The Globalization of Nothing 2

George Ritzer

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781452239095
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Globalization of Nothing is back in a revised and completely updated edition, with an even greater emphasis on the processes of globalization and how they relate to McDonaldization. As before, this book is structured around four sets of concepts addressing the issues of: "places/non-places, " "things/non-things, " "people/non-people, " and "services/non-services." By drawing upon salient examples from everyday life, George Ritzer invites the reader to examine the nuances of these concepts in conjunction with the paradoxes within the process of the globalization of nothing. Critical questions are raised throughout, and the reader is compelled not only to seek answers to these questions, but also to critically evaluate the questions as well as their answers. New to This Edition

• Features a greater emphasis on the main topic of globalization: A new first chapter offers an introductory overview of globalization and globalization theory, outlining the unique ways in which these topics are addressed throughout the text.
• Offers a new way to conceptualize and theorize about globalization: This edition delves into two subprocesses of globalization—"glocalization" and "grobalization."
• Provides a new way to think about consumer culture and globalization: New material is presented on consumer culture and its globalization as well as on the role of branding.
• Uses a nontechnical and accessible style with many global examples: The examples in this book are drawn from everyday life and a global consumer culture that are readily recognizable to students.
• Shorter and more concise in response to reviewer feedback.

Intended Audience
This text can be used in a variety of courses focusing on the principles of sociology, social change, social theory, globalization, consumerism, and the global economy in sociology departments as well as in related courses in departments of political science or economics.

Contributor to the SAGE Teaching Innovations and Professional Development Award

Find out more at www.sagepub.com/sociologyaward

1

Globalization

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A New Conceptualization

Every time one enters the World Wide Web (www), by definition (it is, after all, “worldwide”) one enters the global world. Googling almost anything is likely to yield many sites from various parts of the world. With a few keystrokes one can purchase virtually anything from anywhere. Thus, one can download, often for a fee, music, text, and even pornography from anyplace in the world. Indeed, in some cases, especially pornography, the sources may be, and usually are, from anywhere (or everywhere) in the world.

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A trip to the nearby local shopping mall is, whether the shopper knows it or not, a global experience. This is most obvious in the products on sale there. For example, I recently purchased three seemingly identical Russell T-shirts at a mall, and when I got home and examined the labels, it turned out that while all the shirts had the identical logo, and looked the same, each was produced in a different third world country. A visit to a consumer electronics store is also a global experience in the sense that virtually everything offered there is made somewhere else in the world. Even a casual examination of the goods for sale at virtually any shop at any mall will indicate that few things are being produced in one’s own country (unless you happen to live, say, in China). It is literally the case that the world is on sale at your local mall.

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Beyond the products for sale there, the mall itself is increasingly global. For example, many of the malls in my home area (suburban Maryland) and in the area in which I vacation in the winter (Sarasota, Florida) are owned and/or managed by an Australian firm, Westfield (it now has interests in more malls in the United States than in Australia, and also has malls in New Zealand and Great Britain). Furthermore, many specific shops are outlets of chains that may well be owned elsewhere. This is especially true outside the United States, since many of the world’s largest chains are U.S. based. However, it is increasingly the case that global chains with roots outside the United States are coming to populate American malls. Examples include The Body Shop (Great Britain), Pollo Campero (Guatemala), H&M (Sweden), to say nothing of the freestanding Ikeas (Netherlands, by way of Sweden) that are increasingly common and visible throughout the United States.

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The same is true if one is in the market for an automobile. One’s local car dealer is increasingly likely to be offering automobiles produced by companies whose headquarters, if not manufacturing facilities, are elsewhere in the world. Thus, in many places in the world, one is likely to buy cars from companies headquartered in Japan, Korea, Germany, and in the not-too-distant future, China. If one is an American, one is increasingly less likely to buy a car from an American firm, and as a result, those companies are in deep economic difficulties, engaged in downsizing production facilities and workforce, and may be on the verge of bankruptcy. Furthermore, even if an American bought an “American” car, it is likely that many, if not most, of the components of that car were manufactured elsewhere.

