility to attain leading positions in the global urban system in the future. Post-1997, it has been very important for the Chinese government to find a way to coordinate the functions of Hong Kong and the other major cities which allows them to operate smoothly together under quite different political systems. Finally, the authors analyse the relationships between these three metropolises and suggests some possibilities for coordinating their roles in the global urban system.     

How “Water for All!” policy became hegemonic: The power of the World Bank and its transnational policy networks

As recently as 1990, few people in the global South received their water from US or European water firms. But just 10 years later, more than 400 million people did, with that number predicted to increase to 1.2 billion people by 2015, transforming water in Africa, Asia, and Latin America into capitalized markets as precious, and war-provoking, as oil. This article explains how this new global water policy became constituted so quickly, dispersed so widely, with such profound institutional effects. It highlights the prominent role of transnational policy networks in linking environment and development NGOs and the so-called global water policy experts with Northern high-end service sectors, and the ways in which the World Bank facilitates their growth, authority, and efficacy. This phenomenon reflects the World Bank’s latest and perhaps most vulnerable development regime, which I call “green neoliberalism.”     

“This is a Montreal Issue”: Negotiating responsibility in global production and investment networks

While geographers have increasingly focused on how global commodity and production networks create new ‘geographies of responsibility’ there has been little empirical work considering how responsibility is worked into management systems and social activism in such networks. Drawing on literature from global production networks, geographies of responsibility and other literatures, this paper explores the dynamic and contested ways in which concepts of responsibility can play a role in network regulation. Both foreign direct investment and commodity networks (here referred to as ‘global production and investment networks’) are subject to complex negotiations and compromises involving corporate social responsibility and sustainability initiatives as well as shareholder activist, human rights, labor, and environmental activism. This is illustrated by reference to conflicts in Canada over Alcan, Inc.’s investments from 1993 to 2007 in the Utkal Alumina Project in Orissa, India. The project involved significant socio-environmental conflict. In Canada, Alcan’s investment was met by civil society campaigns that tested the company’s commitments to sustainability and corporate social responsibility. The case study suggests revising theories of geographies of responsibility. While foreign direct investment can create new relationships between distant others, these are fluid and contingent and not necessarily desirable. Rather than see networks as a source of responsibility we should work to ensure that the relationships that networks foster be structured to ensure our deeper values are respected.     

At the base of Hubbert’s Peak: Grounding the debate on petroleum scarcity

M. King Hubbert’s 1956 prediction of a ‘peak’ in US oil production has spurred a durable and divisive debate on the exhaustion of the petroleum resource. Pitting physical against economic explanations of resource scarcity, the peak oil debate has seemingly sunk into the well-worn grooves of a long history of scarcity debates. Yet, as this paper argues, this ‘stale dichotomy’ can partly be attributed to a severance from the contexts and ideas that informed Hubbert’s mathematical calculations. Specifically, this paper examines the broader influences on the peak oil model: Hubbert’s career in the newly formed field of geophysics; his personal concern with the relationship between energy and population growth; and his ties to Technocracy, Inc., a social movement originating in the US that aimed to replace political and business control with a group of specialist engineers and technicians. The paper further emphasizes the importance of institutional and political interests to the arguments launched against Hubbert, and in motivating change in this opposition over time. Last, it makes the case that the contemporary de-contextualization of Hubbert’s model has contributed towards a narrow focus of discussions within the oil industry and in certain governments on predicting the timing of a global peak, without addressing the wider questions implied by Hubbert’s model.     

Oil ‘futures’: Shell’s Scenarios and the social constitution of the global oil market

This article explores the relationship between the oil industry’s representation of operating conditions in key sites of extraction and the constitution of oil futures markets. An analysis of Shell Oil’s recent Scenarios publications, the ‘Trilemma Scenarios to 2025’ and subsequent ‘Scramble and Blueprints Scenarios to 2050’, provides insight into both the (global) social construction of oil prices and the oil industry’s reaction to social resistance in its operating environment - whether in the form of movements for resource sovereignty or climate change activism. Examining the implications of these two Scenario publications for key sites of Shell investment, the Nigerian Niger Delta and the Canadian Tar Sands, the article demonstrates that understanding the discursive implications of ‘peak oil’ for the petroleum industry requires contextualizing discussions of ‘scarcity’ within business agents role in shaping oil futures markets, and private industry’s interest in the ongoing development of unconventional fossil fuel sources. While the role of deregulated futures trading receives little attention in the Shell Scenarios, speculative trading - and thus perception concerning supply among business agents - is central to shaping global oil prices and thus the social conditions of the oil market.     

(Re)producing gender cultures: Theorizing gender in investment banking recruitment

Recent work within human geography and the social sciences more generally has attempted to explore and theorise the unfavourable gender relations within organizations which continue to produce a disadvantageous position for women. This paper argues that there is a need to implement a more spatially aware epistemology in the production of such theory. It develops a theoretical approach to organizational gender relations centred around the concept of ‘gender culture’, arguing that to understand gender in the workplace more effectively, it needs to be theorized through the daily social practices which occur in specific organizations. This argument is explored through a case study of the way in which investment banks in the City of London reproduce masculine ‘gender cultures’ through the recruitment process. Building on the recent work of McDowell (Capital culture: gender at work in the city. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), the research presented considers the way in which the ‘pre-organizational gender culture’ of investment banking recruits contributes to the reproduction of masculine gender cultures in those organizations. It also explores how the recruitment process itself—in the shape of interviews, assessment techniques and selection criteria—is also imbued with masculine cultural attributes, and thus aids the reproduction of hegemonic masculinities within the investment banking workplace.     

On China’s growing geo-economic influence and the evolution of variegated capitalism

China’s growing geo-economic clout globally has attracted significant research attention over the past few years. Rather than strictly adopt a national-specific and path-dependent perspective, this paper offers a nuanced perspective on the rationale of Chinese economic expansions overseas. I propose we view China’s growing geo-economic influence as a relational development, inextricably connected to broader changes in global capitalism, especially the failure of the US government to maintain confidence in the dollar. The paper probes critically the underlying logics of two recent developments: (1) the role of the China Investment Corporation (a new sovereign wealth fund) and state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in accessing new markets worldwide; and (2) the policies to extend the global reach of the Chinese yuan. I argue that these phenomena are concatenated to China’s broader aim to secure domestic economic security, given its vast holdings of dollar reserves and its macroeconomic constraints through the maintenance of a fixed foreign exchange regime. These developments in turn contour and sustain the evolution of the variegated global system of capitalism.