saskia sassen, the global city

xix-xxii: the seven hypotheses

(1) - geographic dispersal of economic activities is a key factor feeding the importance of central corporate functions;
(2) - central functions are so complex that large global firms are compelled to outsource them to 'highly specialized service firms.'
(3) - these highly specialized service firms are 'subject to agglomeration economies.' as a result, "global cities are, in this regard, production sites for the leading information industries of our time."
(4) - the more headquarters outsource their most complex functions, "the freer they are to opt for any location" for the work actually done in their headquarters;
(5) - specialized service firms are engaged in providing a 'global service,' which encourages global city-global city partnership;
(6) - a growing number of high level professionals in cities "have the effect of raising the degree of spatial and socioeconomic inequality evident in these cities."
(7) - the dynamics described in hypothesis six lead to "the growing informalization of a range of economic activities..."

(3): cities' four-fold new functions: (1) highly concentrated command points; key locations for finance; (3) sites of production of innovations; (4) markets for the products and innovations of this new services economy.

(5): "the fundamental dynamic posited here is that the more globalized the economy becomes, the higher the agglomeration of central functions in a relatively few sites, that is, in global cities... there is a new logic of concentration."

(5): the "global city" as a site of production of "highly specialized services and financial goods" [note, this does not tell us anything about cities, in general--in that sense the explanandum is not the "urban," but an atypical subset]

(6): wanting to focus on the "practice" of global control--"the work of producing and reproducing the organization and management of a global production system and a global marketplace for finance," a process in which the "global city" has a critical role. [she is less interested, she says, in the 'familiar issues' of the power of larger corporations. but is this simply an excuse to dull the heinousness of what she's describing?]

(8): question, also, about the relationship between the city and the nation-state

(10): and finally, the morphology of the new service sector--what about the low-wage jobs that supply this high-wage service sector?

(12): important--here some reflections on why this transition has happened, and how to theorize it. it is not the case that new industries have emerged to replace old ones; at least it is not that simple. what has happened, instead, is a "deep structural process of decline," in which "growth" and "decline" have to be theorized more holistically. simply and specifically, i guess, this is the idea that we are seeing the geographic dispersal of manufacturing, which has engendered the need for the new. [the question, though, is why we need to see the 80's and 90's as "high-flying," rather than periods of stagnation. this motivates a question re: whether the change she is documenting can be attributed to technological shifts, as is somewhat implied, or whether there's something else, more internal to the pure dynamics of capitalism, which has spurred it. i suppose the two theorizations are not mutually exclusive, but there is a sense in which sassen has evacuated the latter paradigm from her analysis.]

(12-13): more on the systemic connection between 'decline' and 'growth'. four working hypotheses:
(1) geographic dispersal of manufacturing, which contributed to the decline of old industrial center [and] [created] a demand for expanded central management...
(2) the growth of the financial industry... benefited from policies and conditions often harmful to other industrial sectors, notably manufacturing (do we mean hiking the interest rates in '79?)
(3) "a transformation in the economic relationships among global cities, the nation states where they are located, and the world economy..."
(4) a "new class alignment" in the global city [a species of "structured coherence," perhaps?]

(19): it might be important to clarify the causal connections between these three observations, because elsewhere it seems to be distinct from what she is proposing here: "a leading argument in this book is that the spatial dispersion of economic activities and the reorganization of the financial industry are two processes that have contributed to new forms of centralization insofar as they have occurred under conditions of continued concentration in ownership or control." [recall panitch and gindin, in other words, who suggest that 'the reorganization of the financial industry' was necessary for Capital to come to terms with 'transnationalization'. also, is the last clause suggesting a positive, normative project--that this process could (and should) have happened under different "conditions [of] ... ownership [and] control."

(20): what we have seen, in effect, is a de-centering of transnational banks (and the TNC's, of course), and the concomitant rise of the "major centers of finance."

(19): interesting, if cryptic sentence: "whether internationalization is essential to the major outcomes, notably the acute pressure, toward agglomeration in leading cities, is difficult to establish and is perhaps a question of theory." [what to make of this? we can have the global city without globalization? unlikely. but this is why her doing the work of theory would be immensely helpful; is she eschewing that task even though she thinks it worthwhile?]

