Global Cities in the Global Corporate Network

2007 ◽  
Vol 39 (10) ◽  
pp. 2297-2323 ◽  
Author(s):  
William K Carroll

Since the 1980s two separate literatures—one focused on global cities, the other on transnational corporate interlocking—have explored issues of hierarchy and networking within the global political economy. I present an analysis of how major cities and interlocking corporate directorates are articulated together into a global network. Findings indicate that the network is concentrated in the main world cities in a way that reinforces the northern transatlantic economic system. However, the structure of the network is more nationally focused, and more complex, than that predicted by global cities theorizations. To account for the structure, I present a multifactoral framework featuring sociohistorical processes as well as spatiotemporal constraints. In conclusion, I explore implications for sociological analysis of a ‘new network bourgeoisie’, invested with several kinds of corporate power and exercising agency both within and beyond the boardrooms of the world's major corporations.

Author(s):  
Nicola Phillips

This chapter introduces the field of International Political Economy (IPE), the themes and insights of which are reflected in the Global Political Economy (GPE), and what it offers in the study of contemporary globalization. It begins with three framing questions: How should we think about power in the contemporary global political economy? How does IPE help us to understand what drives globalization? What does IPE tell us about who wins and who loses from globalization? The chapter proceeds by discussing various approaches to IPE and the consequences of globalization, focusing on IPE debates about inequality, labour exploitation, and global migration. Two case studies are presented, one dealing with the BRICs and the rise of China, and the other with slavery and forced labour in global production. There is also an Opposing Opinions box that asks whether national states are irrelevant in an era of economic globalization.


1992 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
William R. Thompson

Leadership long-cycle analyses emphasize the global political economy, sea power, and the cyclical rise and fall of maritime powers. Ludwig Dehio's interpretation of European international politics stressed regional politics, land power, and the cyclical rise and fall of continental powers. Since neither framework totally ignores what the other accentuates, a merger of the two perspectives is quite feasible and results in improved explanatory power. As an illustration, several of Dehio's generalizations about the nature and timing of regional power concentration are tested for the period 1494–1945. The outcome suggests that peaks of regional and global power concentration alternate. Global reconcentration is stimulated, at least in part, by the threat posed by a rising regional challenger.


Author(s):  
Anis H Bajrektarevic

Does our history only appear overheated, while it is essentially calmly predetermined? Is it directional or conceivable, dialectic and eclectic or cyclical, and therefore cynical? Surely, our history warns (no matter if the Past is seen as a destination or resource). Does it also provide for a hope? Hence, what is in front of us: destiny or future? Theory loves to teach us that extensive debates on what kind of economic system is most conductive to human wellbeing is what consumed most of our civilizational vertical. However, our history has a different say: It seems that the manipulation of the global political economy (and usage of fear as the currency of control) – far more than the introduction of ideologies – is the dominant and arguably more durable way that human elites usually conspired to build or break civilizations, as planned projects.


Author(s):  
Nicola Phillips

This chapter introduces the field of International Political Economy (IPE), the themes and insights of which are reflected in the Global Political Economy (GPE), and what it offers in the study of contemporary globalization. It begins with three framing questions: How should we think about power in the contemporary global political economy? How does IPE help us to understand what drives globalization? What does IPE tell us about who wins and who loses from globalization? The chapter proceeds by discussing various approaches to IPE and the consequences of globalization, focusing on IPE debates about inequality, labour exploitation, and global migration. Two case studies are presented, one dealing with the BRICs and the rise of China, and the other with slavery and forced labour in global production. There is also an Opposing Opinions box that asks whether national states are irrelevant in an era of economic globalization.


2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (184) ◽  
pp. 423-440 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Dietz ◽  
Bettina Engels ◽  
Oliver Pye

This article explores the spatial dynamics of agrofuels. Building on categories from the field of critical spatial theory, it shows how these categories enable a comprehensive analysis of the spatial dynamics of agrofuels that links the macro-structures of the global political economy to concrete, place-based struggles. Four core socio-spatial dynamics of agrofuel politics are highlighted and applied to empirical findings: territorialization, the financial sector as a new scale of regulation, place-based struggles and transnational spaces of resources and capital flows.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-56
Author(s):  
Thomas Alkemeyer

Two forms or rather perspectives of observations appear alongside practice theories: The first perspective can be called the „theatre perspective“: practice here is observed as a regular, spatiotemporally ordered, socially structured, and therefore recognizable historical form of „practical doings and sayings“, in which participants are understood as mere carriers of practices and their bodies as the raw material for processes of formation. In the other perspective, understood as the perspective of the participants themselves, practices come into view as ongoing, conflictual, and contingent accomplishments, in which participants occur as intelligently collaborating contributors with so called „lived bodies“. These bodies are affectable, sites of experience, and media of a sensitivity that allow an embodied self to orientate itself (with)in a practice. This paper proposes a methodological mediation of both perspectives by taking into account both a sociological analysis of discipline, formation, or adjustment, and the reflexive sensing in action, which can be modeled phenomenologically. Thus, a „lived-body-in-accomplishment“ comes into view that serves the material basis of subjectivation procceses, i. e. the (self-)formation of a constitutionally conditioned (political) agency.


2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (04) ◽  
pp. 739-746 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna M. Agathangelou

International relations (IR) feminists have significantly impacted the way we analyze the world and power. However, as Cynthia Enloe points out, “there are now signs—worrisome signs—that feminist analysts of international politics might be forgetting what they have shared” and are “making bricks to construct new intellectual barriers. That is not progress” (2015, 436). I agree. The project/process that has led to the separation/specialization of feminist security studies (FSS) and feminist global political economy (FGPE) does not constitute progress but instead ends up embodying forms of violence that erase the materialist bases of our intellectual labor's divisions (Agathangelou 1997), the historical and social constitution of our formations as intellectuals and subjects. This amnesiac approach evades our personal lives and colludes with those forces that allow for the violence that comes with abstraction. These “worrisome signs” should be explained if we are to move FSS and FGPE beyond a “merger” (Allison 2015) that speaks only to some issues and some humans in the global theater.


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