Glocalization

A Critical Introduction

Victor Roudometof

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317936282
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book seeks to provide a critical introduction to the under-theorized concept of Glocalization. While the term has been slowly diffused into social-scientific vocabulary, to date, there is no book in circulation that specifically discusses this concept. Historically theorists have intertwined the concepts of the 'global' and the 'glocal' or have subsumed the 'glocal' under other concepts – such as cosmopolitanization. Moreover, theorists have failed to give 'local' due attention in their theorizing. The book argues that the terms 'global', the 'local' and the 'glocal' are in need of unambiguous and theoretically and methodologically sound definitions. This is a prerequisite for their effective operationalization and application into social research.

Glocalization is structured in two parts:

Part I introduces the term, seeking to provide a history and critical assessment of theorists' past use of glocalization and offering an alternative perspective and a clear, effective and applicable definition of the term, explaining the limitations of the term globalization and the value of defining glocalization.

Part II then moves on to illustrate how the concept of glocalization can be used to broaden our understanding and analysis of a wide range of issues in world politics including the 21st century culture of consumption, transnationalism & cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and religious traditions.

Utilizing a wide range of historical, ethnographic and real-life examples from various domains this work will be essential reading for students and scholars of Globalization and will be of great interest to those in the field of Global, Transnational and Cosmopolitan Studies.

1What is glocalization?

DOI: 10.4324/9781315858296-1

“Glocalization rules the world” declares a headline in the Financial Post (Shaw 2011). For a concept that is said to “rule the world,” its coverage in the academic handbooks and collections is far from adequate. For example, in the Routledge International Handbook of Globalization Studies (Turner 2010), the term does not even appear in the volume’s index. Unlike globalization, a term that has become ubiquitous across academic discussions, TV panels, and news reports, glocalization is far less known. This book aims to fill this void, at least in part, by offering a systematic overview of the concept’s growing use across the social sciences and humanities while also suggesting some new ways for theorizing the notion of glocal.

The word glocal is a neologism; that is, it is a new word constructed by fusing global and local. The new term has quietly gained popularity since 1990, and its use has increased across a variety of disciplines and fields. It is widely used in the literature on cross-cultural economic marketing, but it has also been applied to fields vastly removed from business and management. There is solid evidence that the scholarly community is increasingly engaging with the notion of glocal. The aim of this book is to make a substantive contribution to this engagement and offer a transdisciplinary engagement with glocalization, not simply offer a thematic overview of its existing uses across various fields. Hence, the book draws freely upon academic work from diverse fields and disciplines to articulate fresh insights into twenty first-century social realities.

Glocalization is not simply a new term but also a new concept. Glocalization should be a concept analytically distinct from globalization. In this book’s pages, cumulative evidence is presented demonstrating the use of glocalization as a concept to explain a variety of real-life experiences and situations. However, this should not be interpreted as glocalism—in other words, as advocacy of the glocal as a privileged concept in comparison to other concepts. On the contrary, the goal is to offer a balanced perspective that allows an assessment of the concept’s advantages and its limitations. Consequently, the book adopts a critical perspective with respect to existing popular and academic interpretations of the term across the social sciences but also with respect to the concept of glocalization itself. This book is concerned with the notion of glocal and slowly moves from this broader, general notion to specific ideas about glocalization, glocality, and glocalism. Hence, in the following, I employ the expressions of “the glocal” and the “notion of glocal” in order to designate the broader or general idea of a “thing” called glocal. Progressively, the discussion shifts to more specific concepts, and the more specific terms glocalization, glocality, and glocalism are used.

Origins and definitions

According to the Oxford Dictionary of New Words (Tulloch 1991:134), glocalization derives from the Japanese notion of dochakuka, originally the agricultural principle of adapting farming techniques to local conditions. In Japan, the concept of “global localization” is often attributed to Sony Corporation’s CEO Akio Morita. Sony employed this concept in corporate advertising and branding strategies in the 1980s and 1990s (Edgington and Hayter 2012). A 2014 EBSCO Host search between 1966 and 1987 revealed that there should be 11 entries containing the word glocal (of which only two are in academic journal articles). Interestingly, in none of these entries does the word glocal actually appear. The Japanese word dochakuka found its way into an interview of Michael Schrage (1989) with Yoshihisa Tabuchi, president and CEO of Japanese giant Nomura Securities. In the interview, the term glocal is not, in fact, used; Tabuchi used the word dochakuka, and that word was rendered as “becoming deeply rooted.”