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Our everyday lives, especially in the realm of consumption (the area covered in the above cases and from which most of the examples used in this book will be drawn), have become increasingly globalized. However, while for reasons of manageability and interest the main examples here will relate to consumption, the fact is that this is merely the tip of the iceberg. As one contemporary thinker has put it, we now live in a “global age.”¹ Globalization is not only increasingly ubiquitous in our everyday lives but also of great relevance to, and of enormous significance for, many larger issues and problems, including inequality between nations and parts of the world (North-South), social class inequality, gender inequality, democratization, and so on. Virtually every nation and the lives of billions of people throughout the world are being transformed, often quite dramatically, by globalization.² The degree and significance of its impact is to be seen virtually everywhere one looks, most notably and specifically in the economic realm, in the activities of not only transnational corporations but also such global organizations as the World Trade Organization (WTO), International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Economic Forum (WEF), and World Bank, as well as of those organizations that oppose the actions of many of them such as Greenpeace, World Wildlife Federation, Amnesty International, the Clean Clothes Campaign, and the World Social Forum (WSF). That this is of great significance is made clear by the great importance of the former organizations, the level of protest against them by the latter organizations (and others), and the fact that the implications of both organizational actions and protests against them have reverberated throughout widely dispersed geographic areas and affected the everyday lives of large numbers of people almost everywhere.

Even more visible, although perhaps of declining significance in the face of the expansion of global organizations like those mentioned above—IGOs (international governmental organizations) and INGOs (international nongovernmental organizations)—that are more or less independent of nation-states, are the actions taken by such nation-states, especially the United States, on the global stage. In recent years, this is most obvious in military interventions and, as of this writing, the continuing U.S. military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course, the United States claimed that those global actions were provoked by other global activities, mainly global terrorism, most notably the infamous September 11, 2001, attacks by al-Qaeda on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC.

All of this—changes wrought in everyday life and consumption, the operations of global economic organizations and of nation-states, the actions of, and reactions to, global terrorism, and much more—has led to increasing interest in globalization among laypeople, business leaders, politicians, popular writers, and scholars.³

In terms of scholarly work, there is now a vast and growing literature on globalization that is derived from many academic fields, including international relations, political science, anthropology, economics, and sociology. It is work in the latter field that will inform this analysis primarily. More specifically, it is theoretical work, mainly in and around sociology, that forms the base for this book. Indeed, in recent years we have witnessed the emergence of a distinctive body of work known as globalization theory.⁴

While this theory is multidisciplinary in nature, the primary emphasis here is on the utilization of sociological contributions to it, as well as a sociological take on theoretical work derived from other fields. Globalization theory has not only emerged in recent years as a result of efforts to better understand the kinds of social changes discussed above but also because of a series of developments internal to social theory, notably the reaction against such earlier perspectives⁵ as modernization theory.⁶ Among the defining characteristics of that theory were⁷ its orientation to issues that were of central concern in the West, the preeminence it accorded to developments there, and the idea that the rest of the world had little choice but to become increasingly like it (more democratic, more capitalist, more consumerist, etc.). Other theories (e.g., world-system⁸ and dependency theory⁹) emerged in reaction, at least in part, to such a positive view of the West (as well as of the North versus the South) and offered international perspectives that were critical of the West (and North) for, among other things, its exploitation of many other parts of the world. Nevertheless, they retained a focus on the nation-state and the West, albeit a highly critical orientation toward both.

While there are many different versions of globalization theory, there is a tendency in virtually all of them to move away from a focus on the nation-state, the West, and the North and to examine transplanetary processes that flow in many different directions, as well as those that are independent of any nation-state or area of the world.¹⁰ Thus, Ulrich Beck (and many others) argues for a globalization theory (and for a social science—including sociology—in general) that adopts a “cosmopolitan”¹¹ orientation. That would involve a shift away from a focus on the West and North, and especially the nation-state, and toward a concern with transplanetary processes such as global “networks” and “flows” (see below).

Thus, there are good reasons, both external and internal to academic work, for the rise in interest in globalization in general, and globalization theory in particular, but globalization is by no means simple or unambiguous; it covers a wide range of very different phenomena. In dealing with some of that complexity, we need a basic definition of globalization as “the worldwide diffusion of practices, expansion of relations across continents, organization of social life on a global scale, and growth of a shared global consciousness.”^{12, 13}

Key Topics in the Study of Globalization

As it has come to be used, the notion of globalization encompasses a number of transplanetary processes that, while they can be seen as global in their reach, are separable from each other (at least for purposes of discussion). It is beyond the scope and intent of this book to deal with the full range of globalization processes and issues,¹⁴ but at this point I can at least give the reader a sense of the breadth and complexity of this still burgeoning topic and literature.