(20): question of the concept of "productive innovation" in finance, insofar as she is anticipating the possibility of "non-productive innovation." what is the distinction? hasn't recent history proven the fallacies of celebrating precisely this same fact of innovation, insofar as it has proved to be 'smoke' and 'mirrors'? or are we speaking of a subset of the kind of innovation that she wants to speak about. [my position seems justified--"innovations" are made explicit on page 21 as "derivatives" and "hedge funds"]

(21): explicitly naming the 'long wave' objection (what is different about this round of 'financialization' from what transpired at the turn of the century?)

chapter two

(23): "capital mobility" is not simply the ability of capital to move across space; the concept must also assimilate the fact of increasing centralization.

(26): mention of 'transnationalization' as a political strategy to break 'fordism', but also a technical consequence of new strategies that were "designed to separate low-wage, routine tasks from highly skilled tasks..."

(28-29): seems too lumpy -- discussing "transnationalization" at the same time as mentioning how many women work from their suburban homes? i understand the affinity, but could this not be said to be symptomatic of some larger failings to systematize data with an appropriately theoretical frame?

(30): sassen's notion of the "redeployment of growth poles," which helps us observe that geographic dispersal has gone hand-in-hand with increasing concentration of capital ["such a parallel decentralization of ownership has not taken place. The large size of firms has made it possible to internalize transaction and circulation costs, thereby reducing the barriers to capital circulation and raising capital's ability to equalize the profit rate." [marxist commitments, clearly...]

(31): perhaps we can start, here, to ask what "productive innovation" in finance might mean? "opening up of regional markets"; "offshore banking" --> all leading to a "renewed concentration in and orientation toward major financial centers, beginning in the early 1980s... not mere geographic retrenchment but was in fact associated with new forms of capital mobility..." "The central activity is now the buying and selling of instruments over and over again, thereby maximizing the circulation of financial capital.."

(32): "increased capital mobility has brought about a homogenization of economic space..." [but, in a way compatible with uneven development, of course.]

(32): important--quite bleak implication for one type of development strategy, here. peripheral labor can now be employed without ever escaping its peripherality. no more "labor aristocracy," which she identifies as a very specific historical phenomenon. technological/communication revolution has enabled high-tech industries to incorporate sweatshop labor. this tendency towards dispersal, she's implying, "neutralizes the politico-economic consequences that Marx associated with the generalized increase in the capital intensity of production..."

(33): labor in this service economy, more mobile/transnational/unequal -- (1) both highly trained personnel, and (2) unskilled service labor

(33-36): useful summary of argument of chapter 2

chapter 10: a new urban regime?

(329): "the most pronounced development is the massive increase in the volume of transactions of the financial industry, by far the most significant international industry."

(330): "most foreign direct investment is now in services."

(331): "the weight of economic activity since the 1980s has shifted from production places, such as Detroit and Manchester, to centers of finance and highly specialized services."

(331): her central amendment to a traditional 'world-systems' narrative--the need for 'control'/'organization' is not inherent in fragmentation ("cannot be taken for granted") but needs to be produced.

(331): "global cities as sites for the production of global control capability."

(332): a list of the kind of firms that comprise this "global control capability"--isn't this a bit underwhelming, if we're honest? -- "advertising, accounting, legal services, business services, certain types of banking, engineering, and architectural services."

(332): hmm--on the one hand she is drawing attention to the enormous importance of finance, as service. but on the other hand, she doesn't want to include the production of financial instruments as a "service." the question, then, is obvious: is the popular narrative that it is these instruments and the games they play that account for the enormity of financial activity? or is it actually true that the services that actually comprise global control capability dominate the world economy? the latter seems very counter-intuitive, especially if you consider the amount of money that was trading on the derivatives market (220 trillion dollars, or something like this...), and all this. having said this, it does seem like she acknowledges this, to an extent; i would only say that what i've read of her argument does not foreground the parasitism of this fact.

(332): the potential for other global cities, besides the trinity -- the possibility of regional and national markets that need a more locally-oriented site of control capability.

