Power and Position in the World City System1

By A. Alderson, Jason Beckfield. American Journal of Sociology, 2004

455 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Globalization has renewed interest in the place and role of cities in the international system. Recent literature proposes that the fate of cities (and their residents) has become increasingly tied to their position in international flows of investment and trade. Data on the branch locations of the world’s 500 largest multinational enterprises in 2000 are subjected to two broad types of network analytic techniques in order to analyze the “world city system.” First, 3,692 cities are analyzed in terms of three measures of point centrality. Second, blockmodeling techniques are employed to generalize further about the positions and roles played by cities in the system. These techniques are used to trace out the structure of the world city system, locate cities in the context of a global urban hierarchy, and explore the degree to which this diverges from a simple one‐to‐one matching of cities onto nation‐states in the world system.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5da1bbdc52cadc70dd6b6f241f049d95b0d088e3

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Citations in the corpus

The Relational Economy: Geographies of Knowing and Learning (2012, unknown): “, 2011 ) and quantitative global economic network studies (for example, A lderson and B eckfield , 2004 ; C arroll , 2010 ).”
Globalization, the structure of the world economy and economic development (2011, background): “…in UCInet (Borgatti et al., 2002; see Wasserman and Faust, 1999 and Ziberna, 2008 for extensive mathematical and conceptual discussion, and Alderson and Beckfield, 2004; Mahutga, 2006 and Smith and White, 1992 for implementations).1 The REGE algorithm identifies the level of regular…”
The Consequences of Economic Globalization for Affluent Democracies (2007, background): “…bound through multinational enterprises; (c) the ranking of cities within that global urban system; and (d) the consequences of this dimension of globalization for urban governance, form, and inequality (Alderson & Beckfield 2004, Castells 1996, Sassen 2001, Smith & Timberlake 2001, Taylor 2003).”
Are the Economy and the Environment Decoupling? A Comparative International Study, 1960–20051 (2012, background): “3 Comparisons between developed countries and less developed countries of statistical associations are common in numerous areas of contemporary sociological inquiry (e.g., Alderson and Beckfield 2004; Longhofer and Schofer 2010).”
The political-economic causes of change in the ecological footprints of nations, 1991-2001: A quantitative investigation (2007, background): “Producer services are highly concentrated in more-powerful global cities (Sassen, 2001), and the latter are generally located in developed countries (e.g., Alderson and BeckWeld, 2004).”
Intercity Relations and Globalisation: The Evolution of the Global Urban Hierarchy, 1981—2007 (2010, methodology): “In earlier work (Alderson and Beckfield, 2004, 2007), we utilised data on the headquarter and branch locations of the world’s 500 largest multinationals in 1981 and 2000 to construct and analyse a relational dataset in which ties are those between headquarter and subsidiary cities.”
Sectoral Differentiation and Network Structure Within Contemporary Worldwide Corporate Networks (2011, background): “In the lower-ranked cities—Zurich, Dusseldorf, Munich, and Amsterdam— our analysis supports similar rankings as those found by Alderson and Beckfield (2004).”
The Location and Global Network Structure of Maritime Advanced Producer Services (2011, background): “However, there are a number of cities in the top 10 that are not part of the rankings of different world city studies (see Friedmann, 1995; Beaverstock et al., 1999; Alderson and Beckfield, 2004; Taylor, 2005; Carroll, 2007).”
Global cluster networks—foreign direct investment flows from Canada to China (2014, methodology): “The resulting network of global cities thus combines the views of Sassen’s (2001) global-city model and network analyses of world cities (Alderson and Beckfield, 2004; Taylor, 2004).”
Economic Globalisation and the Structure of the World City System: The Case of Airline Passenger Data (2010, background): “The most rigorous treatment was that of Alderson and Beckfield (2004), which tested Hymer’s arguments versus that of other world city theorists like Sassen, Friedmann and Taylor.”
Integrating world cities into production networks : the case of port cities (2010, methodology): “Instead, we stick to a simple headquarters-subsidiary approach (Alderson and Beckfield 2004; Rozenblat and Pumain 2007).”