Globalisation& Identity

Notes

Introd

For some, “globalization”is what we are bound to do if we wish to be happy; for others
“globalization”is the cause of our unhappiness’

Discussion aroundglobalization often resolves into a set of unspecific and

unquestionedobservations: the nation-state is losing power; a new global culture isappearing;
there is no alternative to the ‘golden straightjacket’ (Friedman,1999) of global capitalism, and
so on.There is some disagreement over themeaning to be attached to the empirical evidence
used to supportvarious claims about the effects of globalization.

Evidenceabout globalization is formed, sustained and contested within particularsocial,

political, and economic contexts, and claims. For some, globalization is best understood as a
legitimating cover or ideology, a set of ideas that distorts reality so as to serve
particularinterests (Barrett, 1991).

Anthony Giddens (1990) defines globalisation as “the intensification of worldwidesocial

relations, which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shapedby events
occurring many miles away and vice versa” (p. 64). Giddens views globalisation asthe spread of
modernity and discusses time-space distanciation, referring to the way in whichinstantaneous
electronic communication erodes the constraints of distance and time on socialorganisation
and interaction.

Some scholars, such as Robertson (1992), talk of a global cultureand ‘global consciousness’.
Martin Albrow (1996) moves further, arguing that globalization results in a ‘world society’. He
defines globalisation as “all those processes by which the peoplesof the world are incorporated
into a single world society, global society”. This notion of a singleglobal society implies
homogenisation, which has led to the debate about whether globalization results in
homogenisation or heterogenisation.

Schirato and Webb (2003: 199) view‘globalization’ as a ‘discursive regime, a kind of machine
that eats upanyone and anything in its path’. They suggest that ‘globalizationfunctions as a set
of texts, ideas, goals, values, narratives, dispositionsand prohibitions, a veritable template for
ordering and evaluatingactivities, which is “filled in” or inflected with the interests of whoever
can access it’ (Schirato and Webb, 2003: 200). For others, globalizationis a much more
‘material’ reality in the contemporary world.

Langhorne (2001: 2), meanwhile, accents the proliferation oftechnology: ‘Globalization is the
latest stage in a long accumulation oftechnological advance which has given human beings the
ability toconduct their affairs across the world without reference to nationality,government
authority, time of day or physical environment’

Calhoun, 2002: 192) offers the followingconceptualization: globalization is ‘A catch-all term for
the expansionof diverse forms of economic, political, and cultural activity beyond national
borders’. In Bauman’s (1999a) formulation, globalization isabout ‘time-space compression’. And
for Roland Robertson, it is ‘thecrystallization of the entire world as a single place’ (in Arnason,
1990:220). John Lechte (2003), meanwhile, gestures to the connectednessimplied by Marshall
McLuhan’s 1962 phrase ‘the global village’,according to which globalization is to be viewed as
an emerging globalconsciousness.

This connectedness connotes a number of things: communicationnetworks and new

technology; the speed at which it isnow possible to move around the world; the emergence and
contemporaryprominence of the multinational corporation; what Lechte
calls‘decontextualization’-(consider in isolation frm its context), the idea that place is not as
relevant as it oncewas; an awareness of the finitude of global resources; and the threat ofa
standardization of cultural life.

Michael Mann’s (2001) understanding of globalization as the extensionof social relations over
the globe. This is in line with Held andMcGrew’s (2002: 1) definition of globalization as growing
world interconnectedness,or as they put it in expanded form: ‘globalizationdenotes the
expanding scale, growing magnitude, speeding up anddeepening impact of interregional flows
and patterns of social interaction.

It refers to a shift or transformation in the scale of human socialorganization that links distant
communities and expands the reach ofpower relations across the world’s major regions and
continents’.

*Inthis conceptualization, globalization can be understood through thefollowing four concepts:

stretched social relations, so that events andprocesses occurring in one part of the world have
significant impact onother parts of the world; intensification of flows, with the
increased‘density’ of social, cultural, economic, and political interaction acrossthe globe;
increasing interpenetration, so that as social relationsstretch, there is an increasing
interpenetration of economic and socialpractices, bringing distant cultures face to face; and
global infrastructures,which are the underlying formal and informal institutionalarrangements
required for globalized networks to operate (Cochraneand Pain, 2000).

small sample of definitions is sufficient to conclude that globalization is a complex phenomenon

with multiple effects, which makes it hard to define. There are, in fact, three possibilities for
defining globalization (Mittelman, 2006, p. 64). First, it can be defined as intensification of
global flows of goods and production factors, facilitated by
modern transportation and communication means. Globalization can also be defined as a
compression of time and space in a way that events in one part of the world have
instantaneous effects on distant locations. The third approach is to comprehend globalization
as a historical structure of material power. Globalization represents historical transformation in
the economy, politics and culture (Mittelman, 2006, p. 64).

The driving force of globalization is certainly the progress of technology. It speeds up

the effects of globalization, and contributes to essential transformation of the functioning
of economic systems. '' ... international economy is no longer divided vertically to separate
national economies, but involves a number of different levels or types of market activities,
which spread horizontally over a wider area of virtual space - replacing physical
geography of national borders with quasi geography of market structures, transaction
costs and informational cyber space.'' (Jakšić, 1997, p. 13)

Perspectives on globalization
Already, these definitions signal central issues in the field of debatearound contemporary
globalization

Cochrane and Pain’s (2000: 22–4) useful characterization ofthe debate as broadly divided into
three approaches.

First, there are the globalists. The globalists argue that globalization isa vital and inescapable
contemporary social process. National economies,politics, and culture become increasingly part
of networks ofglobal flows, and there is little prospect for escaping these. Globalistscan be
either optimistic or pessimistic in their reading of globalization.For the optimists, globalization
will bring raised living standards,greater democracy, and increasing levels of mutual
understanding. Forthe pessimists, on the other hand, globalization is seen as threateningand
destructive, as serving only narrow political and economic interests,and as tending to create
homogeneity, dislocation, violence, andinequality (Cochrane and Pain, 2000).
Second, there are the traditionalists. The traditionalists are profoundly skeptical about
globalization, seeing it largely as a myth or‘globaloney’. Some may contend that globalization is
not at all new.For example, Marxist traditionalists would point to Marx’s famouscomments in
the 1848 Communist Manifesto as evidence that globalizationis a far from recent thing:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising theinstruments of production,

and thereby the relations of production,and with them the whole relations of society….
Constant revolutionisingof production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social
conditions,everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish thebourgeois epoch from earlier
ones…. The need of a constantlyexpanding market for its produce chases the bourgeoisie over
thewhole surface of the globe…. All old-established national industrieshave been destroyed or
are being destroyed…. In place of the oldwants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we
find new
wants…. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency,we have intercourse
in every direction, universal interdependenceof nations…. The bourgeoisie … compels all
nations, onpain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production … to
become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world afterits own image.

Finally, there are the transformationalists who seek to steer a middleway between the
globalists and the traditionalists. For transformationalistsit is not the case, on the one hand,
that we have entered acompletely new, unrecognizable era of transformation in the direction
of a global economics, culture, and politics. Neither, though, isit the case that nothing has
changed. Instead, contemporary globaltransformations issue in a ‘complex set of
interconnecting relationships’(Cochrane and Pain, 2000: 23).

We cannot, then, predict aheadof investigation what precisely we will find. Cultural, economic,
andpolitical dimensions do not move at the same pace, and within thesebroad dimensions,
unevenness and complexity reign.
A summaryof the globalist, traditionalist and transformationalist positions is presented in Box.

The Globalist, Traditionalist and Transformationalist

Globalist
• There is a fully developed global economy that has supplanted previous
forms of the international economy.
• This global economy is driven by uncontrollable market forces which
have led to unprecedented cross-national networks of interdependency
and integration.
• National borders have dissolved so that the category of a national
economy is now redundant.
• All economic agents have to conform to the criteria of being internationally
competitive.
• This position is advocated by economic neoliberals but condemned by
neoMarxists.
Traditionalist
• The international economy has not progressed to the stage of a global
economy to the extent claimed by the globalists.
• Separate national economies remain a salient category.
• It is still possible to organize co-operation between national authorities to
challenge market forces and manage domestic economies and govern the
international economy.
• The preservation of entitlements to welfare benefits, for instance, can still
be secured at the national level.
Transformationalist
• New forms of intense interdependence and integration are sweeping the
international economic system.
• These place added constraints on the conduct of national economic
policy-making.
• They also make the formation of international public policy to govern
and manage the system very difficult.
• This position sees the present era as another step in a long evolutionary
process in which closed local and national economies disintegrate into
more mixed, interdependent and integrated ‘cosmopolitan’ societies.
Source: Held (2000: 90–1)
primacy of one dimension, or that attempt sweeping characterizations

globalization as
tied to the development of capitalism.

Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Social Change

Karl Marx (1818–83) was a German philosopher, political economist, andsocial theorist, and the
founder of modern communism. Marx studied philosophyat the University of Berlin, where he
also became involved in radicalpolitics. Because of his involvement in revolutionary politics,
Marx eventuallywas compelled to leave Germany, first for France and then for GreatBritain,
where he was supported in large part by his friend and collaborator,Friedrich Engels. Marx’s
theories were developed in response to classicalpolitical economy and the emergence of
bourgeois liberalism and capitalism.

For Marx, economic systems or modes of production determined the structure of social orders
and consequently the course of social change. Accordingto the Marxist theory of historical
materialism, changes in the ‘superstructure’of society – state and legal institutions, religion and
morality – resultfrom changes in the ‘base’ or economic mode of production. Marx argued
that because the capitalist mode of production, with its emphasis on competition,consumerism
and profit, leads to domination, class conflict and alienation,only a radical transformation to a
communist mode of productionwill enable genuine emancipation. ‘Scientific’ or ‘orthodox’
versions ofMarxism adopted a positivist view of historical materialism as revealingempirical
‘laws’ that can enable the prediction of supposedly inevitablefuture events. Marx’s most
influential works include The German Ideology(1846), The Communist Manifesto (1848), and
the three-volume Capital (1867,1885, 1894).

Max Weber (1864–1920) was a German political economist and sociologist.Weber’s most
important contributions were to the study of the modernstate and bureaucracy, and the
connections between economics, politics,and religion. For Weber, the modern state has a
monopoly of the means of‘legitimate violence’, and modern forms of authority are
characterized byrational administrative procedures and impersonal legal rules rather thanthe
personal characteristics of a charismatic leader.

In contrast to theMarxist emphasis on economic systems as the ultimate determining factor of

social change, Weber argued that historical change must be understood inlight of the
interaction between many factors, including cultural, economic,political, and religious values.
For instance, Weber viewed modernity asdefined by the kind of instrumental or ‘means-end’
rationality associatedwith Protestantism and, ultimately, with the bureaucratic nation-state.
Consequently, Weber contended that the subjective meaning of socialaction could not be
reduced to ‘evolutionary laws’ about economic systemswhich supposedly determine the course
of history. Weber’s major worksinclude The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1902),
The Sociology ofReligion (1920) and Economy and Society (1922).

Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) was a French sociologist and philosopherwho helped to found
sociology as a distinct discipline within the socialsciences. For Durkheim, sociological
explanation must be functional inorientation, by considering ‘social facts’ in relation to the
whole structureof social life and the values embedded within it. According to
Durkheim,societies evolve from simple, non-specialized forms towards highlycomplex,
specialized forms. In more complex modern societies, workbecomes specialized – the division
of labour – providing a new basis forsocial solidarity. Social change, Durkheim argued, can
result in the conditionof ‘anomie’, which refers to the breakdown of social codes and
normswithin communities leading individuals to experience greater dissatisfaction,conflict, and
unhappiness. For Durkheim, the social disintegrationcharacteristic of anomie should be
countered by the emergence of newforms of cultural integration based on commonly shared
values, beliefs,and institutions. His most important works include The Division of Labourin
Society (1893), Suicide (1897), and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life(1912).

Development’ and ‘modernity’

Two more important ideas are often evoked – sometimes explicitly,sometimes implicitly – in
discussions of globalization: ‘modernity’ and‘development’. We will first examine the notion of
‘development’through the exploration of two competing paradigms. We will thendiscuss the
notion of modernity, which is closely linked to the idea ofdevelopment and a topic of renewed
interest with the rising fortunesof ‘postmodernity’. Modernity also is an important concept in
theoreticaldiscussion of globalization – for instance, modernization is oftenviewed as one of the
logics or component parts of globalization

Development
In this section, we will explore two prominent theoretical paradigms –
the ‘modernization’ and ‘dependency’ approaches – which werepopular as ways of accounting
for global inequalities and for framingprogressive responses to such inequalities, as contained
in the post-Second World War idea of ‘development’. These two approaches to thegoal of
development have subsequently gone into decline. Nevertheless,both modernization and
dependency approaches continue tofunction within the broad discourse of globalization, and
this section istherefore a crucial backdrop to discussions of global inequality inIt is clear that
those in the so-called ‘third world’, the South, or‘developing’ nations suffer greatly unequal life
chances compared withthose in the ‘first world’, the North, or the developed world. The term
‘third world’ was coined by French economist Alfred Sauvy in 1952,and denotes the states not
of the capitalist, developed first world or ofthe socialist second world (Hobsbawm, 1995b;
Hulme and Turner,1990).

It also denotes a state of economic development often designatedtoday as ‘underdeveloped’,

‘less developed’, or ‘developing’. Theterm has become less fashionable with the end of the Cold
War andwith recognition of the variety of experiences lumped into that category
(Hulme and Turner, 1990; Dirlik, 1997). In general, ‘the thirdworld’ encompasses societies
exhibiting low growth rates, high incidencesof poverty, poor sanitation and health,
comparatively highpopulation growth rates, higher fertility rates, lower life expectancy, a
higher proportion of the economy dedicated to agriculture, lower ratesof urbanization,
inadequate housing, extensive internal inequality,high levels of gender inequality, and adult
illiteracy (Hulme andTurner, 1990; Webster, 1990).

These countries often also sufferhigh levels of indebtedness, and much of their budgets are
taken upmaking payments on loan interest and principal. In addition, democracyis often weak
or non-existent in these countries, with militaryexpenditure often dwarfing spending on health
and education.

Global inequalitybetween rich and poor countries. Life expectancy for those in countries
such as Japan, Sweden, Australia, France, Kingdom is above or close to 80 years of age, while it
is less than 40for persons living in Rwanda, Zambia, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, and the
Central African Republic. over 40 per cent of the population are undernourished inAngola,
Tanzania, Haiti, Mozambique, The adult literacy rate is low in developing countries.

