Global Corporate Service Firm Urban Networks: A SNA approach

Existing research in urban studies has not measured or visualized the urban structural relations of the world’s largest global advanced producer service firms through social network analysis (SNA). The work of Taylor (2001, 2004) and numerous co-authors has explored the urban office locations of the world’s largest global advanced producer service firms through a – now widely questioned and rejected (see Smith, 2013) – world city interlocking network model (INM). In contrast, Alderson and Beckfield (2004, 2007, 2011) have pioneered the use of SNA (and the use of UCINET software) in world cities research. However, they have concentrated on the urban structural relations of multinational corporations and their subsidiaries. Our paper advances the study of intercity relations through undertaking the first SNA of the urban office locations of the world’s largest global advanced producer service firms. We undertake a measurement of three world city regional – North America, Europe, Pacific – datasets. Treating the pair-wise relations between world cities as symmetric (in-directed graphs) we define as connected those cities which host common firms offices (headquarters or branch). Measures of local and global centrality are then computed in order to identify hub-cities and to classify them according to their degree of centrality.