Page 110 - Cultural Theory

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••• Giddens and Cultural Analysis •••

‘rational’ characteristics. Giddens alludes to the prospect that late modern features
may, indeed, point beyond modernity to a radically transformed form of society,
though not to the kind of postmodernity conventionally depicted.
Central to the period of late modernity, according to Giddens, is globalization. The
growth and intensification of inter-state and inter-economy transactions in the mod-
ern world system link distant events together and produce a shifting system of polit-
ical alliances and geo-political blocs. This has also led to the declining autonomy of
specifically ‘national’ societies (Giddens, 1985: 166; 1990: 65–9). Global capitalist
commodification and the growing internationalization of state politics have been
extended through a parallel globalization of both industrialism and militarism. An
international division of labour and system of production extends across the world,
and militarism develops into a world military order that is organized around a bal-
ance of power and the coordinated action of core states against peripheral ones.
Giddens recognizes a corresponding tendency towards the globalization of the
symbolic orders and systems of mediated communication that comprise the princi-
pal elements in the lifeworld. There is now, he argues, a world-wide sharing of knowl-
edge and cultural representations. The globalization of the mass media, partly a result
of the globalization of communications technology and of communications busi-
nesses, has a significant cultural impact. Giddens gives particular attention to the
global ‘pooling’ of information through news broadcasts, which ensure that infor-
mation is no longer bound to particular localities but is broadcast immediately across
the globe. This global pooling of knowledge is central to the world financial system,
where the prices of stocks and shares, currencies, interest rates, and information
about other economic variables can be transmitted, almost instantaneously, across
the world, from one financial centre to another. Similarly, international political
responses to localized political events and natural disasters are shaped by the ways in
which they are presented and communicated through news broadcasts. Broadcast
forms of entertainment are, increasingly, global products transmitted and syndicated
in societies far removed from those where they are produced.
The key implications of this globalization have been drawn out in what Giddens, fol-
lowing Beck (1986), sees as a ‘risk society’. The Enlightenment emphasis on the cultural
application of science and technology promised an increase in human control over
nature and the dangers that it posed for human beings. Giddens argues that the global
spread of capitalist industrialism has meant that the reality in late modernity is that
technology has itself become a source of danger and hazard. Technologically induced
risks – ‘manufactured risks’ – are themselves globalized, as each locality faces the further
risk that it will experience hazards generated elsewhere in the world. Acid rain produced
by the industries of Western Europe, for example, falls disproportionately on the forests
of Northern Europe. Such manufactured risks as pollution, environmental devastation,
and global warming increasingly overshadow any natural or ‘external risks’ that are
unmediated by human actions and technology. In late modernity the very idea of an
unmediated source of risk become meaningless.
Global risks make themselves felt in all the key institutional clusters of modernity.
Global capitalism runs the risk that its economic growth mechanisms will collapse;

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