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.