Manning circuits of value: Lebanese professionals and expatriate world-city formation in Beirut

Abstract

Advanced producer services firms and the highly skilled labour they employ are important indicators for world-city formation, as their activities allegedly grant cities the capabilities to exert command and control over global accumulation processes. To ‘stress test’ this central assumption of global city theory, we apply Burawoy’s extended case method to probe world-city formation in Beirut, Lebanon. Observing a tendency in the literature to superimpose distinctions between high- and low-skilled labour and between North and South, the study marshals a more plural conceptualization of ‘professionals’ to include expatriate or transnational Lebanese service workers. The study’s key finding is that Euro-American professionals play a relatively marginal role in Beirut’s human resource base, complicating North–South distinctions. By contrast, domestic and expat Beiruti professionals are far more crucial in manning circuits of value leading to and from the city. These professionals act as intermediaries in unlocking Gulf markets for clients, contribute to institutional change in their host countries and help build command and control functions elsewhere. Relatedly, Beirut has become susceptible to processes of ‘expatriate world-city formation’, where real estate development and the attraction of bank deposits are partly the result of these APS-professionals repatriating their management fees into Beirut’s built environment and Lebanon’s domestic banking sector. Witnessing the growth of Beirut's expatriate world-city functions in absence of financial centre redevelopment, the paper proposes to be sensitive to potential disconnects between the function and location of command and control in global cities more generally.

Geofinance/banking between political and financial geographies

“…In summary, this work seeks to be a starting point for a discussion about two gaps in financial geography by (1) introducing the perspective of the semi-peripheries and (2) calling for a closer attention to the politics and geopolitics of finance. While much more has been written on politics and finance -for example, Hardie (2012) on the constraints of government borrowing in emerging markets, or Krijnen et al (2017) for analyses of finance in the world-city tradition -we as editors resist over-theorizing by keeping the conceptual contribution focused on geography. While the theoretical contribution of the whole book is targeted and specific, the empirical content is wide ranging: the chapters connect with a variety of disciplines and engage with two trends on the broader role of the semi-periphery of global finance.…”

Reframing labour market mobility in global finance: Chinese elites in London’s financial district

“…However, as Robinson (2002Robinson ( , 2005 has argued, much of this work is characterised by a distinctive geographical focus on the mobility of elites from the Global North to other parts of the world. As a result, much less attention has been paid to financial elites beyond Western Europe and North America, their mobility patterns and working practices (although see Bassens et al, 2011Bassens et al, , 2010Lai, 2012;Krijnen et al, 2017 andKleibert andKippers, 2016).…”

Agency and practice in the making of global cities: towards a renewed research agenda

“…Professionals such as advertising creatives, consultants, lawyers, accountants or investment bankers are a service firm's main asset to achieve its strategic goals. Such work suggests that the role of APS in global capitalism needs to be understood in more nuanced and subtle terms than 'command' and 'control' (Kleibert, 2017); their business includes such activities as facilitating, switching, advising and circulating knowledge (Bassens and van Meeteren, 2015) and even persuasion, seduction or manipulation, and research needs to be more sensitive to these other modalities (Krijnen et al, 2017). As Sassen (2010, p. 158) argues, the influence of APS firms on clients' strategies is 'embedded' into the services provided.…”