Perhaps no topic has received more attention from those interested in globalization than the economy in general and especially the role played in it by transnational corporations (TNCs) such as Toyota, Microsoft, and Exxon. Most observers see TNCs as the most powerful players on the globe today, or at least one of the two or three most important participants.¹⁵

Politics is the other of the most important concerns of those interested in globalization, especially the role of the nation-state in that process.¹⁶ There is a broad consensus that a wide variety of social changes—increasingly porous borders, the growing power of supraterritorial entities (United Nations [UN], European Union [EU], World Bank), and even subterritorial entities (direct relations between regions in different countries)—are eroding the power of the nation-state. However, even if we acknowledge the decline of the power of the nation-state, it remains a potent force in globalization.¹⁷

An increasing force in globalization is the wide array of INGOs and IGOs mentioned previously. INGOs, especially the World Social Forum, are seen as forming the beginnings of a global civil society that could serve as an alternative to global political and economic organizations.¹⁸

A new type of city, the “global”¹⁹ (as well as the broader “world”²⁰) city, is seen as emerging, and it has been the subject of considerable thought and research. Among other things, it is one of the subterritorial units engaging in global relationships that largely or totally bypass, or rather pass through, the nation-state (e.g., financial transactions involving directly the three global cities—New York, Tokyo, and London—that are the sites of the largest stock exchanges in the world²¹).

Globalization has naturally been of great practical interest to those in business, especially the emergence of new global markets and how to create, serve, and/or get larger pieces of those markets. A variety of ideologies have been developed to support the globalization of business, and those ideologies have come to be analyzed by observers and critics of global business, especially in its capitalist form.²²

Technology, especially the emergence of a bewildering array of new technologies, is related to virtually all aspects of globalization. Indeed, globalization as it currently exists, to say nothing of what it will become in the future, could not have occurred without all sorts of technological developments. Among the interests and concerns in this regard are the satellites that have allowed the mass media to become a global force,²³ the computer and the Internet²⁴ (including the role they have played in the emergence of the global digital divide as well as other global inequalities²⁵), and the advanced information technologies that are transforming many domains, including warfare (at least as it is engaged in by the United States and to a lesser extent other developed countries), from, for example, hand-to-hand combat between people to missiles being launched, often from great distances, from planes, ships, and even pilotless drones.²⁶

Then there are such issues as the relationship between globalization and religion,²⁷ sport,²⁸ pop music,²⁹ and virtually every other aspect of the social world. For example, in early 2006 the first global baseball championship, the World Baseball Classic, took place involving teams from, among other places, South Africa, Cuba, the United States, the Netherlands, Japan, Korea, and China.

Great attention has been devoted to the relationship between globalization and a range of social problems such as poverty and economic inequality in general³⁰ as well as gross inequalities in the nature and quality of health care,³¹ global crime³² and corruption,³³ global sex³⁴and the international sex trade,³⁵ terrorism,³⁶ as well as the often negative impact of globalization on agricultural life³⁷ and the environment.³⁸ All of these problems, and many others, have led to considerable interest in the morality and ethics of globalization,³⁹ to say nothing of a wide range of efforts to deal with these problems, including resisting globalization, at least as it currently exists.⁴⁰

However, the aspect of globalization that will concern us most in this book is the globalization of culture in general,⁴¹ especially the globalization of consumer culture.⁴² A great deal of attention will be devoted in these pages to the worldwide spread of consumer culture in general, as well as the various products, services, and settings (e.g., supermarkets, fast-food restaurants) associated with it. Also of concern is the issue of whether global consumer culture poses a threat to both indigenous consumer cultures and the distinctive commodities associated with them.⁴³

While the examples to be deployed in this book are from consumer culture, this is not so much a book about consumer culture but rather one about globalization. While a new way of thinking about consumer culture will be presented in Chapters 2–4, the main objective of this book, as indicated by the title of this chapter and as detailed in Chapter 5 and further developed in the last three chapters of the volume, is to offer a new way of conceptualizing and theorizing globalization. Before we can get to the distinctive conceptual and theoretical contributions of this book, I need to offer a sketch of e...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Author
• Preface
• 1. Globalization: A New Conceptualization
• 2. Nothing (and Something): Another New Conceptualization
• 3. Meet the Nullities: Nonplaces, Nonthings, Nonpeople, and Nonservices
• 4. Nothing: Caveats and Clarifications
• 5. The Globalization of Nothing
• 6. Theorizing Glocalization and Grobalization
• 7. The Globalization of Consumer Culture—and Global Opposition to It
• 8. Loss Amidst Monumental Abundance—and Global Strategies for Coping With It
• Notes
• Index