Two broad paradigms that seek to explainand remedy global inequality.

First, modernization theory follows theinterests of the classical social and political thinkers in
their concentrationon the supposedly progressive movement from traditional tomodern social
orders. Emerging from this evolutionist perspective –especially from Durkheim and from Weber
– modernization theorycame to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s. The context of this
approach is the polarization and global competition of the Cold Warperiod, as both
superpowers sought allegiances with non-Europeansocieties. Theorists of this paradigm draw
on the tradition-modernitydistinction.

Talcott Parsons, America’s leading sociologist of the period,had already drawn up a list of traits
ostensibly dividing traditionalfrom modern social orders: affectivity versus affective neutrality;
collective versus self-orientation; particularism versus universalism;

While modernization theory is not all of a piece, emphasizing differentfactors in the move to
modernity, there are important commonalities.For example, modernization theory views
values, beliefs,and norms as important for progressive social change (Webster, 1990).

Modernization thinkers identify a numberof logics, tendencies, and institutions that should be
encouraged so asto generate development, such as urbanization, nuclear families,growth of
education and the mass media, and the emergence of asystem of rational law (Webster, 1990;
Hulme and Turner, 1990).

The second paradigm, emphasizing Western impact as an explanationfor underdevelopment, is

labelled dependency theory. We havealready referred to Marx’s assumption that capitalism
would spreadinexorably around the world, creating, in the process, a global capitalistorder,
which he believed was a progressive step insofar as it wouldpave the way for communism.

Capitalism, that is, would generate thenecessary productive forces and skills and create a
human force – theworking class – that would bring a higher stage of human social organization.
Marx was impressed by capitalism’s dynamism and progressiveness,and was often
contemptuous of the traditional ways of lifecapitalism swept away. While Marx recognized the
disruption and barbarismthat can come with this expansion – the slave trade and the
colonizationof India are singled out – he viewed this process as inevitableand as ultimately
progressive.

However, Marx does also note that, at least in part, the developmentof the Western capitalist
nations is related to their ability toexploit the less advanced countries (Hulme and Turner,
1990). It isthis idea that is very important to the thinkers who were to draw onMarx and
Marxism to criticize and offer an alternative to modernizationtheory. For these Marxist
thinkers, we need to turn to the historyof Western exploitation of what is now the third world
in order tounderstand why these countries did not and could not simply ‘takeoff’ into
development, but were, quite the reverse, underdevelopedand made dependent by their
contact with the West.

Modernity
The question of modernity is obviously linked closely to ideas of developmentand
modernization.

Marx, Weber, and Durkheim were each wrestling with the advent ofmodernity and
conceptualizied it, respectively, as dominated by capitalism,rationalization, and the expansion
of the division of labour.

Inall three accounts, modernity is double-sided (Lemert, 1998; Berman,1983), at once

promising and dynamic but also disruptive and threatening– alienation and exploitation
accompany capitalism (Marx), disenchantmentof the world (a loss of the magic quality of life)
comes withrationalization (Weber), and anomie (normlessness) with the expansionof the
division of labour (Durkheim). And, as we have seen in Marx’saccount, modernity was linked to
what is now called globalization, withcapitalism spreading across the world.

(Marx, 1987: 224–5)

Other traditionalists may view globalization as not really happening at all – for instance, some
claim that, in economic terms, what we are witnessing is increased regionalization or
interconnectedness between geographically contiguous states rather than globalization. Often,
they insist that nation-states remain strong and central. Frequently, traditionalists contend that
national economies, too, continue to be of central importance. And they tend to deny that
culture is, or could be, global in any pertinent sense.

In the social sciences today, modernity is often understood as a political,cultural, intellectual,

and economic cluster that includes the followingfacets: the Industrial Revolution and the
application of scienceand technique to production; capitalism, the generalized production of
commodities for a market, and the relentless search for profit; theadvent of the modern nation-
state, nationalism, and the category ofthe citizen; the beginnings of the socialist movement and
the cominginto political life of the masses; Western global expansion and the
emergence of the discourse of the ‘West versus the Rest’; the intellectual-cultural revolution of
the eighteenth century Enlightenment, withits emphasis on Reason, empiricism, science,
universalism, progress,individualism, toleration, freedom, and secularism (Hamilton, 1999).

Economic Globalization
it often seems that economic globalization is thedriving force behind the various changes bound
up with culture and politicsin the contemporary world, as well as being the principal concern
ofthe alternative globalization movement.

One vital ingredient in the emergenceof the new global economy has been a set of deregulating
policiespushed by neoliberals, which have come to replace the previous social
democratic consensus in Western nations (Castells, 1996).

Capitalism is an economic system based on the generalized productionand circulation of

commodities – goods and services on sale on amarket – and the production and circulation of
these commodities iscentredaround the drive for profit (Buick and Crump, 1986). For
Marxists, the existence of capital implies as a corollary the existence ofwaged labour – that is,
men and women who own no means of production(factories, tools of production, products of
labour) and selltheir labour power, their capacity to labour, to the capitalist class (the
owners of the means of production). This relationship entails exploitationof the worker by the
capitalist – profits are derived from theworker’s surplus labour time (the time over and above
that taken toproduce an amount equivalent to the costs of sustaining the worker
and reproducing the next generation of workers). Profitability, themarket, competition, and
inequality are thus all central to capitalism.

Especially important for the achievementof neoliberal hegemony were the electoral victories of
RonaldReagan in America (1980) and Margaret Thatcher in England (1979).

From this time, in many parts of the world, attempts were made toreduce social spending,
deregulate markets (including labour markets),‘rationalize’ and privatize state enterprises, and
promote an ethos ofself-reliant, competitive individualismThe socialist movement, growing
from about the time of Marx andEngel’s 1848 Communist Manifesto, had posed capitalism a
series ofintellectual, moral, economic, and political challenges.

Neoliberalism and the IMF, World Bank, and WTO

For critics of economic globalization, some of the most damaging outcomesof globalization can
be attached to the neoliberal orientation ofinstitutions such as the International Monetary Fund
(IMF), the WorldBank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO). These institutions are
commonly viewed as working according to the so-called ‘WashingtonConsensus’, a neoliberal
agenda that originated with policies directedtowards economic reform in Latin America from
the late 1980s,

New technology
As Mackay (2002) notes, one vital feature of modernity is its increasinglymediated nature. This
rising mediation is seen by Giddens (1990, 2005)as important in the stretching of social
relations (‘time-space distanciation’),making social life less centrally about immediate locality –
a keyfactor in globalization. New information and communication technologiesare frequently
viewed as crucially linked to contemporary globalization– for instance, in the notion of an ‘end
of geography’ brought by‘fast capitalism’s’ instantaneity and erosion of boundaries (Agger,
2004),which transforms identity, as well as social and economic life. In economicterms, just as
the spread of rail, fast steamers, and telegraph in the‘age of imperialism’ facilitated a great
expansion of world interconnectedness,so too satellite, digitization, video conferencing, mobile
communications,electronic data exchange, and networking appear to facilitate agrowing
density of transnational economic interaction.

For some, new technology is the defining feature of the current economicsystem, a new
information or postindustrial era. For Castells(1996), for instance, productivity and
competitiveness now are cruciallybased on the generation of knowledge and information
processing.This is signalled for him by the steep growth in the 1990s of theinformation
technology sector, the rise of the Internet industry’s revenuesand of Internet-related
employment, the high ranking amongstcorporations of new technology giants, and
informationalism’spivotal role in the collapse of the Soviet Union, an event with great
geo-political significance (see Chapter 3).The rapid spread and declining costs of technology
often are viewedas great democratizing forces, contributing towards greater transparency
and citizen access to knowledge. In addition, such new technologyis commonly seen as having a
‘flattening’ effect on globalinequality. Thus, Thomas Friedman (2005) enthuses over the arrival
ofwhat he calls ‘globalization’, a coming ‘flat world’ which providesunprecedented
empowerment of individuals and whose benefits canno longer be confined to the West, with
technology promising an endto the constraints of place.

Trade and multinational corporations

attention to the deepening of globalization in the ‘age of imperialism’,with a significant
expansion in the volume of internationaltrade, and the increasing tendency towards monopoly
or corporatecapitalism in Germany and America. multinational capitalism was ushered in,
dominatedby AmericaMNCs have increasingly relocated production and outsourced to
developingcountries in the hope of benefitting from the differential costs oflabour, raw
materials, and transport. As a result, many products todayare highly internationalized, such as
automobiles which contain componentsproduced in various countries (Held and McGrew,
2002;Cohen and Kennedy, 2000)

For enthusiasts of global free trade, MNCs are enormously beneficial,providing consumer
goods, technology, and new skills, and acting withstates (whom they provide with revenue in
the form of company taxes)to advance economies and provide jobs. However, for critics MNCs
exercisefar too much power, are largely unrestrained, and exhibit far toolittle social
responsibility, exploiting workers, diminishing the state’ssovereignty, and undermining
democracy in general (Cohen andKennedy, 2000). One of the major criticisms of MNCs in this
regard isthat they can simply relocate their facilities to overcome barriers toprofitability.

These barriers might include decent wages or environmentalprotection regulations. Nike

provides a good case study of this. Nikeoriginated in Phil Knight’s plan to introduce low-cost
Japanese-producedathletic shoes into the US market in the 1970s (Short, 2001). As labourcosts
rose, Nike moved production to South Korea and Taiwan in 1972,then, as workers organized,
into Indonesia, China, and Thailand in1986, and, finally, into Vietnam in 1994 (where in 1998
workers earnedas little as $1.60 a day) (Short, 2001; Anderson et al., 2000; Steger, 2003).Nike
now subcontracts 100 per cent of its goods production to 75,000workers in China, South Korea,
Malaysia, Taiwan, Vietnam and Thailand(Anderson et al., 2000; Steger, 2003).

The movement of capital away from the US and Europe after the1970s involved attempts to
secure new markets, gain greater profits,and utilize cheap, unorganized labour (Cohen and
Kennedy, 2000)

One way in which MNCs have optimized their profitability since the1960s is through relocating
production, or contracting production tocompanies in ‘export-processing zones’ or ‘free trade
zones’ (FTZs),within developing countries. These FTZs have special incentives toattract foreign
firms, such as tax privileges, cheap labour, and limitedenvironmental regulations (Cohen and
Kennedy, 2000; Scholte, 2000Pfizer,Merck, Novartis, Glaxo,Smith,Kline, and Johnson and
Johnson havehigher profit margins than any other industry, and the top five drugcompanies
have a combined worth that is twice the GDP of the wholeof Sub-Saharan Africa (New
Internationalist, 2003b)

Transnational corporations’imply that these organizations are disembodied from any

nationalbase, and that they would produce and market in a genuinely internationalmanner
(McGrew, 2000). On the other hand, MNCs would still besignificantly bound to their home
country (Cohen and Kennedy, 2000;Held and McGrew, 2002). Critics argue that, in reality, it is
difficult tofind many examples of genuine TNCs (Cohen and Kennedy, 2000; Heldand McGrew,
2002)
Thus, Bauman(1999a) depicts our globalized period as witnessing the emergence of
atransnational elite, a new stratum of ‘absentee landlords’ who are freeto escape the
consequences of their actions, while the bulk of peopleare condemned to remain as locals. This
disparity in life chancesreflects the differentials in terms of the new stratifying factor of
mobilityand is a sign of global inequality,

Stratification is about patterned inequality. For Marx, of course, themajor dimension of such
inequality was class inequality, the divisionbetween those who owned and controlled the
means of production(the capitalist class) and those that had no such ownership and control
(the working class).

For neoliberal enthusiasts ofglobalization, Marxist theories of inequality are of little value
today.They argue that economic world integration and interdependency will,in the long-term at
least, benefit everybody. Free global trade will resultin rising productivity and wealth for all,
eliminating the distortions ofstate intervention and protectionism, which prevent countries
andpeople doing what they are best at (see Martin, 2000).

However, numerouscritics have charged that globalization has meant growing inequality,both
between nations, in terms of the gap between the rich and the poorworld, and within nations,
as the rich get richer and the poor poorer.

According to critics of globalization, the last three decades have alsoseen an increasing
polarization of wealth and rises in inequality withincountries. The UNDP’s Human Development
Report for 2005 notes ‘aclear trend over the past two decades towards rising inequality
withincountries’ (55), with inequality rising in 53 of the 73 countries withavailable data. Poverty
and income inequality increased in most developedcountries, for instance, through the 1980s
and 1990s, as unemploymentand insecure employment grew, union power declined,
andneoliberal restructuring saw states seeking to reduce welfare spending(Faux and Mishel,
2000)

In light of this radical inequality, Castells (1998) speaks of the emergencewithin the global
economy of a new ‘fourth world’. That is, wesee the emergence of a mass of people – ‘millions
of homeless, incarcerated,prostituted, criminalized, brutalized, stigmatized, sick, and
illiteratepersons’ (Castells, 1998: 165) – across every country who areexcluded from the
benefits of globalization and are marginalized interms of participation in the new economy.

Work
An important dimension in approaching global inequality is the transformationof work over the
past two or three decades.This period of deindustrialization and neoliberal restructuring
alsosaw significant rises in the numbers of people engaged in part-time,limited-term contract,
and casual work – the ‘flexibilization’ of employment.This flexibility has a number of
dimensions, including numericalflexibility, ‘externalization’ (for instance, ‘subcontracting’),
internalnumerical flexibility (variable working hours), functional flexibility(changes in
employment tasks in response to employer needs), andwages flexibility (Munck, 2002).

Part of this tendency towards flexibilization is the growth of thenumbers of the

unemployedOne effect of this unemployment has been a growth in the informalemployment
sector. As Munck (2002) notes, ‘Informal work is usuallydefined as any work which takes place
outside the formal wage-labourmarket, such as clandestine work and illegal work, but also
includingvarious forms of self-employment’ (111–12)

Globalization and Politics

Perhaps the most common claim associated with the literature aroundglobalization is the
assertion that globalization entails the demise ofthe nation-state, summarized in notions such
as an emerging ‘borderlessworld’ and a ‘hollow state’ (Cohen and Kennedy, 2000). The
powerand mobility of global finance and multinational corporations, the culturalfragmentation
of national populations, the emergence of powerfulagents of governance at supra-national and
local levels, citizendisaffection from electoral politics, and the growth of global civilsociety, are
all viewed as wearing away at the power or efficacy of thestate. In addition, a crucial problem
pointed to by critics of globalizationis that, as Martin and Schumann (1998: 211) put it,
economicsappears to be devouring politics.

