Tales of the Global City: German Expatriate Employees, Globalisation and Social Mapping
Author(s)
Moore, Fiona
Abstract
Transnational business people are seldom studied by anthropologists. They are inexorably linked to cities through the nature of their work and yet detached from them by virtue of their globe-trotting lifestyles. Here, the author examines the role that two ‘global cities’ – London and Frankfurt – play in the lives of a group of employees from a German transnational financial corporation. The author considers how these employees construct, and are constructed by, the cities in which they work and suggest that anthropologists may have to rethink their present conception of ‘the global’ versus ‘the local’, in favour of more abstract models.
