Page 170 - The Disneyization of Society

IMPLICATIONS OF DISNEYIZATION

significant than that. For one thing, they are not tied to particular companies so
that their influence and diffusion are less immediately obvious and less high pro-
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file than the arrival of prominent brand names and the goods and services they
offer. While the arrival on foreign shores of a new theme park like Disneyland
Paris, or McDonald’s restaurants, or Starbucks coffee shops is sometimes greeted
with an outcry, it is hard to imagine a similar chorus of disapproval greeting the
arrival of the principles of Disneyization. Focusing on products obscures the more
fundamental issue of the diffusion of underlying principles through which goods
and services are produced and then put into people’s mouths, onto their bodies, and
into their homes. McDonald’s restaurants have been the focus of anti-globalization
campaigners and Disney was given a decidedly gallic cold shoulder among intel-
lectuals in France when Disneyland Paris was in the planning stage, occasioning
the famous ‘cultural Chernobyl’ comment. However, the spread of the fundamen-
tal principles that can be deduced from an examination of what the Disney theme
parks and McDonald’s exemplify is much less frequently, and perhaps less likely
to be, a focus of comment.
When considered in this way, it is striking how poorly Disneyization and
McDonaldization fit into Appadurai’s influential delineation of different forms
of ‘-scape’, that is contexts for the flow of goods, people, finance, and other items
around the globe. Appadurai distinguished between five scapes: ethnoscapes (the
movement of people); technoscapes (the movement of technology in the form of
hardware and software); financescapes (the movement of capital); mediascapes
(the movement of information); and ideoscapes (the movement of ideas and
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ideals). Waters has argued that ‘McDonaldization infiltrates several of these flows’. 8
However, such a view does not do justice to the significance of McDonaldization
and by implication Disneyization. In a sense, we need a new conceptual term for
them, which we might call systemscape to refer to the flow of contexts for the
production and display of goods and services. While they incorporate elements of
the five ‘scapes’, as Waters suggests, Disneyization and McDonaldization are
somewhat more than this. They represent important templates for the production
of goods and services and their exhibition for sale. In the case of Disneyization, it
is a non-machine technology for the delivery of goods and services, a technology
that can be transferred across the globe.

Disneyization and Globalization

In describing Disneyization as a globalizing force, there is a risk of a simplistic
globalization or Americanization thesis that depicts symbols of American culture
spreading by design across the globe and riding roughshod over local conditions
and practices, creating an homogenized world in their wake. As writers on globalization