The nation-state
Today, the world is organized politically into nearly 200 nation-states.Such nation-states appear
very durable and, as Walby (2003) notes, westill tend to equate modern societies with nation-
states.

Held andMcGrew (2002) usefully summarize the four major innovations and
characteristics of the state form that emerged with modernity and weresubsequently
globalized: 1) territoriality; 2) monopoly over the meansof violence; 3) impersonal structures of
rule; and 4) claims to legitimacybased on representation and accountability.And it would
appear that we are seeing a contemporary politicalshift with globalization that entails major
alterations to the role andpower of the state.The genesis of the modern state can be located in
Western Europe inthe eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and is linked to
industrial,economic, and military changes, to an increasingly firm demarcation ofnational
borders, and to the spread of rationalization and bureaucracy(Giddens, 1990).

The French Revolution of 1789 is often viewed as akey moment in the development of the
modern nation-state. ThisRevolution brought the centralization of the French state, the
citizenarmy, and that key modern dynamic, nationalism. Tied to the FrenchRevolution and to
nationalism is the notion of citizenship, of being aperson with certain legal rights and
responsibilities derived from membershipin a national community.
The decline of state power?

The globalist argument has it thatpolitical power or governance has been, or is progressively
beingaltered in a movement of politics from a primarily national scaletowards an increasingly
transnational or global scale. Global politics isno longer, they argue, first and foremost about
states, and older conceptualdistinctions between domestic and international or territorialand
non-territorial are losing intellectual traction (Held et al., 1999;Short, 2001). As Ulrich Beck
(2002: 53) puts it, ‘National spaces havebecome de-nationalized, so that the national is no
longer national, justas the international is no longer international.This entails that
thefoundations of the power of the nation-state are collapsing both fromthe inside and the
outside’. There are a number of strands to this typeof argument: nationalism is now challenged
by transborder allegiancesbased on a range of factors; states are forced, more and more, to
submitto the dictates of powerful, mobile capital interests, especially giventhat many face
substantial deficits;substate actors are seeking greaterindependence and are bypassing the
state; regionalization – such asNAFTA and the EU – and trans-world governance – such as the
WTO orthe UN – are on the increase; and new actors within global civil societyhave emerged –
for example, Save the Children, World VisionInternational, and Medécins sans
Frontie`res(Scholte, 2000; Castells, 2000The powerful forces of the global economy today
arguably preventstates from pursuing independent economic or social policies. Thespread of
neoliberal common sense and the powerful forces exerted onstates by financial markets,
MNCs, and international organizationssuch as the WTO and the IMF mean states are
increasingly forced to
develop policies that leave the market as free as possible: lowering taxation,privatizing and
deregulating, and cutting spending, especiallyspending on social services.‘the nation-state is
increasinglypowerless in controlling monetary policy, deciding its budget, organizing
production and trade, collecting its corporate taxes, and fulfillingits commitments to provide
social benefits’. This suggests that the substantialstate economic intervention once pursued as
a means to thegoal of national development can no longer stand.

Ralph Nader(1998) has argued that, ‘The essence of globalization is a subordinationof human
rights, of labour rights, consumer, environmental rights,democracy rights, to the imperatives of
global trade and investment.Held (1995) argues that a new mode of global governanceis
emerging, as governments struggle to control the flows ofideas and commodities, as
transnational processes expand, and as multilateraltreaties and international organizations
increase in number.

We are, then, seeing an emerging transnationalization of politics, asstate power is reconfigured

and it is increasingly ‘enmeshed in globalprocesses and flows’.In addition,there has also been a
rise in the number of intergovernmental organizations,non-governmental organizations (NGOs),
and multilateraltreaties.It is clear that globalization entails not only the intensification
ofinteractions and interconnections that have led to the ‘shrinking’ ofour world, but also the
emergence of a system of global governancethat seeks to regulate and manage various areas of
transnational activity.With global governance comes increased intergovernmental
interactionand transnational networks, new centres of political poweralongside the state, and
the growth of transnational civil society (suchas NGOs).

This ‘pluralization of global governance’ is theorized byGovernance is the sum of the many ways
individuals and institutions,public and private, manage their common affairs. It is a
continuingprocess through which conflicting or diverse interests maybe accommodated and co-
operative action may be taken. It includesformal institutions and regimes empowered to
enforce compliance,as well as informal arrangements that people and institutions eitherhave
agreed to or perceive to be in their interest. … At the globallevel, governance has been viewed
primarily as intergovernmentalrelationships, but it must now be understood as also involving
nongovernmentalorganizations (NGOs), citizens’ movements, multinationalcorporations, and
the global capital market. Interacting withthese are global mass media of dramatically enlarged
influence. …

The enormous growth in people’s concern for human rights, equity,democracy, meeting basic
material needs, environmental protection,and demilitarization has today produced a multitude
of newactors who can contribute to governance.John Gerard Ruggie (2003: 95) argues that in
the process of moreinclusive forms of governance spreading across the globe, ‘a globalpublic
domain is emerging, which cannot substitute for effectiveaction by states but may help produce
it’. This global public domainis commonly referred to as ‘global civil society’ and is
widelyregarded as playing a central role in fostering global governance.Civil society can be
defined as ‘the realm of organized social life thatis voluntary, self-generating, (largely) self-
supporting, autonomousfrom the state, and bound by a legal order or set of shared rules’ in
which individuals act collectively and publicly ‘to express their interests,passions, and ideas,
exchange information, achieve mutualgoals, make demands on the state, and hold state
officials accountable’(Diamond, 1996: 228). In the context of globalization, it isoften said that
civil society has assumed a significant global dimensionon the basis of transnational networks of
non-state actors, especiallyNGOs such as Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Oxfam
International, and Medécins sans Frontie`reswhose memberships,common purpose, and
organizational activities have spread acrossnational borders. Global civil society has served as a
source of governancethrough dissemination of information, formation of openforums for
dialogue and debate, and advocacy of greater democracy,transparency, and accountability in
governmental and multilateralinstitutions. In this way, global civil society orglobal public
spheres can help to prevent the powerful from‘owning’ power privately. Global publics imply
greater parity. Theysuggest that there are alternatives.

They inch our little blue andwhite planet towards greater openness and humility, potentially to
the point where power, whenever and wherever it is exercised acrossborders, is made to feel
more ‘biodegradable’, a bit more responsiveto those whose lives it shapes and reshapes,
secures or wrecks.(Keane, 2003: 174)
Thoseenthusiastic about global civil society reject, then, the simple thesis thatglobalization
entails a straightforward shift of power to markets and corporations,and argue instead that
global governance has become pluralized,and that global civil society can be a real, and
progressive, force intransformed governance.For instance, today more than $7 billion in aid
to developing countries flows through international NGOs, such asCARE International, Oxfam,
and Save the Children (UNDP, 2000).

Advocates of global civil society would point to the tangible impact of‘people power’ today. For
instance, Amnesty International has been ableto mobilize people across the world – with
around 2 million membersand supporters in 150 countries – and contribute to a global political
discoursearound the importance of protecting and extending rights(McGrew, 2000).For such
sceptics, it is not the casethat states cannot any longer determine economic or social policy.
Hirst and Thompson (1996, 2002), for example, maintain that the stateis and will remain central
in terms of the exercise of power. Theycontend that rather than pluralized governance, the
world is dividedinto regional trading blocks dominated by nation-states. Against arguments
that posit a coming race to the bottom as far as the welfare stateis concerned, critics such as
Philippe Legrain (2002) insist that statesremain capable of choosing the sorts of policies they
want: globalizationis not, for instance, forcing governments to eliminate the welfare
state. In line with this, Huber and Stephens (2001) note that, while wesee a decline in welfare
spending through the 1980s across developednations (largely in response to the fiscal pressures
of growing unemployment),the basic institutional features have been maintained andcutbacks
have, for the most part, been modest.

A state, then, can still assertitself, and implement its own policies, under current conditions of
globalization – provided that its economy can compete on the worldmarket’

These sceptics will frequently point out that states have often beenextremely active in
transnational, globalizing activities, thereby themselveslaying the important foundations for
globalization. In addition,Steger (2003) notes that governments have generally retained control
over education, infrastructure, and, most notably (especially post-September 11, 2001), over
immigration control, putting lie to the notionof a ‘borderless world’.

According to Petras and Veltmeyer (2001), globalization is not aninevitable process but a class
project and an ideological device. Theterm ‘globalization’, implying the interdependence of
nations andshared economies and interests, is best replaced with the conceptof ‘imperialism’,
which alerts us to the reality of domination andexploitation of less developed nations by the
governments, MNCs, andbanks of powerful states. What we have with ‘globalization’ is, most
vitally, the deepening and extension of capitalism and the growingpower of the capitalist class
against the working class, despite some

Globalization or Imperialism?
Globalization or US imperialism? That is the question. At the end of onemillennium and the
beginnings of another a definitive answer can be given:the world economy is increasingly
dominated by US economic power. Thedominant view in the 1980s and early 1990s was of a
world of ‘global corporations’that transcended national boundaries – what some called a
‘globalvillage’ and others referred to as independent states linked by internationalcorporations.
But this perspective is no longer tenable. Systematic analysis ofthe composition of the
international economy conclusively demonstratesthat US multinational corporations are far and
away the dominant force andbecoming more so over time. Ideas of a ‘bipolar’ or ‘tripolar’
world, of amore diversified world economy based on the emergence of the Asianmiracle
economies, are a mirage. … To the extent that globalization rhetoricpersists, it has become an
ideological mask disguising the emerging power ofUS corporations to exploit and enrich
themselves and their chief executiveofficers to an unprecedented degree. Globalization can be
seen as a codeword for the ascendancy of US imperialism.
Source: Petras and Veltmeyer (2001: 62)

have emerged with globalization a number of profound challenges tothe sovereignty of the
state. Waters (1999: 100–2), for instance, hasnoted the following sorts of factors as exerting
pressure on states today,leading in the direction of what Hedley Bull (1977) described as a
‘newmedievalism’:
• the regional amalgamation of states
• the near collapse of states provoked by ethnic conflicts
• international terrorism
• a decreased capacity of states to deal with problems on a national
basis
• global technological unification
• spreading consciousness of deepening environmental problems that
single states are unable to solve
• a growing level of ‘expertise, education and reflexive empowerment
in the adult citizenry that makes them less susceptible to state
authority’.

The transnational human rights movement has helped to exposenumerous human rights
violations around the world and to promotefundamental human rights and freedoms, often by
publicizing criticalissues and problem areas and thereby raising the profiles of bothspecific
human rights causes and the global human rights regime.

Recent examples of efforts to address gross human rights violations inthe forms of genocide
and crimes against humanity include the formerYugoslavia and Rwanda. Between 1991 and
1999 civil war, ethniccleansing, and other human rights abuses tore apart the republics of
the former Yugoslavia.

The spread of a global discourse of human rights is widely cited asevidence of a growing global
consciousness, of the power of global civilsociety, and as signal of fundamental alterations in
terms of the sovereigntyof states. For enthusiasts of human rights discourse, such rightsare
important trumps against repressive regimes, allowing citizens toappeal to global principles in
the face of persecution, and having theeffect of deepening democracy and human freedom.
A changing political culture?
We now turn to a multifaceted issue that has been touched on atseveral points in the
discussion thus far – the question of whetherthere is emerging a new political culture. This
issue is broadly one ofdemocracy in a globalizing world. We have already discussed some ofthe
arguments that contend that the state as container of politics,democracy, and citizenship is
being challenged, undermined, oroutflanked by growing world interconnectedness. There are a
numberof ways that politics have been transformed in line with globalization:for instance, loss
of faith in the state and political parties; the fragmentationof older party, class, and national-
ethnic senses of belonging;growth of new political actors and the invigoration of global
civilsociety; and the transformation of social democracy and the demise ofthe communist
alternative. At a time in which liberal democracyappears increasingly to be universalized, many
people across the globeseem disaffected with party politics and democracy as never before
(seeBox 3.5). At the same time as the lack of trust in democratic governmentshas grown, some
thinkers point to new information technologyas one possible means by which to extend and
deepen democracy,when the public sphere appears to be shrinking and Western
styledemocracy can appear ever more shallow and elite-centred.

Cultural Globalization
Meanings, language, identity,and the proliferation of media are all seen as crucial issues that
markour postmodern, global condition. This cultural turn is signalled byMarxist Fredric
Jameson’s (2000) claim that today even the economichas become cultural. Clearly, cultural
questions are central and pressingin discussions of globalization: as Tomlinson (1999: 1)
argues,‘Globalization lies at the heart of modern culture; cultural practices lieat the heart of
globalization’.

In the premodern period cultural globalization was most importantlyabout globalizing religions
– Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. In themodern period, with the Enlightenment and the
spread of capitalism,industrialization, and democracy, cultural globalization has been
predominantlyabout the movement of secular ideologies – nationalism, liberalism,socialism –
and the diffusion of the values and practicesassociated with modern science.

Today, cultural globalization seemsmost urgently centred around the impact of the growing
volume ofexchanges of cultural products, the rising power and visibility of the
‘culturalindustries’, the apparent ubiquity of Western popular culture, andthe consequences for
identity that flow from these other forces (Held etal., 1999).

As a result, the combined effect of contemporary processes ofcultural globalization is often

understood through the notion of deterritorialization,‘the loss of the “natural” relation of
culture to geographicaland social territories’ (Canclini in Tomlinson, 1999: 107).

We will examine a cluster of issues around cultural production andidentity in this chapter. Most
importantly, we will explore what Holton134(2000) sees as the three major theses on
globalization’s cultural consequences:first, the ‘homogenization thesis’, where
globalizationamounts to Westernization or, more narrowly, Americanization;second, the
‘hybridization thesis’, which points to the pervasive globalintermixing of cultures that renders
obsolete notions of the existence ofdistinct and pure cultures; and, third, the ‘polarization
thesis’, which
views globalization as producing a series of antagonistic fissuresbetween different cultural
worlds.

