Page 32 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

Changing ordinary life 23

First, there is argument that capitalism and the business and economic
processes that define it are spreading to all parts of the world. Thus, news-
papers and academic literature discuss how companies like McDonald’s or
Starbucks are appearing in parts of the world (such as China) where, until
recently, they would not have been welcome. Moreover, a related aspect of this
process is how the practices of capitalist practice and organization have
become parts of activities such as schools, hospitals and universities that are
now considered as business. There is a strong economic logic to globalization.
Second, there is the argument that political processes are increasingly global-
ized. This is often examined in terms of the decline of the nation state in the
face of the economic strength of the capitalist enterprises that are core to the
economic processes. However, it can also be thought of in terms of the way in
which political processes are increasingly connected at global levels and how
supranational government organizations are having an impact. Third, there
are range of social practices thought of in terms of social interaction that are
becoming globalized. Thus, there is the way in which the movement of people
is being affected by the increased availability of cheap airfares and the move-
ment of migrant workers. The latter is having an impact on the nature of the
major cities of the western world in many ways. Even if the places to which
people in a society like Britain travel are routinized and are themselves global-
ized, there is still a measure of new forms of social interaction that are taking
place. The same is true for culture as ways of life and artistic production and
consumption. On the one hand; there are processes that suggest that ways of
life are converging (again as partly driven by the processes considered so far).
Thus, we can get a similar coffee in Starbucks or a burger in McDonald’s or we
can shop for books and CDs in stores that appear increasingly similar. On the
other hand, however, as part of this process as with others, there are new forms
of ways of life and symbolic representation that develop that combine forms of
artistic expressions and ways of life to produce new hybrids.
Three major points about these processes require emphasis. First, they
are dynamic and (in some ways potentionally) contradictory – thus, globaliza-
tion does not mean that everything is becoming the same. As Tomlinson
suggests:
From the instrumental point of view of capitalism, then, connectivity
works towards increasing a functional proximity. It doesn’t make all
places the same, but creates globalized spaces and connecting corridors
which ease the flow of capital (including its commodities and its per-
sonnel) by matching the time-space compression of connectivity with a
degree of cultural ‘compression’.
(Tomlinson 1999: 7)
What is occurring is what Tomlinson (1999: 9), following Robertson,
terms ‘unicity’ – ‘a sense that the world is becoming, for the first time in
history, a single social and cultural setting’. It is important, therefore, to rec-
ognize the dynamic nature of the process, rather than seeing it as a simple
unfolding of some kind of evolution.
Second, the different aspects of globalization are connected. Thus, any
aspect of globalization analytically separated will condense and contain aspects