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

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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.