Cultural production and the cultural industries

Cultural goods can be defined as ‘those consumer goods that conveyideas, symbols, and ways
of life. They inform or entertain, contributeto build identity and influence cultural practices’
(UNESCO, 2004). Inthe last two or three decades, there has been a remarkable growth inthe
global circulation of cultural goods such as printed matter, radio,crafts and fashions, television,
cinema, visual arts, games, and sportinggoods. Hesmondhalgh (2002: 232), for instance, refers
to thecontemporary ‘proliferation of texts’ and our exposure ‘to an unprecedentedamount of
entertainment and information’

For some, this new information and communication technology andthe growing volume of
cultural exchanges mean the possibility, imaginedby Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s, of a
‘global village’. ForMcLuhan, the constraints of place are overcome by time: ‘Electric
circuitryhas overthrown the regime of “time” and “space” and poursupon us instantly and
continuously the concerns of all other men …

An important feature of cultural production is the prominence andpower of the so-called

‘cultural industries’. The cultural industries areusually seen as ‘those institutions … which are
most directly involvedin the production of social meaning’, including advertising and
marketing,broadcasting, film, print and electronic publishing, musicindustries, video and
computer games, and other more ‘borderline’cases such as fashion, sports, and software
(Hesmondhalgh, 2002: 11)

the culture industry meant a lossof personal authenticity, a decline in the demand for and
appreciationof authentic artwork, a growing inability to imagine other possibilities,and a
uniformity of opinion, taste, and behaviour that confirmedMarx’s comment that those who
controlled the material means of productionalso controlled the ideological means of
production; in otherwords, the ruling ideas of the age were always the ideas of the rulingclass.

Globalization as cultural imperialism

As we have noted, the cultural industries have become more powerfuland prominent over the
last two to three decades. One notable feature ofthese cultural industries is that the largest
come, overwhelmingly, from asmall number of countries – most notably, the ‘big four’:
America, theUK, Germany, and France

It is widely believed today that the globalization of culture will leadto greater global
understanding. It will make people aware of difference,lead to rich cultural intermixing, and
might even reduce the likelihoodof cultural misunderstanding and conflict. Some would
arguethat a new global culture will emerge in the process. This could potentiallylead to the
demise of specific cultural values and practices, butthis is not necessarily to be lamented. On
the one hand, those echoinga modernization theory approach might argue that the demise of
traditionand the spread of Western-led cultural globalization will lead to a
generalization of individualism, choice, freedom, democracy, andgreater prosperity. In this vein,
some commentators will insist that thisdoes not involve an imposition by the West; rather,
those in the lessdeveloped countries

This expansion of advertising signals the domination of the imagewithin McWorld, says Barber.

For him, companies like Nike functionmore like state religions than sportswear manufacturers
in their connectionof products with emotions, fantasies, and ways of life.Advertising and
marketing function as ‘needs factories’, generatingwith incredible rapidity new desires and
wants, and attaching these tospecific commodities

Commodification
Commodification refers to the process, identified by Marx, through which socialrelations are
reduced to exchange relations. The most fundamental process ofcommodification in capitalist
society is the labour process, in which the workernot only produces commodities, but becomes
a commodity. According to Marx,in the labour process the real, material activity of labour by
individual workers isreduced to an abstract value that is sold to those who can use it for the
purposeof manufacturing commodities for exchange. In this way, workers themselvespossess
value only as another commodity to be bought and sold. Commodificationalso plays an
important role in the cultural sphere. This is primarilythrough what is referred to as ‘commodity
fetishism’, an important theme inHorkheimer and Adorno’sDialectic of Enlightenment (1989).
According to them,in capitalist society commodities have replaced religion and politics as
thosethings which have assumed a dominant importance in people’s lives.

Commoditieshave become fetishized insofar as they are publicly accorded more‘reality’ than
individuals and social relations themselves, even though commoditiesare merely inanimate
objects. Consequently the cultural industriesare able to exploit fetishization in order to evoke
desires for goods that are consumableand therefore profitable. With the worldwide spread of
neoliberal economics,commodity fetishism has become globalized; literally anything it seems–
from international cuisine to ‘alternative’ music and ‘authentic’ indigenousarts, crafts and
rituals – can be turned into a commodity.

Against those who see with cultural globalization growing culturalheterogeneity, Ritzer insists
that homogeneity is the dominating trend,captured by his concept ‘grobalization’.

Grobalization, linked to bothMarx’s and Weber’s analyses of modernity, denotes the central
motiveof growth and the concentrated power of certain nations, corporations,and
organizations. In this analysis, the world is becoming more andmore the same, social processes
are one-way, people are left withlittle room to pursue alternative ways of life, and commodities
andmedia are key.

Globalization contains three sub-processes: Capitalism,McDonaldization, and Americanization.

Capitalism is the centralprocess with growing marketization and the collapse of societal
alternatives.

McDonaldization, as we have noted, is a concept that points tothe spread of formal rationality
to more and more areas of life.

Americanization is about the way in which the US has become everyone’s‘second culture’
(Ritzer, 2004: 90).

Held and McGrew (2002: 30) argue that‘there is no common global pool of memories; no
common global wayof thinking; and no “universal history” in and through which peoplecan
unite’. The idea here would be that ‘global culture’ is not really aculture at all, and therefore
does not penetrate as deeply in terms ofmeaning and identity as some have argued (Smith,
1990).there is the argument thatinstead of growing uniformity, we see increasing heterogeneity
in thecultural sphere and widespread cultural mixing. Critics making thisargument frequently
deploy concepts such as glocalization, hybridization,indigenization, and creolization. Here the
notion is that newhybrid cultural forms are emerging with globalization. Rather than
thereplacement of local culture by a single global/Western culture, we see‘selective borrowing
and transformation’ (Thompson, 1997). ForRoland Robertson (1995), globalization is far too
complex a beast to becaptured accurately by the notion of growing homogenization. Theidea of
‘glocalization’ – a blend of the local and global producing a culturalhybrid – can help us get
closer to what is really taking place.

Forinstance, in the spread of nationalism we see both a homogenizationof sorts (nationalism as

worldwide dynamic) and, at the same time, animportant particularism, as each nation seeks to
map out its specificityRobertson identifies a globe-wide discourse of locality,community, home,
and so on.

For Robertson (1995: 35), ‘the global isnot in and of itself counter-posed to the local. Rather,
what is oftenreferred to as the local is essentially included within the global’.Globalization links
localities, and it also involves the ‘invention’ oflocality. Robertson (1995: 38) contends that ‘the
overwhelming evidenceis that even “cultural messages” which emanate directly from“the USA”
are differentially received and interpreted; that “local”groups “absorb” communication from
the “centre” in a great variety ofways…. Second … the major alleged producers of “global
culture” …increasingly tailor their products to a differentiated global market
Identity and globalization
The concept of identity and related issues of subjectivity- no objective truth are central tomuch
contemporary social analysis.

Identity is a concept social scientistsdeploy to understand the connection between our

subjectiveexperiences and the contexts (cultural, historical, social) within whichwe are situated
(Woodward, 1999).

The concern with identity is againpart of the so-called ‘cultural turn’ which focuses on language,
experience,meaning, and symbols, refusing to understand them as merelysecondary
expressions of more important structural factors.

How weview ourselves, what we see as central in what makes us, ‘us’, and howwe see
ourselves against others, it is clear, are hardly negligible concerns.These questions do not go
away by referring, for instance, to‘objective’ class positions. Orthodox Marxist class analysis can
beregarded as too unconcerned with what people themselves think anddo, determined instead
on dropping a rigid theoretical frameworkon top of and over real experiences and sources of
individuation andcommunity.

For many people this new diversity is exciting, even empowering, but for some it is disquieting
and disempowering. They fear that their country is becoming fragmented, their values lost as
growing numbers of immigrants bring new customs and international trade and modern
communications media invade every corner of the world, displacing local culture.

Some even foresee a nightmarish scenario of cultural homogenization—with diverse national

cultures giving way to a world dominated by Western values and symbols. The questions go
deeper. Do economic growth and social progress have to mean adoption of dominant Western
values? Is there only one model for economic policy, political institutions and social values?

Policies that regulate the advance of economic globalization must promote, rather than
quash, cultural freedoms

The fears come to a head over investment, trade and migration policies. Indian activists
protest the patenting of the neem tree by foreign pharmaceutical companies. Anti-globalization
movements protest treating cultural goods the same as any other commodity in global trade
and investment agreements. Groups in Western Europe oppose the entry of foreign workers
and their families. What these protesters have in common is the fear of losing their cultural
identity, and each contentious issue has sparked widespread political mobilization
CULTURAL IDENTITY CRISIS IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION AND
TECHNOLOGY Mustafa, (2006)

The concept of identity turns out to be more problematic and complex than ever before
because of the rapid innovations in information and communication technology (ICT).

ICT have minimized geographic limitations and have enabled virtual relationships and new
social identities through instantaneous global communications. The development of these
relationships and identities radically increases the number of interfaces between people and
provides increased opportunities for cultural, social and political exchanges between and
among people on a global level regardless of geographic location and time zone.

It is in this sense that the question of how ICT is involved in the transformations of cultural
identities in the era of changing patterns of global and local image and information spaces has
become one of the emerging issue in these days.

I argue that, in order to understand such an issue, one need to analyze it in the time-space
contexts and power relations that have shaped our global world.

WHAT IS IDENTITY AND HOW IS IT CONSTITUTED?

Within the historical evolution of the concept of the identity, there are two common, but
opposite, approaches to the questions of what identity means and how it is constituted. In
prevalent and traditional approach, especially before the industrial revolution, identity is
defined as a constitution based on the recognition of familiar and shared derivations including
but not limited to ethnic, linguistic, religious, historical, territorial, cultural and political
attributes with other people, groups or ideal (Hall, 1994, 1996).

From this
perspective, cultural identity is a “one, shared culture, a sort of collective ‘one true self,’ hiding
inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed ‘selves,’ which people with a
shared history and ancestry hold in common” (p. 394). As Grossberg (1996) contends, the
problematic belief in this analysis is that there is some intrinsic and essential content to any
identity which is characterized by either a common origin or a common structure of experience
or both. One can be deemed to be born along with his or her identity that appears to act as the
sign of an identical harmony. In this regard, identity is determined more likely as a naturalistic
and static formation that could always be sustained. This conventional view sees individual as a
unique, stable and whole entity.
On the other hand, the discursive approach, as Hall (1996) goes on, delineates identification as
“a process never completed and logged in contingency” (p. 2) while not denying that identity
has a past. It is always in the process of becoming rather than being, accordingly, it is constantly
changing and transforming within the historical, social and cultural developments and practices
such as globalization, modernity, post-colonization, and new innovations in technology.

According to this constructionists and discursive view, an individual is a socio-historical and

socio-cultural product and identity is not biologically pre-given to a person, instead, he or she
occupies it, and more importantly, this occupation may include different and multiple identities
at different points of time and settings (Gergen, 1991; Hall, Held & McGrew, 1992).

Although both approaches are trying to explain the same concept, their conflicting point is the
existence and sustainability of a true, stable, fixed or authentic identity. While the former view
of identity is “fixed and transhistorical”, the latter one advocates the identity as being “fluid and
contingent” (Woodward, 1997), not an essence but positioning. In social and cultural studies,
this debate refers to a tension between essentialists (Descartes, Karl and Husserl) and
constructionists/anti-essentialists (Hume, Nietzsche and Sartre) or in recent discussions, a
transformation from the conception of modern identity to postmodern identity. This is how
Bauman (1996) explains this transformation:
If the modern problem of identity was how to construct an identity and keep it solid and stable,
the postmodern problem of identity is primarily how to avoid fixation and keep the options
open. In the case of identity, as in other cases, the catchword of modernity was creation; the
catchword ofpostmodernity is recycling. (p.18)

From a sociological perspective, on the other hand, Castells (1997) asserts that identity acts as a
source of meaning and experience for people through self-construction and individuation
particularly on the basis of cultural attributes in a context marked by power relationships. He
identifies three forms and origins of identity building each of which leads to a different social
association: a) legitimizing identity that is introduced by the dominant institutions of society to
extend and rationalize their domination over social actors, and it generates a civil society
including organized and structured social actors, b) resistance identity that is produced by the
actorswho are in positions of being excluded by the logic of domination, and it leads to building
of communities as a response to conditions of oppression, and reinforce the boundaries
between the dominant institutions and new ones, and finally c) project identity that is a new
identity produced by social actors to redefine their position in the society on the basis of
whatever cultural materials are available to them. The example he provides for project identity
is that of the feminist movement. When it first appeared it was in the form of resistance against
the
patriarchal society, but eventually developed to produce a different life for women, liberating
them and allowing them to form a new independent identity.

Identities are usually produced within the play of power, representation and difference which
can be either constructed negatively as the exclusion and marginalization or celebrated as a
source of diversity, heterogeneity and hybridity (Laclau, 1990; Butler, 1993; Hall, 1996;
Bhabha1996; Woodward, 1997; Gilroy, 1997), suggesting that they are relational to other
identities. This involves the process of persistently distinguishing one identity from others by
means of discourse as a symbolic and representative meaning tool which contributes to the
identity formation. Gender, race, class and sexual identities can be given as examples of identity
construction out of difference, exclusion and subordination.

Identity

democratic governments in the early twenty-first century, while facing the perennial problems
within their societies of poverty and growth, welfare and order, are confronted with two new
challenges: the increasing loss of sovereignty to new regional and global authorities and the
politics of identity, which require reconciling the building and elaboration of a nation with
acquiescence to different citizens’ demands for recognition of communal identity – in Crawford
Young’s words, the reconciling of democratic governance with cultural pluralism (Young, 1993:
19).

This viewpoint suggests that the focus of identity studies in the developing world ought to be
on the national question, on the extent to which governments succeed in their quest for
reconciliation and the extent to which those in civil society acquiesce to, or resist, nation-
building strategies.

local government practice in African cities led to the systematic segregation

of urban spaces, to differential access both to entry into the city and to formal
housing and service delivery within the city, as well as, in the South Africa case,
to strict residential segregation on a racial basis. In reaction to these policies and
practices, urban residents have at various levels (neighbourhood, suburb, and
city) constructed collective identities that seek forms of solidarity and of survival
strategies different from those offered or imposed by city government.

Charles Puttergill& Anne Leildé

Most societies at the beginning of the new millennium are caught up in seemingly
never-ending processes of social transformation. One consequence for members
of these societies seems to be increasing insecurity about ‘fitting in’ and belonging.

identity has become a key concern within the social sciences and humanities. Identity has
become, in fact, ‘the watchword of the times’ (Shotter, 1993b: 188).
Goldberg and Solomos to argue that the question of identity has ‘taken on so many different
connotations that sometimes it is obvious that people are not talking about the same
phenomena’ (Goldberg &Solomos, 2001: 5)
Theoretical Underpinnings
The nature vs nurture debate

Exploring the notion of identity

Conceptions of identity have changed dramatically over time. Identity in premodern
(traditional) societies was perceived as undifferentiated, socially derived, fixed to a position,
and unproblematic. Change then took place, from the absolute certitude of traditional or feudal
forms of social and economic organisation, culture, and thought, to notions of autonomy,
openness, and questioning.

