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A free video abstract to accompany this article can be found online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IziwDorbeGU.This paper provides important insights into how executive search firms can successfully manage their reputations to overcome major threats to their organizations. The paper focuses on three threats faced by executive search firms: the global financial crisis; questions around the sector's professional status; and the proliferation of social media for recruitment. Our data show that there was not a single coherent response from firms, but a piecemeal approach that focused on three forms of reputation management. First, diversifying service offerings; second, highlighting their symbolic capital; and third, connecting their firms to clients and candidates through partners. Building on our data and the theoretical literature, we provide a framework for understanding how professional service firms can manage their reputations in response to common threats, based on three categories from the English idiom ‘keep up with the Joneses’. First, moving away from the Joneses; second, fencing out the Joneses; third, networking more than the Joneses. We provide theoretical and practical insights around how organizations can manage their reputations in response to threats which are common across sectors.

This study has two objectives. Firstly, to compare cluster benefits, costs, and processes in two different highly productive clusters holding city location constant: financial services and media in London. To what extent are cluster forces similar and different in these two clusters? The second objective is to compare cluster benefits, costs, and processes for MNEs and UNEs within the two clusters. To what extent are cluster forces similar and different for MNEs and UNEs? Via exploratory factor analysis and logit analysis of derived factor scores, we find that similar factors are at work in each cluster: the factors are largely generic and not industry/cluster specific. We also find that some factors are similarly valued by MNEs and UNEs, some are valued more by MNEs, and some are valued more by UNEs. Importantly, factors falling into each category varies by cluster. So, multinationality matters and what matters is industry/cluster specific.

From the late 1990s, the establishment of a new relational ‘turn’ in the study of world city connectedness in globalisation has run parallel to the wider relational turn occurring in economic geography. Early work, built firmly upon a qualitative approach to the collection and analyses of new intercity datasets, considered cities as being constituted by their relations with other cities. Subsequent research, however, would take a strong quantitative turn, best demonstrated through the articulation of the inter-locking world city network (ILWCN) ‘model’ for measuring relations between cities. In this paper, we develop a critique of research based around the ILWCN model, arguing that this ‘top down’ quantitative approach has now reached a theoretical impasse. To address this impasse, we argue for a move away from structural approaches in which the firm is the main unit of analysis, towards qualitative approaches in which individual agency and practice are afforded greater importance.

The report examines changing relations between London and Frankfurt with the introduction of a single European currency and the decision to locate the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. Based on interviews with key personnel in global financial and business service firms and institutions in both cities, the findings support a network model of inter-city relations, which, the authors contend, is more appropriate than the simplistic competition model that dominates public discussion.