Global Culture, Economy, and Societal Shifts

Perspectives on Global Culture

Skeptics: Emphasize the thinness of global culture relative to national cultures, highlighting contestation where integration and the spread of ideas and images provoke reactions and resistance.

Transformationalists: Focus on the intermingling of cultures and peoples, resulting in hybrids, glocalities, and new forms.

Hyperglobalizers: See a trend towards global cultural homogenization, driven by American or Western popular culture and consumerism.

Cultural Imperialism and its Manifestations

Cultural Imperialism: The idea of Western ideals as universal, overriding local traditions, with an imbalance of cultural flows from the core to the periphery.

Coca-Colonization: Commodities promoted by global marketing campaigns that exploit basic material desires, create similar lifestyles, leading to a consumerist culture and the domination of a few brands.

Americanization: The U.S. exerts a hegemonic influence in promoting its values through popular culture and the news media/oligopoly.

Reactions to Globalization

Pluralization: Interaction across boundaries leads to the mixing of cultures in particular places and practices.

Institutionalism: Diversity has become a global value promoted through international organizations and movements. However, this can lead to perceived threats to local identity and a strong assertion of that identity.

Multiculturalism: An ideological system that advocates tolerance of and respect for various cultures. Some argue this ideology serves the expansion of global capitalism.

Fundamentalism: An ideology that contains assertions of some sacred essence in one’s religion, ethnicity, nationality, and culture, and calls for a return to the fundamentals of a doctrine or a world that is imagined as a beautiful past.

Types of Immigrants

• International migrants
• Internal migrants
• Forced migrants/Refugees/Asylees

Refugee: A person who, owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinions, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country.

Fordism

Aspects of Fordism:

• An accumulation strategy based on mass production.
• Salaried (instead of hourly) labor and the unionization of the labor force.
• Development of internal markets for goods.
• A welfare state and the institutionalization of a social pact between big labor and capital.

The Globalization Project

Characterized by the debt crisis and Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), which include:

• Opening up of protected economies.
• Deregulation and removal of government controls on enterprises, wages, and prices.
• Free trade/trade liberalization: freedom of movement of goods, capital, and services; elimination of tariffs, subsidies, quotas, and other restrictions.
• Privatization of state-owned enterprises.

Offshoring of Manufacturing

Mobile material production in manufacturing contrasts with immobile sectors like construction, public works, agriculture, and most services. The GDP of industrialized countries has increased even with relatively lower manufacturing. Poor countries industrialize largely for export and international production rather than internal consumption and growth.

Unprotected Labor

Competition between and within developing countries leads to depressed wages and prices. The share of wages in GDP has declined rapidly in labor-exporting countries. Global subcontracting eliminates and weakens the regulation of work conditions, resulting in global workers in competition with one another.

Migration of Core Work

This is often invisible due to private “core work” (core deficit), racial discounting, and the Western culture of individualism (e.g., nannies, maids, sex workers).

Three Revolutions

• Communications Revolution: From letters (1840s Europe) to cell phones and the internet.
• Transportation Revolution: From indenture (1700s) to cheaper transportation.

Other Key Terms

Remittance: Money sent abroad to native countries.

Culture: The totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought.

NACs (New Agricultural Countries): Serve global rather than national markets (e.g., Thailand). Governments promote export agro-industrialization, focusing on non-traditional exports like high-value foods (animal protein products, fruits, and vegetables) or low-value feed grains. Agro-industry grows as food processing firms contract rural smallholders.

U.S. Deindustrialization: A shift from manufacturing to high- and low-tech services, leading to wage erosion and the loss of stable, organized, blue-collar manufacturing jobs. This results in a shrinking middle class and growth in temporary, part-time, flexible, and feminized jobs.

Legitimacy: Comprises at least two aspects: whether people in power have the right to occupy powerful positions and exercise authority, and how much people accept government institutions and the way these institutions are formed.

Expansion: Leading industries originate from the system’s core and achieve high degrees of quasi-monopoly, able to regenerate market forces for further systemic expansion.

Contraction: Shrinking of real estate, collapse of banks, and persistent high levels of unemployment in core countries.

Sovereign Debt: National or government debt.