In 1990, U.S. and News Report listed the word glocal in its “Words to Watch” (1990:84) list. In the entry, glocalization is defined as “the trend among multinational corporations of dispersing power from their headquarters to far-flung branch offices.” This entry reflects the Japanese and U.S. business discourse of the late 1980s. However, the story of the term’s Japanese origins is not without some reservations. For example, Robertson recalls the following:

Upon the occasion of a recent visit to Japan in December, 2002, the first newspaper I read, on my way from Narita International Airport into the city of Tokyo, was the English-language Japan Times. A prominent article in the latter proclaimed that a new term had entered journalistic discourse in Japan—namely glocalization! (2004: para. 3)

The story itself suggests that the glocal may be the product of translation of dochakuka from Japanese into English in the late 1980s. Subsequently, the word was reintroduced back to Japan under the guise of glocalization.

However, there is another genealogy, albeit not as widely discussed in the social sciences. The glocal was originally used in the Global Change Exhibition (which opened May 30, 1990) in the German Chancellery in Bonn. Heiner Benking built an exhibition piece in the form of a three-dimensional orthogonal cube, called “Rubik’s Cube of Ecology” (François 1997; see also “Cube” Grafic Purpose N.d.). This hyperlinked eco-cube aimed toward improving the understanding of and communication about multi-disciplines like ecology. It offered a representation of embodied cognitive space, a “pointer to possibilities” for applications ranging from knowledge organization to ecological awareness. The main objective was to offer a representation of links along and across spatial scales in relationship to the goal of developing bridges relating local to regional to national to global levels for the purposes of environmental research and management. Dr. Manfred Lange, the director of the touring exhibit development team at that time and head of the German National Global Change Secretariat, called the depth dimension of this cube glocal in order to give a word for the magnitude ranging from micro to meso to macro scales. This second line of interpretation suggests quite different origins, far removed from commercial practices and more in tune with ecological efforts to connect the global and the local in order to create awareness and enhance rethinking of frames of action.¹

It is also important to note the difference in the historical emergence of the terms glocal and global. Glocal is a term that has emerged relatively recently and, as such, it did not exist before 1990. Nevertheless, it is true that the related notions of hybridity, fusion, creolization, and mixture have a long history. Although glocal is not simply another word for any of the above terms, it can be used to describe some of the social and cultural phenomena that fall within the scope of these terms. In contrast, global is a term with a considerably longer history. In business circles, the credit for use of the term globalization is conventionally given to Levitt’s (1983) classic article about the globalization of markets (for a critical appraisal, see James and Steger 2014:418).

However, Robertson’s (1983) first publication on globality was published simultaneously with Levitt’s (1983) article. Consequently, the perception that globalization, as a concept, originated in economics and only subsequently transferred into the social sciences is not entirely correct—rather, ideas about globality and globalization initially emerged in the context of the sociology of religion and debates about the seemingly unexpected rise of Iran’s Islamic fundamentalism in the late 1970s. Moreover, as James and Steger (2014) show, the notion of globalization was used during the period spanning the 1930s to 1970s in a variety of fields and in relation to diverse issues (such as race, international education, and the European Common Market). If the discussion shifts from using globalization to the issue of the origins of the term global, it is possible to go even further into the past.

Scholte (2000:43), for example, dates the first occurrence of the notion of global back to 1944. MacGillivray (2006:10) reports that its earliest occurrence dates back to 1892, in the pages of Harper’s Magazine, in reference to Monsieur de Vogue, a Frenchman whose love of travel made him “global.” Of course, if one moves beyond the linguistic barrier of the word, then it is apparent that many civilizations employed notions of “the world.” Such notions cover a wide range, from the Ancient Greek cosmos to the Christian ecumene and the Chinese tian xia (which literally means “all-under-heaven”).