Contemporary theorists concede that a stable and coherent cultural context no longer serves as
a base for a stable identity and acknowledge the role played by contingency and uncertainty in
collective and individual representations

In the words of Bauman, [P]ostmodernity is the point at which modern untying (dis-embedding,
disencumbering) of tied (embedded, situated) identities reaches its completion: it is now all too
easy to choose identity, but no longer possible to hold it … Postmodernity is the condition of
contingency ... nothing seems impossible, let alone unimaginable. Everything that ‘is’, is until
further notice. (Bauman, 1996: 50–51)

Identity formation in ‘late modernity’ is indeed influenced by a multiplicity of factors, as

Driessen and Otto point out: ‘[g]lobalising markets and media, the flow of people, ideas and
values, ethnic revival and the redrawing of political frontiers, all contribute to identity questions
... at all levels of socio-political integration and differentiation’ (Driesen& Otto, 2000: 12).

Gilroy describes a postmodern attribute of identity as follows:

[Identity] offers far more than an obvious common-sense way of talking about individuality,
community, and solidarity and has provided a means to understand the interplay between
subjective experiences of the world and the cultural and historical settings in which those
fragile, meaningful subjectivities are formed. (Gilroy, 2000: 98)

With the notion of subjectivity, individual agency in identity construction is recognised. As

Giddens points out, loosening social ties, fluidity of social relations, increasing individualisation,
narcissism, emphasis on the self and reflexivity in modernity facilitate the opportunity to
choose between lifestyles (Giddens, 1991).

It is now widely acknowledged that individuals draw meaning from belonging to more than one
group. They construct and maintain multiple identities that emerge under different
circumstances in their daily lives. According to Agger (1998: 53) ‘people are seen as dispersed
into a wide variety of subject positions from which they speak polyvocally about their
experiences and meanings ... and multiple subject positions’. Although identities can overlap,
the significance and nature of each possible identity varies over time and not all identities are
equivalent or interchangeable. It is in their social relations that individuals manage their
identities according to their significance and nature.

Identity is therefore ‘socially bestowed, socially sustained and socially

transformed’ (Berger, 1963: 116). NURTURE

It is neither essential nor immutable but a social construction open to change as circumstances,
strategies and interactions fluctuate. Since identities do not transcend space and time, they
need to be situated historically and relationally. Accordingly, identity is best viewed as a process
rather than a property. Viewing identity as a process problematises the notion of an already
existing fixed identity. Indeed, as a process, identity is emergent, never complete, finalised, or
fixed, but rather always in the making (Castells 1997; Shotter, 1993b). It is something we ‘do’
rather than something we ‘are’.

Grp presentations
Ind, collective such as grp identities

The notions of agency, subjectivity, and multiplicity in identity formation remain

contested within the African scholarship. They are at the heart of a debate between ‘a younger
generation of “postmodern” scholars and Africanist intellectuals claiming loyalty to the anti-
colonial and nationalist struggles’ (Robins, 2004: 18).

While Western media continue to portray the African continent and its people according to a
framework of ontological difference (Pottier, 2003; Nyamnjoh, 2000), the struggle against
colonialism and continued economic imperialism has produced a legitimate discourse on
African identity, based on the unity of African people, the commonality of the experience of
subjugation and the authenticity of African culture. However, according to postmodern
scholars, the Pan-Africanist ideal constitutes the substitution of one hegemonic discourse by
another and fails to take into account ‘the enormous differences within Africa and amongst
Africans that inhabit the continent; differences that express themselves along the lines of
gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, religion, language, region, nationality, and so on’

(Robins, 2004: 24). Mbembe, in particular, argues that Marxism and nationalism as practiced in
Africa throughout the twentieth century gave rise to two narratives on African identity and
experience: nativism and Afroradicalism.
.... When analyzed closely, these two orthodoxies are revealed to be faked philosophies
(philosophies du travestissement). (Mbembe, 2002b: 629, original
emphasis) While the former (re)asserts the uniqueness and authenticity of African culture and
calls for the establishment of ‘an African interpretation of things’, the latter stems from a
‘reified vision of history’ whereby ‘the present destiny of the continent is supposed to proceed
not from free and autonomous choices but from the legacy of a history imposed upon the
Africans – burned into their flesh by rape, brutality and all sorts of economic conditionalities’
(Mbembe, 2002a: 243). Postmodern scholars call for a re-evaluation of such historical,
economic, and cultural determinism. They draw attention to the fact that ‘postcolonies are
radically unalike’ and to the need to study ‘the disparate identity strategies emerging in
everyday life’ (Werbner, 1996: 2). Criticisms of African postmodern scholarship, on the other
hand, contend that postmodern theories are Eurocentric and ‘insist upon the need for theory to
continue to draw attention to the material consequences of imperialist and colonial legacies in
contemporary Africa’ (Robins, 2004: 22).

An identity is a social construct. It refers not to a given reality but rather to a discourse which is
intended to bring order to things. It is a narrative, ‘the function of which is to make normal,
logical, necessary, and unavoidable the feeling of belonging to a group’ (Martin, 1994: 23,

Each individual moreover belongs to different identity communities and asserts his or her
belonging to one or the other depending on circumstances.

an identity that one shares with some also sets one apart from others. Identity is therefore a
complex concept. It refers both to the individual and to the collective. Does this in fact mean
that an identity refers to an individual identification of who one is or to the feeling of belonging
to a group with whom one shares this identity? Can one distinguish between the two?

the role of space in identity construction first, an analysis of how the use of political power
manipulates space to promote various identities (a South African-specific analysis); second, an
analysis of how individual identities (in so far as they exist) are constituted; and third, an
analysis of how places themselves acquire an identity (at a general level).

How politics uses space to create identities

The most common way in which politics uses space is found in the association
attaching an identity to a spatial entity (and thereby establishing a territory).

Politics proposes such attachments in order to convince individuals of their shared membership
in a specific group. Society as a whole, together with those individuals, groups, and
organisations that comprise it, conceptualises itself not only in spatial terms, but also in terms
that reflect its interests. The spatial entities so established overlap, cut across each other, and
often lead to ambivalent identities. This lies at the root of many spatial conflicts since territory
is often both the basis for the construction of an identity as well as indicative of an interest. The
function of political territory, according to Raffarin (1980), is control over both populations and
resources (which are usually the real stakes).

The main actor in this game, in its various guises, is the state, for it is the state that delineates
external territorial limits and internal boundaries (such as provinces, counties, and
municipalities). This, in turn, enables the state to diffuse and exercise its authority. The ideal
from the state’s point of view is that this imposition of territory on groups is experienced by
these groups as constitutive of one of their salient collective identities.
What is of interest here is the spatial dimension of this classification: residential mixing was
declared unlawful and urban municipalities were obliged to designate residential space as
separate Group Areas defining where residents were required to live according to their racial
classification.

Simultaneously, various ‘resistance’ identities were constructed in opposition to

such identities imposed ‘from above’. Apartheid has gone, and yet these imposed identities
appear to persist,

Identity construction is a process that transcends such opposites and mixes various registers
and markers. Such complexity comes to light when one investigates the identities constructed
by individuals.

Space and individual identity

An issue related to ‘individual’ identities is whether such an identity can exist separately from a
collective identity. One could easily side-step this question through claiming that individual
identities do not exist since individual identities are always collective in nature.

As an illustration, ‘[t]he individual is, according to sociology, a relational object’ (Vuarin, 1997:
48) and always belongs accordingly to a ‘social configuration’ (Elias, 1939) through which the
individual is intrinsically linked to others.

The individual can only be defined through the collective. It may be argued, however, that
identity always involves individual choice, leaving an important role for the individual to play as
actor: [I]n each case, the individual is, at the beginning, attached to a plurality of groups: choice
is made more or less easily, riskily or painfully according to the situation within which the
individual finds himself, by the events which occur successively in time; all these, however,
never obstruct the possibility for some kind of choice. (Martin, 1994: 22, author’s translation)

Identity is never static, never fixed. One construction might indeed be replaced by another
when the individual enters another age category, another social group, or another living space,
or when he or she alters his or her identity choices. Identities are therefore multiple. Can one
have multiple identities at any given time

The questions I pose here are how an individual with an individual identity is taken up into a
collective entity, and subsequently, how this transformation influences (and how is it influenced
by) his or her relationship to space. In order to address these questions, one also needs to
explore how individual choices lead to territorial identity construction, to the allocation of
meaning to places.

S is the child of a mine worker, of a migrant. His father was a Mozambican

citizen who came to work on the Witwatersrand’s gold mines. Upon his arrival
in 1949, he was employed and given shelter by a mining company in the Benoni
municipality (situated to the east of Johannesburg, in the East Rand). After
having lived in a mine compound, he settled in Daveyton Township, following his
marriage in 1953 to a Xhosa-speaking South African woman. S’s mother was an
urban dweller throughout her life, she was born in the East Rand, but her Tswanaspeaking
father had emigrated from Botswana to work in Johannesburg in the 1920s, and her Xhosa-
speaking mother had come from the Transkei. Let us first consider the multiplicity of S’s father’s
identities.
Being black, he had to live in a specific area and was very strictly limited in his access to the
labour market.
Being ‘foreign’, he was not subjected to a South African Bantustan authority
but belonged to that extraordinary category invented by apartheid: ‘native alien’.
Being Shangaan, he belonged to an ethnic group originating from the north-west
of South Africa and the south-east of Mozambique. Finally, as a mine worker, he
belonged to a well-delimited social group in South Africa. These identities are not
organised according to a hierarchical order, as the individual chooses one or the
other according to circumstances, or has to refer to one or the other depending
both on the place he finds himself in and the company he finds himself with.

Crucially, despite the imposition of apartheid-defined identities, this man made

choices; he chose, for instance, not to marry within his ethnic group.
The Witwatersrand is in fact a cosmopolitan region where ethnic mixing
is common. It attracted migrants from the whole of South Africa and from the
Southern African region, as well as a variety of people from different regions of
Europe. What real meaning then is attached to so-called ‘ethnic’ identities in such
a context? Public meetings that are currently taking place in the Witwatersrand
arecharacterised by what I would like to call ‘linguistic freedom’: Anyone may
use the language of his or her choice (which is not always mother tongue, for
there are tactical considerations that rule the choice of language depending on
the context).

So who is S? A Shangaan-Xhosa-Tswana?A mine worker’s son? A black South

African?An East Rander? The language spoken in his family is Xhosa. He lived
in Daveyton,4 in a neighbourhood reserved for Xhosa speakers and was taught
in this language at school. This was a choice made by his father who gave up his
Mozambican-Shangaan identity to facilitate integration.

Characteristics of identity

These two individual trajectories reveal the complexity and fluidity in time
and

space of identities, as well as the often strong spatial dimension of these

identifications. They also show the importance of individual choices, whether
they are choices taken under strict structural constraints or otherwise. The sum of
these choices make up the city and, in the case of the Witwatersrand, a common
denominator is prominent: The city is made up of the personal histories of those
migrants who came in search of jobs and in search of freedom. These multiple
choices over a long period of time have created a territorial identity for the
Witwatersrand, an identity for the city itself. Identity is informed by time. ‘People look back for
various reasons, but shared by all is the need to acquire a sense of self and of identity.

Identity is informed by choice. Offered a menu of identity choices, we make choices to assert
ourselves as one or the other, either consciously or as a result of structural contingencies.

These choices vary over time depending on circumstances, on the company we keep, and on
the possibilities available.

Identity is informed by politics. Each human group is involved in power relationships, and each
individual belongs to various groups. Political power proposes or imposes identity narratives
which continuously influence the identities of individuals.

Does space inform identity? Yes, because time, choice, and politics are ‘spatialised’. Time is
inscribed into space, in the natural environment for Australian aborigines, for example, or in the
built environment in the metropolis for modern urban dwellers.

it is useful to reflect on the way individual and collective identities that meet in the same space
merge with this space and produce a unique and identifiable geographical object which is the
constantly changing construction of the interaction between human beings and the place
where they reside. Space and identity mobility patterns were not as developed as they
currently are

Urban identities in the United States

We will study identity construction in selected post-apartheid South African
metropolitan areas against the backdrop of two theories on urban identities:
Class, race and language in Cape Town and Johannesburg 147 The first one – the dual city
concept – is formulated by Mollenkopf and Castells (1991) who focus on the socio-economic
restructuring that is taking place in American cities. In the case of New York, this concept refers
to a changing urban social structure that is progressively polarising, fragmenting, and becoming
more exclusionary, due to the restructuring of the labour market. Such a process produces the
coexistence in the city of a professional and managerial elite and a growing urban ‘underclass’.
In addition, this process manifests itself spatially by minimising contact between these two
groupings. For the upwardly mobile elite, in fact, home ownership in a middle-class suburb is
widely viewed as a stage before selling and buying in a better area. Accordingly, any
depreciation in the land market (through low-income housing developments, for instance) is
resisted (Huchzermeyer, 2003). In effect, this process embodies the breakdown of what Castells
calls the ‘urban contract’ (Castells, 2002b: 377)
Such a process of social and spatial polarisation has a direct impact on identity construction
according to the two authors.

Indeed, ‘the tendency toward cultural, economic, and political polarisation in New York takes
the form of a contrast between a comparatively cohesive core of professionals in the advanced
corporate services and a disorganised periphery fragmented by race, ethnicity, gender…’
(Mollenkopf& Castells, 1991: 406).

On the one hand, economic prosperity leads to social integration promoted by shared values
such as individualism, lifestyle choices and consumption patterns, cosmopolitanism, and
increasingly an obsession with security. On the other hand, poverty encourages fragmentation
and segmentation, mainly in ethnic terms, of the excluded who build ‘defensive communities’
that fight and compete against each other for access to work and ‘to preserve the territorial
basis of their social networks, a major resource for low income communities’ (Castells, 2002a:
310) In the former case, identity expresses itself through individuation, in the latter, through
communalism (Castells, 2002c).