(333): and KEY--her larger argument assimilates the understanding that manufacture and the proletariat, in fact, HAVE NOT declined. "I argue it is these transformations that constitute the shift to a service-dominated economy, rather than the mere fact of a shift in employment from manufacturing to services, a process usually centered on the growth of consumer services. On the contrary, I posit that the period of massive growth of consumer services is associated with the expansion of mass production in manufacturing." [but this does raise the question: why do we need to speak about this as "an economic system dominated by such management, servicing, and financial activities? see page 334] see also discussion below

(333): between the global cities, the emergence of a "transterritorial economy" [though not, at all, a self-sufficient economy, remember--it could not exist without manufacturing]

(334): important--an explicit consideration of the place of manufacturing economy. and again, the implications are bleak, insofar as they portend an increasing divergence between the fortunes of the global city and the nation. "Yes, manufacturing matters, but from the perspective of finance and producer services, it does not have to be national... One of the key points developed in this book is that much of the new growth rests on the decline of what were once significant sectors of the national economy, notably key branches of manufacturing that were the leading force in the national economy and promoted the formation and expansion of strong middle class."

(335): MOST IMPORTANT--new, more severe forms of "increased social and economic polarization" associated with this transformation. and this, of course, may one day call into question the foundations of the new growth, too. "At what point do these tensions become unbearable? At what point is the fact of homelessness a cost also for the leading growth sectors? How many times do high-income executives have to step over the bodies of homeless people till this becomes an unacceptable fact or discomfort? At what point does the increasing poverty of large numbers of workers begin to interfere with the performance of the core industries either directly or indirectly? It is perhaps the social involution that this mode of growth brings about in significant sectors of a national economy that may be more devastating to its own growth than the decline of manufacturing at the national level, since there is significant manufacturing growth globally, and in that sense there is grist for the mill of the producer services complex."

(335-336): and then, also, the obvious tension between the "growth of these leading 'industries'" and the decline of the health of the nation-state (in burgeoning budget deficits due to the decline of national economic sectors)

(336): barriers to entry, which is critical for the absurd hacks who want to transform this into a normative project ("And most cities lack the mix of resources which creates organizational complexity in leading cities. We are entering a whole new phase in the development of urban economic cities.")

(337-338): narrative of suburbanization and the rise of the middle-class in the US; in UK, "social provisioning" in the form of a "national public health system" and "public housing"; in Japan, "massive reinvestment to expand the infrastructure for production rather than that for social reproduction."

(339): a move away from production for internal consumer markets, and towards international markets as symptomatic of the larger shift away from the Fordist phase.

(340): IMPORTANT, even if she doesn't answer it, she is asking exactly the right question, here: "This development [away from Fordism] raises a number of questions about the intersection of economics and politics and about the 'natural' tendencies of capitalist economies. Was the social compact of the postwar period the result of the weight of local politics in a phase of economic development that gave local claims unusual powers? And is what we are seeing today--increased economic and social polarization--the 'natural' outcome of the operation of the economic system when political claims carry little weight?"

(340): identifiying an "ideology of globalism," within which "localities are seen as powerless in an era of global economic forces."

(340-341): important--high-income workers vs. management of these service industries--argument, here, is that there is an important distinction to be drawn between the two. the former have no claims over their places of work; they can be fired at the drop of the hat. they are tied to it through "conspicuous consumption," which "serves a strong ideological function of securing the alliance of these workers." [many questions, of course, but perhaps useful to use this as a way into the question of "productive" and "unproductive" labor -- the argument is that "they are ultimately a stratum of extremely hard-working people whose alliance to the system leads them to produce far more profit than they get back in their admittedly very high salaries and bonuses." but how? is their labor not more destructive, than productive, insofar as they're engaged in the re-distribution of surplus value? or are they actually 'facilitating' the creation of 'surplus-value'? or perhaps these two are not mutually exclusive?

(341): let's not overplay the role of these people, as a mass, in the larger population. she acknolwedges that they are "numerically small", but seems to peg the prominence of a "new social aesthetic" to their rise, nonetheless. i suppose we'll have to admit that this culture exists, of course; though it's prominence is open to contestation. they are certainly not involved in an active "war of position." they don't care about winning "hearts and minds." clearly, with sassen, we are still justified in deriding this as the culture of an unaccountable and seceding elite.

