These firms' offices are attributed a vital role in the world city network literature and form the basis for world city rankings using the interlocking network model. In particular, financial service firms, but also management consultancies, law firms, and other advanced producer service firms have offshored tasks abroad. The changing geography of service employment and the relocation of back-office service tasks to developing economies present a challenge to contemporary world city network research and methodology, as cost-driven offshoring may wrongly suggest a city's increased importance in global city rankings. Finally, the article moves beyond neo-Marxism’s key concepts by juxtaposing their assumptions with ethnographic results from social studies of finance, a manoeuvre which forges an understanding of cities as socio-technical assemblages and eventful multiplicities, beyond, inter alia, the baseless assumption that the global economy is subject to ‘command and control’. Second, Taylor’s interlocking world city network model is forensically examined to explain that it is fallacious because it is a structuralism that, bedevilled by a sorites paradox, contains the further problem of containing no credible evidence for the existence of ‘command centres’. First, imagining the global economy as being subject to ‘highly concentrated command’ through the function of some major cities as ‘strategic sites’ for the production of ‘command and control’ is traced back through several neo-Marxist authors to narrate its genesis, and to argue that the lack of evidence for that proposition is a consequence of those antecedents envisioning capitalism as a totalizing structure, thus making the assumption that it is subject to control and coordination from a distance. The article argues that the lack of convincing empirical evidence for the global economy as being subject to ‘command and control’ results from that contention being a neo-Marxist myth.
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