Saskia Sassen

Agora

Saskia Sassen

b. 1947

A first way ina deliberate simplification – the portrait says more

The global economy is run from a few great cities, where top financiers and low-paid migrant workers depend on each other.

Placement

Sociology & Social Theory · Western Europe · Society & History, Politics & Law

Showed that globalisation needs places: the dispersed world economy is steered from a few “global cities”, and globalisation happens inside nation-states rather than simply past them.

Key ideas

The global city
Migration and the mobility of capital
Denationalisation inside the state
Expulsions

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Influence

Influenced by 1

Karl Marx

influenced by
Sassen asked whether advanced capitalism produces a systemic equivalent of Marx’s primitive accumulation, a ‘savage sorting’ that expels people, land and economies (2010; Expulsions, 2014). S. Sassen, “A Savage Sorting of Winners and Losers: Contemporary Versions of Primitive Accumulation”, Globalizations 7 (2010); Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (2014)
Evidence: AI draft
Karl Marx › 1818–1883

Works

1991The Global City
New York, London, Tokyo: globalisation concentrates command functions and business services in a few cities – and with them a new polarisation between high and low incomes.

Position

Sassen’s work shows how globalisation is anchored in particular places and institutions. Her early study The Mobility of Labor and Capital (1988) argued that foreign investment in poorer countries could itself set migration towards the rich ones in motion. The Global City (1991) argued that the more economic activity is dispersed around the world, the more its control is concentrated in a few cities – above all New York, London and Tokyo – where finance and specialised services such as law, accounting and consulting cluster. These global cities form a network more closely tied to one another than to their national hinterlands, and they are deeply polarised: high-earning professionals depend on a large, often immigrant, low-wage workforce of cleaners, cooks and carers. In Territory, Authority, Rights (2006) she rejected the idea that globalisation simply weakens the nation-state; much of it happens inside the state, as parts of national law, central banks and executives are “denationalised” and reoriented towards global markets. Expulsions (2014) describes a new logic in the global economy that expels people from jobs, homes and land, and ecosystems from life itself – a brutality produced by highly complex systems.

Life & context

Saskia Sassen was born in 1947 in The Hague and grew up from 1948 in Buenos Aires, with periods in Italy; she has said she was brought up in five languages. After studies in France, Italy and Argentina she went to the University of Notre Dame in the United States, where she took her doctorate in sociology in 1974. After teaching in New York she held the Ralph Lewis chair of sociology at the University of Chicago and then became Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University; she has also long held a visiting professorship at the London School of Economics. In 2013 she received the Prince of Asturias Award for Social Sciences. She is married to the sociologist Richard Sennett.