(343): all this, again, seems to represent a "new urban regime" [what does this mean, though--theoretically--for questions re: its stability?]

(344): again, engaging the earlier question of the role of finance--how to make sense of this, exactly? ("This is not to say that finance was unimportant then and manufacturing is unimportant today. Nor is it simply that the financial industry has replaced the auto industry as the leading economic force.

epilogue

(346): there are six sets of debates
(1) re: the global city as model (347-355);
(2) re: place and role of finance
(3) producer services;
(4) relations among cities;
(5) inequality in global cities;
(6) are global cities a new spatial order?

(347): concept of "incipient de-nationalization" -- is this helpful? elites willingly surrendering the state to capital?

(348): no such entity as a single global city--"the global city is a function of cross border network of strategic sites... The global city network is the operational scaffolding of that other fuzzy notion, the global economy."

(349): she is not assuming homogenization--rather, her point is "the development and partial importation of a set of specialized functions and the direct and indirect effects this may have on the larger city."

(349): what work does this distinction do, exactly--"It is not simply a matter of global coordination but one of the production of global control capacities."

(349): she is concerned, after all, with a "whole infrastructure of jobs typically not marked as belonging to the corporate sector of the economy."

(350): "The place-ness of the global city is a crucial theoretical and methodological issue in my work. Theoretically it captures Harvey's notion of capital fixity as necessary for hypermobility."

(350): important--she understands herself as making a "distinction between what is encompassed by the global city model and the larger urban entity called New York... What may have not been stated with adequate clarity... is that the effort... was to understand the impact of the global city function on the larger city, to see whether this impact is beneficial for a larg sector of the population or not..." [i think we can push this much, much further than she has--and then, having done that, doesn't it destabilize much of what is 'formally' advertised in this book?]

(351): one answer to why this prism of the global city is useful (again, though, not because it might tell us about cities, but because it tells us something specific about the global economy): "The concept of the global city introduces a far stronger emphasis on strategic components of the global economy, and hence on questions of power... Overall, I would say, the concept of the global city is more attuned to questions of power and inequality."

(354): speaking, explicitly, of "the global city," as it exists today, as a construction of today--"one of the marking features of the organizational architecture of the current phase" of capitalism.

(358): "indeed it let me to start a major new multiyear project on the role of the state in globalization and the impact of the latter in altering the logic explaining whose claims become legitimate"

(358): acknowledging that 1980s and 1990s "increasingly delinked finance from its role as servicing the 'real' economy." and also that financial turn "is not the first time this happens in recent Western history..." "But in my reading there are distinctive features that differentiate the current phase rom earlier phases."

(360): KEY, responds to the questions I posed earlier--"what is specific about the shift to services is not merely the growth in service jobs but, most importantly, the growing service intensity in the organization of advanced economies: firms in all industries, from mining to wholesale buy more accounting, legal, advertising, financial, economic forecasting services, and so on, today than they did twenty years ago... Cities emerge as important production sites for what are key inputs for firms in all industries."

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neil brenner critique in "review of international political economy" (1,1, 1998)-- reference point of sassen's concept of "systemic discontinuity" is a static nation-space; she has not seen how the reconfiguration of the state, itself, is concomitant to the same processes that have shaped the city. thus her conclusions about the state suffer because they reify an earlier, temporary form, in effect (he is drawing attention, instead, to regional configurations--not unlike taylor).

peter taylor critique in "review of international political economy" (1, 2, 1994)--sassen misses three things: (1) the focus on three cities is inadequate for an understanding of the world urban hierarchy; (2) her theorization of the state is absent, rigid, inadequate--he wants to mention the possibility that different states will take different tactics re: the production of the global city; (3) her theorization of the 1980s runs roughshod over the realization problem; in effect, taylor is drawing attention to the contradiction of neoliberal restructuring (capital will still need to find a market for its goods). this is why he thinks it is the 1980s that are temporary, rather than the social democratic solution of yesteryear.