Geographies of economic governance functions of producer service firms in German global cities

本研究的主要目的是考察德国法兰克福/M、杜塞尔多夫、慕尼黑、汉堡和柏林五个全球城市中全球生产者服务企业经济治理功能的社会空间关系。虽然人们普遍认为，生产者服务公司对全球商品链的治理有很大的影响，从而影响到资金、物质和人力资源在这些商品链中的分配和流动，但从全球城市延伸到生产者服务公司客户经营的其他地点的治理流动空间却很少受到关注。由此导致的对生产性服务企业的治理功能如何通过城市间的影响在空间上发展和发挥作用的知识缺乏，破坏了全球城市论点的说服力，该论点声称这些城市是世界经济的控制中心。在该项目中，采用了混合方法。第一步，该项目将向德国最大的2,500家公司发放问卷，询问它们与全球生产者服务公司的关系，以确定在法兰克福/M、杜塞尔多夫、慕尼黑、汉堡和柏林设有373个办事处的131家全球生产者服务公司的影响力“半径”。通过描述性统计分析，展示全球生产性服务业企业的客户结构。其次，将与全球生产者服务公司的专业人员和选定的客户公司的代表进行面向问题的半结构化面对面访谈，以了解从德国的全球城市延伸到所有其他地方的经济治理流动空间。该项目的成果将对涉及经济治理的若干文献具有重要意义，并将与关于经济实力、其行为者、组织形式、合法性和地理等问题的更广泛辩论相关，这些问题在追求可持续的全球经济秩序方面至关重要。

The principal objective of this project is to scrutinize the socio-spatial relations of economic governance functions of global producer service firms in five German global cities: Frankfurt/M, Düsseldorf, Munich, Hamburg, and Berlin. While it is generally accepted that producer service firms exercise a strong impact on the governance of global commodity chains, influencing thereby how financial, material and human resources are allocated and flow within such chains, the spaces of flows of governance that stretch from global cities to other locations where producer service firms’ clients operate, have received little if any attention. The resulting lack of knowledge about how producer service firms’ governance functions develop and function over space through inter-city ramifications undermines the persuasiveness of the global city argument which claims that these cities are control centers of the world economy. In the project, a mixed-method approach is used. In a first step, the project seeks to identify the 'radius' of influence of 131 global producer service firms with 373 offices in Frankfurt/M, Düsseldorf, Munich, Hamburg, and Berlin with the use of a questionnaire that will be distributed to Germany’s 2,500 biggest companies, asking for their relations to global producer service firms. Through descriptive statistical analysis the client structure of the global producer service firms shall be displayed. Secondly, problem-oriented, semi-structured, face-to-face interviews with professionals of the global producer service firms and with representatives of selected client firms will be conducted in order to develop an understanding of the spaces of flows of economic governance that stretch from Germany’s global cities to all sort of other places. The project’s outcomes will be important for several literatures dealing with economic governance, and they will be relevant for wider debates on issues of economic power, its actors, forms of organization, legitimacy and geographies which are at stake in the pursuit of a sustainable global economic order.