Advanced Logistics in Italy: A City Network Analysis

Abstract

Logistics services providers present similarities with main advanced producer services as, besides their operational functions, they manage highly elaborated informational flows in order to run supply chains. Thanks to detailed information on employees provided by the social network LinkedIn, this paper proposes a World City Network analysis applied to main logistics providers operating in Italy, that focus only on knowledge and management activities. LinkedIn also allows decomposing firms' value chains and permits to develop interlocking networks dedicated to firms divisions. Italian advanced logistics appears to be primarily attracted by knowledge rich environments, rather than infrastructural nodes. The Italian network is centralised in Milan. Though, rather than an exclusive command centre, Milan acts as a hub, where part of the information and power are distributed in certain secondary cities, depending on their sectorial and geographical specificities

Spatial structure and influencing factors of regional city supply networks in manufacturing: A case study of Shandong, China

“…Earlier studies of city networks through corporate relationships can be traced back to the world city network (WCN) studies of Taylor et al (2002), which made a shift from corporate linkages to city relations by the inter-locking network model based on the inheritance of Sassen's emphasis on advanced producer services (APS) (Sassen, 2001). Another group of researchers, based on the theory of Hymer (1982) and Friedmann (1986) that states that cities gathering multinational headquarters have "urban control" of the world economy, focus on industry-wide or industry-specific corporate networks, such as those based on linkages between the financial sector (Zhao et al, 2018), advanced logistics services (Antoine et al, 2017), and the branches of multinational corporations (Alderson and Beckfield, 2004). Some scholars expanded the study of WCN with a focus on inter-enterprise venture capital (VC) (Pan et al, 2016), advanced producer service relationships in corporate public offerings (IPOs) (Pan et al, 2017), and project cooperation between enterprises in the film industry (Hoyler and Watson, 2019).…”

Research on the Spatial-Time Evolution and Influence Mechanism of Logistics Network Structure in Zhengzhou Metropolitan Area

“…This model has a strong rationality in measuring the logistics connection, and the expression of logistics quality and distance can more accurately approach the actual situation, becoming an important means to measure the logistics spatial connection. Second, the logistics network is built based on the geographical location distribution of logistics enterprise headquarters and branches [4][5]. Third, regional logistics network structure is characterized based on the data such as road freight order [6][7][8][9], railway freight flow [10][11], sea freight flow [12], air freight flow [13][14] and express freight bill [15][16][17][18].…”

The Behavior Mechanism of the Urban Joint Distribution Alliance under Government Supervision from the Perspective of Sustainable Development

“…In summary, academic studies are mainly concentrated on the urban joint distribution study of route optimization and distribution mode [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][25][26][27], and there are also scholars researching the interests distribution between main participants, incentives and distribution mechanisms, from different perspectives [28][29][30][31], but there is little research on the role of the major player (namely, the government) in the city of joint distribution of in-depth discussion. It is of great significance to study the behavior mechanism of players and its evolution for the urban joint distribution alliance taking governments as the law regulators.…”