The other relevant theoretical input – the divided city concept – is used by
Nathan Glazer, who conceives of New York as a multicultural city. According to
this view, the socio-economic divide developing in this city is insufficient to capture adequately
what is of meaning, of interest, and of concern to residents. While dual cities suggest horizontal
divisions, divided cities suggest vertical divisions in both society and social space. These
divisions, which are mainly ethnic, according to Glazer, ‘play an independent role, particularly
as carriers of certain values in conflict’ (Glazer, 1994: 187). Indeed, divided cities refer to ‘cities
divided by race, ethnicity, religion rather than by economic fortune, income, wealth, even
though the latter divisions are real enough … Divided cities refer to divisions that we sense to
be of kind, rather than quantity … Sometimes, as we know, this kind of division is marked by a
real wall, but generally the invisible wall is good enough to keep groups apart’ (Glazer, 1994:
178).
148 Simon Bekker& Anne Leildé
These two conceptions of New York City – the one founded on elite class group
solidarity and ‘underclass’ fragmentation, the other on cultural diversity – will
guide our analysis of emergent urban identities in Cape Town and Johannesburg.
First, however, we will show that, despite numerous public efforts to the contrary, most current
analysts view Cape Town and Johannesburg as fast becoming dual cities. (It is appropriate to
note here that Johannesburg refers to the Johannesburg Metro, excluding the Ekurhuleni
Metro).

Class, race and language

Urban middle-class identities in both cities appear to be constructed around shared middle-
class values that in turn are significantly related to living in neighbourhoods where notions of a
close-knit community and of neighbourliness ought to be shared.
[L]anguage is … important in the construction of individual and social identities.
It can also be a powerful means for exercising social control. Identifying yourself as belonging to
a particular group or community often means adopting the linguistic conventions of that group,
and this is not just in relation to the words you use, but also in the way that you say them.
(Thornborrow, 1999: 136)

Language is important as a means of transmitting meaning as well as for marking cultural

belonging for individuals and groups. The language used in communication and the manner of
speech also tell observers about what is 172 Robert Mongwe being said, and they tell about the
social backgrounds of those involved in the communication. By communicating in a particular
language, social norms and values are being transferred between the groups in question.
Language is, in other words, an important cultural attribute through which social boundaries
are drawn between different groups in the society.

However, it is the powerful groups in the society that determine which languages or varieties
become standard forms in order to achieve socially sanctioned goals (Rahman, 2001; Anderson,
1983). In other words, languages do not become dominant in the societies because of their
superior linguistic structures but rather due to the political, economic, and cultural power of
respective speech communities. Therefore, non-standard language varieties are low in social
prestige not because of their inherent inferiority, but due to the economic, social, and political
power of the groups who speak the languages in question. The status of languages mirrors the
balance of economic, political, and cultural power in the
society. Language in this sense symbolises social power. This point is succinctly
expressed by Prah (1995):
The subcultures of the leading social classes and groups serve as reference categories for the
less endowed elements of the society; they serve as cultural pacemakers and claim supremacy
in the hierarchies of subcultures. (Prah, 1995: 12)

"tiaditional" and "modern" societies. Anthony Giddens argues that "In traditional societies, the
past is honoured and symbols are valued
because they contain and perpetuate the experience of generations.
Tradition is a means of handling time and space, which inserts any
particular activity or experience within the continuity of past, present
ind future, these in turn being structured by recurrent social practices"
(Giddens, 1990, pp. 37-B). Modernity, by contrast, is not only defined
as the experience of living with rapid, extensive, and continuous
change, but is a highly reflexive form of life in which "social practices
are constantly examined and reformed in the light of incoming
informationatout those very practices, thus constitutively altering their
character" (Giddens, 1990, pp. 37-B).
Giddens cites in particular the pace of change and the scope of
change - "as different areas of the globe are drawn into interconnection
with one another, waves of social transformation crash acloss virtually
the whole of the earth's surface" - and the nature of modetn
institutions (Giddens, L990, p. 6). The latter are either radically new
compared with traditional societies (e.g' the nation-state or the
commodification of products and wage labor), or have a specious
continuity with earlier forms (e.g. the city) but are organized on quite
different principles. More significant are the transformations of time
and space, and what he calls the "disembedding of the social system" -
,,the ,Iifting out' of social relations from Iocal contexts of interaction
and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space" (1990' p.
21). We will take up all these themes later. However, the general point
we would stress is that of discontinuities.

Nation
National cultures are composed not only of cultural institutions, but of
symbols and representations. A national culture is a discourse - a way
oiconstructingheanings which influences and organizes both our
actions and our
"o.t""piiott
of ourselves (see chapter 6)' National
cultures construct identities by producing meanings about "the nation"
with which we can identifin, theie are contained in the stories which
are told about it, -emories which connect its present with its past, and
images which are constructed of it. As Benedict Anderson (1983) has
argu"ed, national identity is an "imagined community" (see the
diicussion of this idea by Kenneth Thompson in chapter 12)'
Anderson argues that the differences between nations lie in the
different .uyrLr which they are imagined, Or, as Enoch Powell put it,
,.the life of nations no less than that of men is lived largely in the
imagination" (Powell, 1969, p. 245)' But how is the modern nation
imalined? What representational strategies are deployed to- co-nstruct
o,rr.-"o-*orr-sense views of national belonging or identity? What are
the representations of, say, "England" which win the identifications
and define the identitiertf "n"gtirtt" people? "Nations," HomiBhabha
has remarked, ,,Iike narratives, Iose their origins in the myths of time
and only fuIIy realize their horizons in the mind's eye" (Bhabha, 1990,
p. r). How is the narrative of the national culture told?

five main elements'

1 First, there is Ihenaffative of the nation, as it is told and retold in
national histories, Iiteratures, the media, and popular culture. These
provide a set of stories, images, landscapes, scenarios, historical events,
national symbols, and rituali which stand for, or represent, the shared
experiences, sorrows, and triumphs and disasters which give meaning
to the nation. As members of such an "imagined community"' we see
ourselves in our mind's eye sharing in this narrative. It lends
significance and importance to our humdrum existence, connecting our
".Ltyday
lives with a national destiny that pre-existed us and will
outlive us.

Secondly, there is the emphasis on origins, continuity' traditiot'

and timelessness. National identity is represented as primordial -
"there, in the very nature of things," sometimes slumbering, but er''.
ready to be "awoken" from its "long, persistent and mysterious
somnolence" to resume its unbroken existence (Gellner, 1983' p. -lb
The essentials of the national character remain unchanged through ,
the vicissitudes of history. It is there from birth, unified and
continuous, "changeless" throughout all the changes, eternal'

A third discursive strategy is what Hobsbawm and Ranger call ti'

invention of tradition: "Traditions which appear or claim to be old a:
often quite recent in origin and sometimes invented' . . , 'Invented
tradition' lmeans] a set of practices, . ' ' of a ritual or symbolic nature
which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behavioursbv
repetition which automatically implies continuity with a suitable
historical past." For example, "Nothing appears more ancient, and
linked to an immemorial past, than the pageantry which surrounds
British monarchy and its public ceremonial manifestations.Yet. . . in
its modern form it is the product of the late nineteenth and twentieth
centuries" (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 19S3, p. 1).
4 A fourth example of the narrative of national culture is that of a
foundational myth: a story which locates the origin of the nation, the
people, and their national character so early that they are lost in the
misis of, not "real," but "mythic" time. Invented traditions make the
confusions and disasters of history intelligible, converting disanayint
"community" and disasters into triumphs. Myths of origin also help
disenfranchised peoples to "conceive and express their resentment ant:
its contents in intelligible terms" (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 19S3, p' 1).
They provide a narrative in terms of which an alternative history or
counter-narrative, which pre-dates the ruptures of colonization, can be
constructed (e.g. Rastafarianism for the dispossessed poor of Kingston.
|amaica; see Hall, 1985). New nations are then founded on these myth:
(I say "myths" because, as was the case with many African nations
which emerged after decolonization, what preceded colonization was
not "one nation, one people," but many different tribal cultures and
societies.)
THE QUESTION OF CULTURAL IDENTITY
5 National identity is also often symbolically grounded on the idea of
apurc, original people or "folk." But, in the realities of national
development, it is rarely this primordial folk who persist or exercise
power. As Gellner wryly observes, "When [simple people] donned folk
costume and trekked over the hills, composing poems in the forest
clearings, they did not also dream of one day becoming powerful
bureaucrats, ambassadors and ministers" (toa3, p, 61).

Glob and the state

WILLIAM I. ROBINSON (2001)

Globalization: From a world economy to a global economy

I n my view, however, globalization is not a new process, but the near culmina-tion of the
centuries-long process of the spread of capitalist production relations around the world and its
displacement of all pre-capitalist relations ("modernization")

The capitalist system since its inception has been expanding in two directions, extensively and
intensively. The final phase in capitalism's extensive enlargement started with the wave of
colonization of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and concluded in the 1990s
with the reincorporation of the former Soviet bloc and Third World revolutionary countries.
Under globalization, the system is undergoing a dramatic intensive expansion. Capitalist
production relations are replacing what remains of all pre-capitalist relations around the globe.

In this process, those cultural and political institutions that fettered capitalism are swept aside,
paving the way for the total commodification or "marketization" of social life worldwide

Here we can distinguish be-tween a world economy and a global economy. In earlier epochs,
each country developed national circuits of accumulation that were linked to each other
through commodity exchange and capital flows in an integrated international market. This was
a world economy. Different modes of production were "articulated" within a broader social
forma-tion, or a world system while nation-states mediated the boundaries between a world of
different articulated modes of production.4 In the emerging global economy, the globalization
of the production process breaks down and functionally integrates these national circuits into
global circuits of accumulation. Globalization, therefore, is unifying the world into a single mode
of production and a single global system and bringing about the organic integration of different
countries and regions into a global economy.

. The nature of global capi-talism is such that it will always create uneven spaces

A study of globalization is fundamentally historical analysis, in that events or social conditions

can be conceived in terms of previous social processes and conditions that give rise to them.
Each epoch in capital's historical ascendancy has seen a successive expan-sion of the system
over the preceding epoch and has also seen the establishment of sets of institutions that made
this expansion possible and organized long-term cycles of capitalist development
From the seventeenth-centurytreaties of Westphaliainto the 1960s, capitalism unfolded
through a system of nation-states that generated concomi-tant national structures, institutions,
and agents. Globalization has increasingly eroded these national boundaries, and made it
structur-ally impossible for individual nations to sustain independent, or even autonomous,
economies, polities, and social structures. A single head-quarters for world capitalism had
become untenable as the process of transnational market, financial, and productive integration
proceeded in recent decades.

Capitalism is a constantly revolutionizing force, which perpetually reshapes the world in new
and often quite unexpected configurations.7 In the emerging global capitalist configuration,
transnational or global space is coming to supplant national spaces. There is no longer any-thing
external to the system, not in the sense that it is now a "closed" system, but in that there are
no longer any countries or regions that remain outside of world capitalism

As the organic and internal linkage between peoples become truly global, the whole set of
nation-state institutions is becoming superseded by transnational institutions.

decreasing power and signifi-cance of the nation-state and the increasing significance of supra
or transnational institutions. However, what these diverse accounts share is a nation-state
centrism that entraps them in a global-national dual-ism.

Conceptualizing a transnational state apparatus: From Weber to Marx The question of the state
is at the heart of the globalization debate

need to distinguish analytically among a number of related terms: nation, country, nation-state,
state, national-state, and transnational state. Nation-states are geographical and juridical units
and sometimes culturalu nits, and the term is interchangeablea s used here with coun-try or
nation. States are power relations embodied in particular sets of political institutions. The
conflation of these two related but analyti-cally-distinct concepts is grounded in a Weberian
conception of the state that informs much analysis of this subject. For Weber, the state is a set
of cadre and institutions that exercise authority, a "legitimate monopoly of coercion," over a
given territory. In the Weberian con-struct, the economic and political (in Weberian terms,
"markets and states") are externally related, separate and even oppositional, spheres, each
with its own independent logic. Nation-states interact externally with markets.

C onsequently,globalizationi s seen to involvet he eco-nomic sphere, while the political sphere

may remain constant, an immutable nation-state system. State managers confront the impli-
cations of economic globalization and footloose transnational capital as an external logic.

The way out of these antinomies is to move beyond Weber and return to a historical materialist
conception of the state. In the Marxist con-ception, the state is the institutionalizationo f class
relationsarounda particular configuration of social production. The separation of the economic
from the political for the first time under capitalism accords each an autonomy - and implies a
complex relationship that must be problematized - but also generates the illusion of
independent exter-nally-related spheres

Weberian state theory reduces the state to the state's apparatus and its cadre and thereby
reifies the state. States are not actors as such. Social classes and groups are historical actors.
States do not "do" anything per se. Social classes and groups acting in and out of states (and
other institutions) "do" things as collective historical agents. State apparatuses are those
instruments that enforce and reproduce the class and social group relations and practices
embedded in states. The institu-tional structures of nation-states may persist in the epoch of
global-ization, but globalization requires that we modify our conception of these structures.

The TNS comprises those institutions and practices in global society that maintain, defend, and
advance the emergent hegemony of a global bourgeoisie and its project of constructing a new
global capitalist

The TNS apparatusismultilayeredand multi-centered. It links together functionally institutions

that exhibit distinct gradations of "state-ness," which have different histories and trajectories,
and which are linked backward and forward to distinct sets of institutions, structures, and
regions. The supra-national organizations are both economic and political, formal and informal.
The economic forums include the Inter-national Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB),
the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the World Trade Organization (WTO),t
heregionalbanks, and so on. Supranationalpolitical forums include the Group of 7 (G-7) and the
recently formed Group of 22, among others, as well as more formal forums such as the United
Nations (UN), the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the
European Union (EU), the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), and so on.
They also include regional groupings such as the Association of South East Asian Nations
(ASEAN), and the supranationaljuridical,administrative, and regula-tory structures established
through regional agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and
the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum. Here I wish to theorize this emerging
configuration. These supranational planning institutes are gradually supplanting national
institutions in policy development and global management and administration of the global
economy. The function of the nation-state is shifting from the formulation of national policies
to the administration of policies formulated through supra-national institutions. However, it is
essential to avoid the national-global duality: national states are not external to the TNS but are
becoming incorporated into it as component parts

The TNS is attempting to fulfill the functions for world capitalism that in earlier periods were
fulfilled by what world-system and inter-national relations scholars refer to as a "hegemon," or
a dominant capitalist power that has the resources and the structural position that allows it to
organize world capitalism as a whole and impose the rules, regulatory environment, etcetera,
that allows the system to function. We are witnessing the decline of U.S. supremacy and the
early stages of the creation of a transnational hegemony through supra-national structures that
are not yet capable of providing the economic regula-tion and political conditions for the
reproduction of global capitalism. Just as the national state played this role in the earlier period,
I suggest, the TNS seeks to create and maintain the pre-conditions for the valorization and
accumulation of capital in the global economy, which is not simply the sum of national
economies and national class structures and requires a centralized authority to represent the
whole of competing capitals, the major combinations of which are no longer "national" capitals.
The nature of state practices in the emergent global system resides in the exercise of
transnational economic and political authority through the TNS apparatus to reproduce the
class relations embedded in the global valorization and accumulation of capital.