For indicative purposes, a short list of collected definitions from a series of online dictionaries and encyclopedias is offered in Table 1.1. These definitions tend to reflect the use of the word glocalization in the fields of business and marketing.

Although these definitions help capture the meaning of glocal as a word, they are far less helpful in clarifying glocalization as a concept. This fuzziness prevails often not only in academic discussions but also in popular use. Consider, for example, its use in the widely known film Up in the Air (Reitman et al. 2009). In the film, Ryan Bingham (played by George Clooney) works for the Career Transitions Corporation (CTC). He makes his living traveling to workplaces around the United States and informing workers of their dismissals in place of their employers, who fear doing it themselves. His style is that of tailoring the message according to each person, thereby adding a highly personalized dimension to the entire process. In the film, Ryan is unexpectedly called to CTC’s offices in Omaha, Nebraska. He discovers that an ambitious, freshly graduated new hire, Natalie Keener (played by Anna Kendrick) is promoting a plan to cut costs by conducting layoffs via videoconferencing. In a scene in the film where Natalie shows the promotional video, the new method promoted is described as merging the “global” with the “local”; hence it is described as “glocal.”

TABLE 1.1 Definitions of glocalization

Source	Definition
www.oxforddictionaries.com/	The practice of conducting business according to both local and global considerations
http://en.wikipedia.org	A term that describes the adaptation of international products around the particularities of a local culture in which they are sold
http://www.wordspy.com/	The creation of products or services intended for the global market but customized to suit the local culture
http://www.britannica.com/	The simultaneous occurrence of both universalizing and particularizing tendencies in contemporary social, political, and economic systems
http://www.macmillandictionary.com	The process of changing products or services that are sold all over the world to suit people in different local markets
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/	The idea that in globalization local conditions must be considered
Note: All sources accessed on October 5, 2015.

However, the layoff method called glocal in the film is not, in fact, a glocal strategy; that strategy is the one practiced in the film by Ryan. Instead, standardizing a layoff strategy via a uniform script and having the news broken to the employees via videoconference resembles the processes typically referred to as McDonaldization. McDonaldization refers to the adoption of the organizational characteristics associated with the fast food industry, whereby McDonald’s serves as its ideal type. McDonaldization is a reconceptualization and extension of Max Weber’s classic theory of rationalization, and the term is used to highlight the fact that contemporary industrial production is organized according to the principles of efficiency, calculability, control, and standardization. Ritzer (1993/2000) sees the fast food restaurant industry as having become the more representative contemporary paradigm for contemporary society. The concept has gained attention in different aspects of contemporary culture and typically is associated with the thesis of worldwide cultural homogenization.² To mention one of its most contemporary applications, the development of massive online open courses (MOOCs) represents a McDonaldization of higher education. Moreover, Ritzer’s (1993/2000, 2004) concepts of McDonaldization and the “globalization of nothing” highlight precisely the opposite of glocalization—what Ritzer calls “grobalization.” Ritzer’s ideas are examined further in Chapter 3.

Returning to the storyline of Up in the Air, the application of this McDonaldization strategy backfires, as one of the people who is laid off commits suicide. Subsequently, the company decides to continue using Ryan and his glocal strategy. As the above shows, the term glocal can be easily confused with other concepts that mean precisely the opposite of the original business meaning of the term. The above discussion clarifies—to the extent possible—the origins and definition of glocalization as a new term. This book however is not about glocal as a term. Instead, it aims to demonstrate the significance of glocalization as a concept—to show what it is, how it works, where and how it has been applied, and what insight is gained from its employment. To accomplish such an objective, the first issue at hand is to locate the slow and contested emergence of glocalization both in public debates as well as in the academic agendas of the twenty first century.

The limits of globalization

The word globalization emerged...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Epigraph
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 What is glocalization?
• Part 1 Introducing glocalization
• Part 2 Engagements
• Appendix: A Brief Guide to Glocalization Resources
• References
• Index