Page 100 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

GLOCALIZATION

radios, supermarkets and shopping centres. Further, patterns of population
movement and settlement established during colonialism and its aftermath,
combined with the more recent acceleration of globalization, particularly of
electronic communications, have enabled increased cultural juxtapositioning, 77
meeting and mixing. Indeed, all locales are now subject to the influences of distant
places.
It is commonly argued that globalization is the consequence of the dynamism
and inherently globalizing character of the institutions of modernity. Indeed,
Giddens likens the institutions of modernity to an uncontrollable juggernaut of
enormous power that sweeps away all that stands before it. In particular,
globalization is to be grasped in terms of the expansionism of the world capitalist
economy, the global information system, the nation-state system and the world
military order. In this view, modernity originated in Western Europe and
subsequently rolled out across the globe. However, this characterization has been
subject to the criticism that it is Eurocentric, envisaging only one kind of modernity,
that of the West. Instead, it can be argued that different spatial zones of the globe
have become modern in a variety of ways requiring us to speak of global
modernities in the plural.
Certainly, on the level of culture, globalization is far from an even process of
Western expansion driven by economic imperatives. Rather, it is better
characterized in terms of the disjunctive relationships between flows of money,
technology, media, ideas and people. That is, globalization involves the dynamic
movements of ethnic groups, technology, financial transactions, media images and
ideological conflicts that are not neatly determined by one harmonious ‘master
plan’. Rather, the speed, scope and impact of these flows are fractured and
disconnected. Metaphors of uncertainty, contingency and chaos are replacing those
of order, stability and systemacity. Globalization and global cultural flows cannot
be understood through neat sets of linear determinations but are better
comprehended as a series of overlapping, overdetermined, complex and chaotic
conditions which, at best, cluster around key ‘nodal points’.

Links City, cultural imperialism, glocalization, modernity, postcolonial theory

Glocalization The concept of glocalization, in origin a marketing term, has been
deployed to express the global production of the local and the localization of the
global. The global and the local are mutually constituting, indeed, much that is
considered to be local, and counterpoised to the global, is the outcome of translocal
processes. For example, nation-states were forged within a global system and the
contemporary rise in nationalist sentiment can be regarded as an aspect of
globalization.
Further, the current direction of global consumer capitalism is such that it
encourages limitless needs/wants whereby niche markets, customization and the
pleasures of constant identity transformation give rise to a certain type of
heterogeneity. Here the products of global forces are localized, that is, they are made
pertinent to ‘local’ concerns. Thus, the global and the local are relative terms. The