Page 48 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

CIVIL SOCIETY

representation, LA is marked by the rise of hyperreality and simulacra courtesy not
only of Hollywood or Disneyland but also of spin doctors, virtual reality, cyberspace,
sound bites and pop culture.
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Global city Underpinning the concept of the global city is the sense that the urban
world economy is dominated by a small number of centres which act as command
and control points for an increasingly dispersed set of economic activities. Thus, the
idea of the global city is illustrative of the structuring and re-structuring of space as
a created environment through the spread of industrial capitalism. In particular,
capitalist corporations are sensitive to questions of location and their relative
advantages. Thus, lower labour costs, weaker unionization and tax concessions will
lead firms to favour some places over others as locations for plants, markets and
development. Similarly, the need to find alternative forms of investment, and the
particular conditions of markets and state intervention, assists some sectors of the
economy (and thus some places) in gaining preference over others.
The key contemporary global cities – London, New York, Tokyo, Seoul, Los
Angeles, Frankfurt, Paris, Singapore – have significance not because of population
size or volume of business but because key personnel and activities are located
within them. That is, they are sites for the accumulation, distribution and
circulation of capital where information and decision making functions are more
telling than size. Ten cities host the headquarters of nearly half of the world’s largest
500 transnational manufacturing corporations and the top four cities, London, New
York, Tokyo and Seoul, account for 156 of these. This is a consequence of a growth
in the number and range of the institutions of global capital, the geographical
concentration of capital and an extension of global reach via telecommunications
and transport. In particular, finance and banking have become the crucial facets of
a city’s claim to global significance.
Links Capitalism, globalization, post-industrial society, postmodernism, urbanization

Civil society After Hegel, the idea of civil society gains its currency from a contrast with
the realm of the state as the domain of social relations and public participation.
Civil society is understood to be an arena of engagement in which individuals
pursue their private interests and form relationships in pursuit of their subjective
needs. However, this brings with it a sense of shared interests as individuals
recognize their duties to others as a condition of their own freedoms. Broadly
speaking, Marx took over this understanding of civil society from Hegel but gave
more emphasis to its penetration by market relations and commodification. Thus,
civil society is understood to be the province of ideological conflict which is both
implicated in the workings of capitalism and the state whilst simultaneously
offering itself as a possible site of resistance.
In work that was significant and influential within cultural studies, Gramsci
understood civil society to be constituted by affiliations outside of formal state
boundaries including the family, social clubs, the press, leisure activities, etc. Here
civil society is the realm of ideology as lived experience rooted in day-to-day