Global Investment Banking and Management Consultancy

Abstract

For academics and business people alike, the globalization of business seems to be quite easily ‘proved’ by the large and growing number of physical locations in which contemporary TNCs have offices. Whenever I asked a senior management consultant or investment banker about the issue of ‘globalization’ in general, their first inclination was, like the Director quoted above, to tell me about the sheer number of offices their respective companies had in different cities around the globe. ‘Globalization’ in both these industries is strongly associated with the physicality of having a building and staff in multiple, strategic locations around the world. And such locations tended to be in urban centres in different countries where these service companies currently are undertaking (or planning to undertake) business activity (Jenkens 1996). Likewise, in the academic social sciences, the key importance placed on ‘global’ and ‘globalizing’ cities is largely founded on empirical research concerned with the numbers, spread and locations of corporate head offices (for example, Brotchie etal 1995; Lo & Yeung 1998; Beaverstock etal 2001; Sassen 2001).

When I joined UKBank3, it was only a couple of thousand people in a dozen countries — that was eight years ago. Now we have over eight thousand in something like seventy-five locations across forty different countries.

(Director, Human Resources, UKBank3, London)