Globalization and Consumption Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Globalization and consumption emerged as key concepts in social theory in the last decades of the twentieth century, and combined with reference to the emergence of a ”global consumer culture”: the same products, services, and entertainment sold in the same kinds of retail and leisure spaces to consumers around the world. Product availability is less tied to specific places, first because the same global brands are on sale at the same time throughout the world and second because deterritorialized immigrants recreate the retail environment of their homeland by importing familiar products. New technologies accelerated the flow of information, money, people, and goods across national borders, creating a world market with a global division of labor and global consumers. These developments challenged sociology’s implicit understanding of ”society” in terms of bounded cultures within nation-states, and shifted the locus of social identity from class position and work to consumption and lifestyle.

Globalization of consumption is often equated with Americanization, an argument reinforced by the number of prominent global brands with corporate headquarters in the USA, including Coca-Cola, Disney, McDonald’s, Nike, and Microsoft. Coca-Cola is in that sense iconic, with the term ”Coca-Colanization” used to signify economic and cultural domination by the USA (Wagnleitner 1994). So, too, McDonald’s, its golden arches metonyms of American culture and its restaurants regular targets for anti-American protest (Ritzer 2004). From this perspective, ”global culture” is in fact ”American culture” and its consumers are ”Coca-colonials.” Critics of this view point out that the sources of global culture are not all American, arguing that Ikea furniture, Indian (”Bollywood”) movies and food, Japanese animation, electronics, and sushi – not to mention the global audience for soccer, a sport in which the USA is an inconsequential player – all point to more complex processes of global cultural flow. In addition, global products are consumed in culturally specific contexts which inflect them with different meaning.

Globalization has contradictory implications for consumption. The idea that consuming global products involves interplay between global and local rather than cultural homogenization gives rise to the terms ”glocal” and ”glocalization” (Robertson 1995) to describe what happens when consumers incorporate global culture into local practice and meaning to produce culture that is neither fully global nor strictly local. By implication, globalization of consumption increases cultural diversity, adding ”glocal” hybrids to the existing pool of local cultures. A less optimistic view would see ”glocal” cultures as replacing rather than coexisting with ”local” cultures, with the balance between global and local shifting inexorably in favor of the global as what’s left of the local in ”glocal” decreases over time.

Bibliography:

Ritzer, G. (2004) The McDonaldization of Society, rev. edn. Pine Forge Press, Thousand Oaks, CA.
Robertson, R. (1995) Glocalization: time-space and homogeneity-heterogeneity. In: Featherstone, M. (ed.), Global Culture. Sage, London.
Wagnleitner, R. (1994) Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC.