The Glocal Crisis and the Politics of Change

Abstract

The term ‘glocal’ seems to have originated in business circles, often attributed to the Japanese business practice of expanding global enterprise by focusing on local conditions. Of late it also comes to mean how local actors can organize activities in the locality to counter the effects of globalization on economic and social vitality. Some may worry that glocalization runs the risk of generalizing the global into the local to defuse local cultural differences, and indeed the increased migration flows between more and less developed countries, the ever expanding internationalization and standardization of consumption, and the uniformity of cultural symbols that threatens local variation and undermines the intergeneration transmission of social practices and norms are a threat. That is, as global capital tries to appropriate local differences in the quest for sales the consequence is a bleeding and blending of those differences into international products. But glocal also evokes oppositional politics, the politics of local first by recognizing that in the middle of this globalizing process the locality can assert itself. It means advocating for the consumption of locally produced food to support farmers in the area over crops shipped half-way around the world. It means looking at the local content of production in the goods we purchase, especially those that have a small ecological footprint and promote sustainability. It means simply drinking coffee at the locally owned and operated coffee house and passing on the many outlets of corporate coffee purveyors that seem to pop up everywhere. Implicit in this effort is a desire to retain local character as well as support local economies to withstand the vagaries of global standardization. Ritzer warns us of the process of standardized reduction in quality of all things in our economic and social world when he points out that ‘McDonaldization ... is the process by which the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as of the rest of the world.’ (1993: 1) The cultural challenge is well summed up by looking at an innovative art project out of Canada which tries to tackle the ubiquity of images and to form unique and (as their name implies) locally focused representations of the collectivity out of individual visions.