The power of national states and the power of transnational capital As class formation
proceeded through the nation-state in earlier epochs, class struggles worldwide unfolded
through the institutional and or-ganizational logic of the nation-state system. During the nation-
state phase of capitalism, characterized by national circuits of production ("autocentric
accumulation") linked to the larger system by inter-national market and financial flows, national
states enjoyed a varying but significant degree of autonomy to intervene in the phase of distri-
bution, and surpluses could be diverted through nation-state institu-tions. Dominant and
subordinate classes struggled against each other over the social surplus through such
institutions and fought to utilize national states to capture shares of the surplus.

By making it structurally impossible for individual nations to sustain independent, or even

autonomous, economies, political systems, and social structures,
:T he declining ability of the national state to intervene in the process of capital accumulation
and to determine economic policies reflects the new found power that transnational capital
acquired over nation-states and popular classes

Different classes and groups contest (national) state power but real power in the global system
is shifting to a transnational space that is not subject to "national" control. This structural
power of transnational capital over the direct power of national states has been utilized to
instill discipline or to undermine policies that may emanate from these states when they are
captured by popular classes or by national fractions of local dominant groups, as popular forces
that won state power in Haiti, Nicaragua, South Africa, and elsewhere in the 1970s-1990s
discovered.

T he notion of responsibility,however minimal, that governments have for their citizens or that
employers have toward their employees is dissolved in the face of this new class relation.

emergent TNS is not yet equipped to resolve

T NCs have increasinglyoperated openly as or-ganized political as well as economic entities in a

way that brings to mind the old business dominance theories of the state. Historically newly
strengthened ruling classes can quickly constrict state autonomy as they make more intensive
use of the state in times of major capitalist restructuring.
Modernity Hall et al (2006)

It can be said that in the period of high modernity or globalization,‘the acquisition and
maintenance of identity has become both vitaland problematic’ (Bendle, 2002: 1), that our
period entails a ‘crisis ofidentity’ (Woodward, 1999). Today, we seem to have moved a longway
from the orthodox Marxian assumption that class provides thebasic coordinates of identity, and
that this class identity would eventually(perhaps inevitably) overcome all other identity claims
andcommitments. Identity now seems very unstable and fractured,involving numerous shifting
factors.

Globalization is often seen asfundamental in the apparent urgency of contemporary

identityissues: migration changes the composition of community and bringscultural interchange
and dislocation; Western culture impinges onsmaller traditions and alters them; travel brings
people side by sideand places are altered through the impact of tourism; the reorganizationof
the international division of labour and neoliberal restructuringradically change the character of
work and work identity; andtransformations in the power, reach, and legitimacy of nation-
stateslead to transformations in identity.

In some accounts, the uncertain world of our global ‘risk society’ andthe effects of de-
traditionalization and social flux mean the productionof a sense of self that is ‘unstable and
untrustworthy’ (Bendle, 2002: 3).In postmodern work on the subject, identity is socially and
culturallyconstructed ‘all the way down’ (Woodward, 1999).

These theoristsreject, then, the notion that there is, at some level, a stable core ofselfhood that
can be discovered and that would provide a solid groundor guarantee for knowledge or action.
There is, the argument goes,nothing essential to being, say, an Arab, a woman, or a teenager.

Identity, instead, is ‘fragmented, multiple and transient’ (Bendle, 2002:5) – it is plastic. This
view of identity is often linked to argumentsabout the growing problematization of knowledge
and truth, risingindividualism and emphasis on self-realization, increased social mobility,and
the questioning and fragmentation of traditions and olderhierarchies.
It is often said that these postmodern emphases entail a break withEnlightenment notions of
knowledge and of subjectivity. TheEnlightenment view of identity and subjectivity is argued to
have.

TheEnlightenment view of identity and subjectivity is argued to have been centred on the
coherence of identity and on the self-directing,self-knowing individual. Stuart Hall (2001)
contends that there havebeen five major ruptures with these assumptions of stability of
self,stability of meaning, and stability of knowledge.

First, Marxism challengesthe idea of universal essence, as subjectivity is crucially producedby

the mode of production in which the actor is situated.

Second, psychoanalysis discovers the unconscious (we are split, inLacanian terms, between the
ego and the ‘discourse of the Other’, theunconscious) against the illusions of subjective
wholeness, stability,and self-directedness.

Third, feminism contends that sexual differenceis central in social organization, and that
femininity and masculinityare not timeless and universal categories.

Fourth, as Derrida’swork emphasizes, the turn to language shows meaning as a functionof

difference and as inescapably in movement: we can not get at theobject directly; there can be
no ‘I’ outside of language; and meaningis inherently unstable.

Last, as presented in Foucault’s work, subjectivityis a discursive production and thus a function
of complexes ofpower-knowledge

Zygmunt Bauman’s work on identity in the contemporary period iscentred on themes such as
uncertainty, plasticity, and fragmentation.While identity and meaning in modernity are
projects, connotingdurability and solidity, the postmodern period sees identities ‘adoptedand
discarded like a change of costume’ (Lasch in Bauman, 2001:478). A new world of uncertainty,
speed (a ‘continuous present’), andsurfaces means that people increasingly avoid fixation and
maintainopenness in identity terms. Bauman’s four postmodern identityfigures – the stroller,
the vagabond, the tourist, and the player – allsignal this new ‘liquid’ (as he comes to call it)
world. Increasinglyfreed from ‘ascribed, inherited and inborn determination of socialcharacter’

(Bauman, 2001: 474), so that determination is replacedby self-determination, contemporary

men and women are forced ‘tobe constantly on the run …[promised] no rest and no satisfaction
of“arriving” …; being on the road has become the permanent way of lifeof the disembedded …
individual’ (Bauman, 2001: 476).
A related concern for those thinking about identity today – and thisconcern also looks back to
questions around the cultural industries andthe cultural imperialism thesis – is that identity in
contemporary timesis increasingly centred around a consuming self. That is, our patterns
ofconsumption are now ostensibly paramount in defining who we are –at least in the North.
Shopping, lifestyle, and conspicuous consumptionbecome the new sources of self-definition
(Bauman, 1999a).

Theproblem with this, for critical theorists, is the shallowness, inauthenticity,conformism,

atomization, and depoliticization that this tendencyis thought to bring. Bauman (1999a)
contends that society no longer‘interpellates’ its members primarily as producers but first of all
as consumers.

No more is work the key to identity, social recognition, community,and solidarity. Instead, the
model of consumption spreads,say, to politics, meaning that there is nothing outside of the
market.

Such consumption works not by domination or ideological mobilizationbut through seduction.

And such consumption has quickened, asfashions turn over at great speed and new desires are
created, makingours a period of extreme transience, shallow attachments, and
intenseindividualization. We have, here, a culture of forgetting rather thanlearning, and nothing
can be embraced firmly (Bauman, 1999a).

In contrast, some social theorists insist on a more optimistic readingof the prominence of
consumption in our period. Anthony Giddens(2003a), for instance, regards ‘late modernity’ as
marked by choice,self-identity, and lifestyle. As habit and tradition retreat, we becomemore
individualized. This can be pathological – for instance, with citi-152 Critical Theories of
Globalizationzenship subsumed beneath consumption – but it also promises greaterautonomy.

Giddens insists that consumption is a much less deterministicprocess than many critical
theorists assume. People are reflexiveand sceptical, they resist, and their consumption patterns
are complexand contradictory. Advertisers, for instance, cannot impose themselvesin a
straightforward way on people. More generally, we mustnot overplay the power of
corporations, partly because the expansionof reflexivity today provides an important counter to
the negativepossibilities of consumer culture run amok.
Ethnocentrism – belief in the superiority of one’s ethnic group.

Cultural diversity- variety of different cultures in a specific region

Social change- transformation of culture and social organisaton or structure over time,
Enlightenment

Multiculturalism- a no of cultures in a particular society

Cultural relativism- concept that cultural norms and values derive their meaning within a
specific social context.

Imperialism, in brief, refers to the

domination of less developed by more developed nations in the interests
of economic gain (Marshall, 1994).

Cultural imperialism- promotion of more powerful culture over the least known or undesirable
culture

- Imposition of foreign culture/ dominant culture over

- is the practice of imposing one’s cultural products and values onto
other societies, whether they want it or not, destroying native
cultures in the process. The ultimate result is to create a culturally
homogenous world of consumers for global capitalism. Cultural
imperialism eliminates global diversity.

Thanks to technology, social and economic productive capacity has increased tremendously.
This means that Western societies and increasingly non-western ones as well, have access to an
enormous variety of consumer goods. Transformations in the means of production and
consumption have a considerable impact on other aspects of culture. George Ritzer (2000)
coined the concept of McDonaldization to capture the changes in modes of production based
the fast-food industry and increasingly extended to other sectors of production as well.
McDonaldization involves four processes.

Characteristics of McDonaldization
To find the cheapest, quickest and simplest way to produce goods, such as
Efficiency
burgers, shirts.
Calculability To focus on quantity rather than quality by producing as many goods as possible
in the shortest possible time. Fast-food restaurants deliver food within minutes.
Characteristics of McDonaldization
This is also accomplished through the use of technology.
To use technology and structure to control both employees (surveillance and
Control timing of operations) and consumers (to shorten eating time inside a fast-food
restaurant)
To ensure that products are standardized and similar irrespective of location.
Preditability Customers can expect similar-tasting food no matter where they buy their
burgers.

Glob as a process, ideology, and theory

Why did globalization become a popular idea? One reason is the rise of globalcommunications,
especially the internet, which made people feel that connectionsacross the world were flowing
more strongly, speedily and becoming moredemocratic.

Globalization may appear a macro phenomenon and distant, not the same as microissues that
have more of an impact on daily life. Yet large-scale global processes ofeconomic restructuring
and International political power have a big impact on ourindividual lives. The global economy
and distribution of wealth affect, for example,our chances of employment and material
circumstances. Identity and culturalexperience is forged out of global inputs, from media to
music, migration and food.

Which side you live on in the constellation of global political powers has
significantconsequences for your life chances eg developed and developing.Culture is affected
by economic and political factors.

Economic and political factors which seem distant from our lives have a large impact. The fact
that I live in a rich, developed country, one of the core powers in the world, andrelatively
democratic, peaceful, and free, has a great effect on my life compared to what it would be like
if I lived in a poor, developing country, or one with less democracy and freedom, or more
conflict and violence. A large proportion of the world’s population live in places with some or all
of these problems.

Some scholars believe that culture and people movements are what sociologistsshould be
concerned about. Culture is sociological and has social effects whereaseconomic and political
issues are the preserve of other disciplines or maybe just lessinteresting to sociologists. You
probably think that if you look at politics and economics this is not really sociology. It is the
territory of political science and economics. But this lacks a sense of an interdisciplinary role for
sociology.
Furthermore sociology is the study of social structures, relations and processes, of society.
Society includes political and economic dimensions. And parts of society and social relations not
classified as political or economic, for instance culture and migration, are affected by politics
and economics.

You can’t understand globalization without looking at its economic and political dimensions, or
by analysing cultural and social spheres instead of, or separately from, politics and economics. If
culture is looked at separately from economic and political relations then the economic and
political power, inequality and conflict that affects culture is overlooked. This makes cultural
globalization seem more equal and benign/kind than it really is.

To take an interdisciplinary perspective is distinctively sociological. Sociology has, from its

founding days, drawn on economic and political perspectives and dealt with issues such as
capitalism, ownership, the division of labour, economic class, and the role of the nation-state.
Consequently, sociology is well equipped to deal with modernity, capitalism and the state,
some of the main institutions in globalization. They are part of society and they affect society,
social relations and social structures.

However, one may wonder, exactly in what sense the world is now a“global village”?
Apparently, at the technical level, there is no lack of transportationand communication tools to
facilitate globalization. Thanks to the ever renovatedtechnology, the world is compressed into a
much smaller one: in the real world,nowadays a trip to the furthest city on earth can be
completed within one day; inthe virtual world, instant and “face-to-face” connection on the
internet makes thephysical distance between any two individuals meaningless.

Thus, the humanexperience of time and space is fundamentally transformed, and the world
isliterally a global village (for those who have access to necessary equipments). Technology can
be used toconnect different parts and different people in the world, but it does not makethe
world integrated automatically.Despite the rapid growth and worldwide facade of the internet,
only of smallportion of the human population are internet users. The “digital divide”
betweenthose who have access to the internet and those who don’t only adds a newdimension
to the gap between the rich and the poor.

Historical Trends

The themes of globalization were not new, but the word and the popularityof the idea really
came to the fore in the 1980s – Martell 2010. The process of globalization since the end of
World War II,especially since the end of the Cold War, has been unprecedented in many
ways.In fact, globalization in its contemporary manifestation is a multithreaded,multifaceted,
and omnipresent process that links different parts of the humanworld. As a result, all
individuals have to conduct their life in a shrunk andinterrelated world, and all individuals have
more or less become global citizens.

Globalization is historical. It started longbefore the recent years of information technology, the
end of the cold war or even theend of the second world war. It has its bases earlier in the
development of capitalismand industrialism and the institutions, technologies. These provided
the biggest qualitative leap in globalization and arebehind many forms of globalization today.
They were not just the key sgtarting pointbut also the basis for current forms. At the same time
it is less plausible thatglobalization, or the bases for current globalization, started before this.
While Europeand the West were still relatively backward other more sophisticated parts of
theworld were practicing long-distance trade, religion and expansion but these were nottruly
globalization.

Still others believe it began towards the end of 19th century with the onset of the Industrial
Revolution, which brought on the development of production and transportation means.
However, these developments really first began being referred to as “globalization” with the
fall of the Eastern Block countries and with the advancement in communication technology,
including news media and the widespread use of the internet, causing an increase in
communication between people. These last two components are important factors, which have
direct influence on the cultural dimensional aspect of globalization. We may then say: In reality,
globalization has been around since the beginning of mankind. We merely evaluate its history
according to various phases of paradigms. But one thing is sure, as transportation and
communication increase in speed, the process of globalization becomes more and more
apparent. As globalization speeds up, we become more aware of it and this increase, in
comparison with past percentages, causes everything in the world to become influenced more
quickly.

