Saskia Sassen
Saskia Sassen is a Dutch-American sociologist whose research examines globalization, migration, and the global city, a framework she helped develop.
Global city: A major urban center where institutions and firms coordinate economic activity across national borders. Sassen developed this framework to explain how certain cities organize the global economy.
Producer services: Specialized services, such as law, accounting, and consulting, supplied to firms and other organizations. Their concentration helps cities manage complex operations dispersed across countries.
Manuel Castells: A sociologist known for analyzing network society, communication, and urban change. His account of network society complements Sassen’s analysis of cities as nodes in global systems.
International migration: The movement of people across national borders to live, work, or settle elsewhere. Sassen studies how global economic changes shape migration and how migrants reshape cities.
The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo: Saskia Sassen’s 1991 book analyzing New York, London, and Tokyo as command centers of the global economy. This book established her best-known framework and made the three cities its core cases.
Globalization: The intensification of cross-border connections in economies, politics, societies, and culture. Her work treats globalization as a process concentrated in specific places, not simply a borderless condition.
Financialization: The growing influence of financial markets, institutions, and motives over economies and organizations. Sassen connects expanding financial activity with the urban concentration of advanced services.
John Friedmann: An urban theorist who developed influential accounts of world cities and global economic change. His world-city hypothesis helped establish the research tradition to which Sassen contributed.
Immigrant labor: Work performed by people who have moved from one country to another. Her account connects migrant workers to both high-end services and low-wage urban jobs.
Territory, Authority, Rights: Saskia Sassen’s 2006 book tracing changes in territorial organization, political authority, and rights under globalization. It extends her analysis from cities to the transformations of national institutions.