The most important developments in recent years in respect to globalization within the
framework of the European Union are free travel,the opening of borders between countries
and the removal of all tradehindrances.As we all know, politics and economics are processes,
which directlyaffect and determine each other. As economic integration increases,political
integration will intensify. The weakening of the national statemodel is a natural result, in my
opinion. Today in place of referring tototal independence, countries speak of their mutual
dependence on eachother. Total independence has become impossible and is viewed as athird
world country approach.

globalization in its contemporary manifestation is a multifaceted, and omnipresent process that

links different parts of the human world. As a result, all individuals have to conduct their life in
a shrunk andinterrelated world, and all individuals have more or less become global citizens.
Conceptualising globalization

Social scientists have used various concepts – such as modernization,(do away w tradition,
shunning our own culture) modernity, latemodernity, post-modernity, development, post-
development, imperialism – to describe a range of related social transformations.

The school of thought that view globalization only referring to economic unification of the
globe, integrating all the countries of the world under a single market grid; and

That globalization is a euphemism/neutral term for “Westernization”, that is, the discourse of
globalization is a Western hegemonic/domination imposition on therest of the world in the
mode of cultural imperialism.

Rather than viewing globalization as a narrow, economic and exploitative process, glob shd be
recognized as a multidimensional process.

challenge yet another popular myth that, as a megaprocess affecting all aspects of our life,
globalization unleashes destructive consequences by erasing differences and creating a uniform
and homogeneous world.

Being connected with satellite television and the Internet is indeed the popular conception of
globalization and certainly this form of globalization raises the possibility of a transformation
that has both far-reaching and complex implications.

Some scholars tend to conceptualize globalization as world-wide modernization, often seeing it

as posing a threat to local cultures and traditions, while others see globalization as a historical
outcome made up of a variety of local traditions. In this perspective, locality becomes a site for
a dynamic confluence/meeting of various cultures.

By tracing the history of the concept of globalization, we argue that globalization does not
simply mean the creation of a world-embracing economic system paving the way for cultural
homogenization on a worldwide basis, and it is not just a new variant of so-called cultural
imperialism. Globalization is neither a menace nor a panacea. It is a complex process of social,
cultural, economic and political connectedness that has to be approached at a high level of
complexity and abstractness.

It is important to conceptualize globalization in relation to cognate concepts such as

modernization and Westernization.separate the concept of globalizationfrom such categories
as internationalization, cultural diffusion,homogenization, and universalization.
It is not Westernization in the sense that theworld is becoming more homogeneous and the
non-Western world looksincreasingly like the West. Its relationship with cultural diffusion is
alsosomewhat problematic. If one conceives of cultural diffusion as a processof mediation
rather than a simple unidirectional overpowering of one cultureby another, then diffusion can
be seen to resemble the generalprocess of globalization.

The multidimensionality of this concept and the heterogeneity/varied of thephenomenon of

globalization have led to a plurality of theories and discoursesabout globalization (Robertson
and Khondker, 1998).

For Ray Kiely(1998: 96), “the globalization thesis contends that we live in a world
economydominated by transnational corporations (TNCs) that invest whereverthey like in a
footloose manner”.

Modernity – Cultural Identity

o Old identities which stabilised social world for a long time are in decline, giving rise to new
identities – “Crisis Identity”.
o Modern identities are being ‘de-centred’ i.e. dislocated or fragmented.
o Modernity is fragmenting the cultural landscapes of class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race,
& nationality.
o These transformations are also shifting our personal identities, undermining our sense of
self.
o This loss of stable sense of self is sometimes called the dislocation or decentering.
o This set of double displacements – decentering individuals both from their place in the
social and cultural world and from themselves – constitutes a crisis of identity for the
individual.
o Identity only becomes an issue when it’s in crisis. When something assumed to be fixed,
coherent and stable is displaced by the experience of doubt and uncertainty. Mercer 1990.
o This process of social transformation leads us to ask if it is not modernity being
transformed.

Identity – Enlightenment
o Conception of identity was based on a conception of the human person as fully centred,
unified individuals, endowed with the capacities of reason, consciousness and action.
o This was a very individualistic conception of identity usually male identity.
o Mead and Cooley and the Symbolic Interactionists are the key figures in sociology who
elaborated on the concept of identity of the self.
o According to this view, this has become the classical sociological conception of the issue.
Identity is formed in the interaction between self and society – front and back stages.
o Identity in this sociological conception bridges the gap between the inside and outside
(personal and public).
o The process of identification through which we project ourselves into our cultural identities
has become more open ended, variable, and problematic.

o This produces the post modern conceptualisation as having no fixed, permanent identity.

o Identity becomes a ‘movable feast’: formed and transformed continuously in relation to the
ways we are represented or addressed in the cultural systems which surround us. (Hall
1987).
o It is historically, socially not biologically defined. A person assumes different identities at
different times. Identities which are not unified around a coherent ‘self’.
o Within us are contradictory identities, pulling in different directions, so that our
identifications are continuously being shifted about.
o The fully, coherent secure identity is a fantasy. Hall 1990.
o We assume temporary identities.

Identity in late modernity (globalisation)

National Cultures
o The condition of a man requires that the individual we exists and acts as an autonomous
being does so only because he can first identity himself as a member of the society, group,
class, state or nation of some arrangement to which he may not attach a name, but which
he recognises instinctively as home. (Scruton 1986).
o Historical view – how is globalisation affecting individuals? ‘Sense of national identification’.
o A national is not only a political entity but something which produce meanings – a system of
cultural representation.
o People are not only legal citizens of a nation; they participate in the idea of the nation as
represented in this national culture. Do we have a national culture?
o We only know about it when in Diaspora. What identifies us in Diaspora?
o Zimbabweans are peaceful people, language, etc.
o Maintenance of national cultural institutions such as national education system.
o A nation is a symbolic community and it is this which accounts for its power to generate a
sense of identity. (Schwarz 1986).
o National cultures construct identities which are ambiguously placed between past and the
future.
o Sometimes national cultures are tempted to turn back and clock, to retreat defensively to
that lost time. When the nation was great and to restore past identities.
o Breman 1990 – nation refers to both modern nation –state and to something more ancient
– the local community, family etc.
o Members of a nation may in terms of class, gender, race, a national culture seeks to unify
them into one cultural identity, to represent them into one cultural identity, to represent
them all as belonging to the same great national family – Is it as unifying.
o It is a structure of cultural power.
o National identities are strongly gendered. The meanings and values of Zimbabweans have
powerful masculine associations which play a secondary role as mothers of nations’ sons.
o Unifying a nation with different ethnical groups but cultural hybrid-difference.

In the era of globalisation

o Forces of social change are powerfully dislocating national cultural identities.

o Globalisation implies a movement away from sociological idea of a society and replaced by
a perspective which concentrates on how social life is ordered across time and space.
(Giddens 1990).
o Modernity is inherently globalising. Giddens (1990).
o Capitalism from the beginning was an affair of the world economy and not of nation states.
Capital has never allowed itself to be determined by national boundaries. (Wallersten.
1979).

Three Possibilities
o National identities are being eroded as a result of the growth of cultural homogenisation
of the global post modern.
o National and other local identities are being strengthened by the resistance to
globalisation.
o National identities are declining but new identities of hybridity are taking their place.
o Weaken national forms of cultural identity.
o Evidence of loosening of strong identifications with the national culture.
o National identities remain strong especially in respect to such things as legal, citizenship
rights.
o Global interdependence is leading to the breakdown of all strong cultural identities and is
producing the fragmentation of cultural codes.
o Cultural flows and global consumerism but nations create the possibilities of shared
identities – as customers for the same goods of clients for the same services.
o Resistance: religious (no TV), regulating channels, no minis.
o AS national cultures become more exposed to outside influences. It is different to
preserve cultural identities intact or to prevent them from becoming weakened through
infiltration, TV, books, movies.
o The more social life becomes mediated by the global marketing of styles, places, images,
by international travel and communications, the more identities become detached from
histories and traditions and appear ‘free floating’.
o Spread of consumerism –acquisition of goods has contributed to this ‘Cultural
Supermarket’ effect.
o Within the global arena, economies and cultures are thrown into intense and immediate
contact with each other, and other that is no longer out there but also within.
o While globalisation is the prevailing force of our time, localism is also significant and there
are also issues of re –localisation within globalisation.
o There is tension between global and local in the transformation of identities.
o Are national identities being ‘homogenised’.
o Globalisation culture privileges consumerism, individualism, competition and efficiency.
Identity - Hauser

o The world is fragmented by globalisation.

o The cultural identities have local roots i.e. they are attached to local contexts such as
values, symbols and language and specified historically.
o In the context of globalisation, there is decontextualisation of symbols, detachment of
social actions.
o Impacts of globalisation affect both at microscopic levels i.e. individuals and the
macroscopic level i.e. the whole society.
o According to Breidenbach and Zukrigl (1998) – there are indications that the local level
of a new relation of community, location and culture.
o For more and more people such as migrants, business people, young people, artistes
etc. Fixed geographical spaces are losing their importance as key points of reference
with respect to identity and the everyday life, giving way to deterritorialised
communities linked by common social and other interests.
o Changes are a result of intensified migration process and worldwide tourism because of
the establishment of interconnected digital communications, media all over the world.
o We live in the ‘media age’ in which the greatest influence on the socio-cultural changes
is attributed to media interlinked worldwide.
o Giddens (1990) – argues that space – time relations of social action play an important
role of the revolutions in information and community technologies (Sterbling 2000).
o The “classical gatekeepers” printed media, radio, TV are losing more and more of their
function but a new communication technology. It allows data in a digitised form to be
exchanged in both directions i.e. from the sender to the recipient and back over any
distance.
o Internet increases the interaction potentials among individuals and organisations
respectively in regions physically separated from each other thus reinforcing the
tendencies of reorganisation of the relations of time, space and culture.
o Social networks of people no longer develop only in places where it is possible to log in.
o The new information and technology build bridges between local contexts of the spread
of uniform systems of symbols, life styles and sterotypes (Schmid 1999).
o According to Breidenbach and Zukrigl (1998) the internet can be seen as a suitable tool
for promoting inter cultural exchange by means of which even very small language and
interest groups can network and express themselves.
o The increase in contacts of people and societies enhances knowledge of alternative
ways of life, values and concepts.
o Exchanges with global influences produce new forms of culture.
o With internet information, communication and participation become much simpler,
faster and less expensive.
o It also increases the availability of information and new sources of information.
o Internet search engines such as Google, yahoo etc enable anybody with access to them
to engage in rapid searching and researching for the selecting information. These
sources of information far outside a person’s local context can be trapped much more
easily, quickly and cheaply than before.
o At macroscopic level, cultural and social consequences of possibilities offered by
globalisation media are considered problematic with respect to the process of locally
based identify formation.
o Roth (2000) says ‘wider opening to the outside is causing interval fears of a loss of
identity.
o Knowledge of other difference forms of everyday life leads to insecurity among
individuals and a relativisation of their values and worlds of living.
o This process results in loss of cultural tradition and forces individuals to redefine their
identity.
o Culture from this scenario results in two opposing theses: fragmentation thesis on one
hand and homogenisation thesis on the other hand.

Fragmentation Thesis
o Process results in or cause further differentiation of societies.
o The increasing adoption of culturally foreign ways of life makes integration into local
cultural contexts more and more difficult.
o The buzzwords describing this mixing of culturally different styles, customs and
traditions are cultural pluralisation, hybridisation Luger Renger (1994).
o Mixing of ‘own’ and ‘foreign’ cultures – there are indications of cultural identities being
gain based more and more on local traditional patterns.
o The permanent presence of foreign images as transmitted by the new electronic media
drains and undermines natural identity by showing images of the world and ways of life
which contradict one’s own cultural contexts.
o It is feared that this would result not only in a loss of natural cultural bands but give rise
to a kind of defence reaction against the excessive offerings of foreign cultural symbols,
thus leading to a search for locally based cultural identity. Nothnagel (2000), Barber
(1997), Castells (2001)
o Warewid interconnectedness of mass media makes cultural process of socialisation and
identity formation more difficult and complex.
o All these could cause increasing fragmentation at national societies and their cultures.

Homogenisation Thesis

o Opposite of fragmentation thesis.

o According to this concept, cultural standardisations of individual societies would be
disseminated globally.
o As internet communication takes place among users from high technology industrialised
countries influenced by western culture is carried on in English, and the communication
standards established by these users are globalised (Huber 1997). Media
Communication is denser from the centre to the peripheries. Saxer (1989) (Industrially
weaker states, non western societies).
o This gives rise to the fear of inevitable process of adaptation of formerly culturally
different societies to one global system primarily a system of western cultural symbols
and language which the forms the background for a global cultural identity.

 Both perspectives are two sides of the same coin as they result from a media
deterministic perspective.
 Western cultural practices- traditional dress replaced by suits. Young people watch films
made in Hollywood, listen to rock and roll, play video games, talk on cell phone, wear
jeans, drinks coke, eat pizza (or McDonal hamburgers), speaks English, increasingly
frequent cybercafés. (Herring 2001).

Cultural Identity Concept

o Derived from a psychological approach, cast into more specific terms by means of a more
informative concept of culture.

Social Identity Theory & Cultural Identity

o Identity Concepts – psychological concept of Sigmund Freud, developed later into a

theoretical concept of ‘self identity’ by Erikson).
o Social Identity Theory (SIT) was developed by Henri Tajfel (1982). The theory is mainly
about the individual processes of categorising perception e.g of one’s own self, of other
people and the environment.
o The assumption is that people establish categories in the form of stereotypes in an effort
to structure the systematise their environment.
o To him stereotyping helped allowing a clear distribution to be made between members
and non members of a category.
o In the course of this social categorisation, people not only classify other as members of
specific categories, but at the same time also categorise themselves placing individuals
within their social environment contributing to the development of social identity.
o Graumann (1999) identification used to build a bridge connecting social identity with
cultural identity. Identity from identification means 3 things: identifying others, being
identified (oneself) and identifying with others.
o Social identity is always related to locations and things and directed at symbols. What
can be symbolised by locations and things the persons ultimately all of which define a
culture.
o Cultural identity – identification with specific values, partial membership in the groups
representing these values.
o Cultural identity can also be built on non identification or negation of other values and
their symbolic expressions e.g. anti capitalism. Thus positive and negative cultural
identification.
o In this sense, it has an integrating effect on one hand and on the other hand serving to
mark group members and exclude non members.
o Culture identity must be considered as a process often full of conflicts and designed to be
heterogeneous.