Defining Glocalization

The term "globalization" is often used to suggest a dichotomy, even a radical disassociation, between the "global" (multinational corporations, international terrorism, the entertainment industry, CNN, the Web) and "the local" (the sense of place, neighborhood, town, locale, ethnicity, and other, traditional sources of identity). The term "glocalization" denotes a more dynamic relationship between these two realms, especially as they are brought into contact on Web sites, on television, and in other media.

Notice in the following examples and definitions, however, that the term glocalization means very different things to different people:

1. glocalization (noun). The creation of products or services intended for the global market, but customized to suit the local culture. more... (Word Spy)

2. [Glocalization is marked by the] development of diverse, overlapping fields of global-local linkages ... [creating] a condition of globalized panlocality....what anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls deterritorialized, global spatial "scapes" (ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes).... This condition of glocalization… represents a shift from a more territorialized learning process bound up with the nation-state society to one more fluid and translocal. Culture has become a much more mobile, human software employed to mix elements from diverse contexts. With cultural forms and practices more separate from geographic, institutional, and ascriptive embeddenness, we are witnessing what Jan Nederveen Pieterse refers to as postmodern "hybridization." (Wayne Gabardi, Negotiating Postmodernism, 33-34)

3. As it is used in Japanese business practice, this term actually refers to the selling, or making of products for particular markets. And as I think most of us here know,
Japanese business people have been particularly successful in selling their products in a variety of different markets, unlike the clumsy strategies of the Americans…
until very recently…. more… (Roland Robertson)

4. The process of glocalization means that San Francisco and other U.S. cities must brace to fend for themselves in the context of a newly emerging international governing structure and an increasingly impotent, indifferent and vestigial nation-state. For a few advantaged cities, the process of glocalization, at least in the short run, will create new opportunities for asserting local autonomy and controlling their own economic destiny…. For most cities, however, glocalization is bad news: bigger problems, fewer resources, no help from the feds, increasingly vicious intercity competition, and the dwindled status of powerless places dominated by the placeless power of global business and finance. more… (Richard E. DeLeon)

5. Friedman defines glocalization as "the ability of a culture, when it encounters other strong cultures, to absorb influences that naturally fit into and can enrich that culture, to resist those things that are truly alien and to compartmentalize those things that, while different, can nevertheless be enjoyed and celebrated as different." For example, Friedman thinks good glocalization is when a little Japanese girl goes to a McDonalds in Tokyo to "enjoy the American way of life and food." Bad glocalization is when she gets off a plane in Los Angeles and is surprised that "they have McDonalds in America, too!" The little girl should be aware that McDonalds is not a part of the Japanese culture. Otherwise we are headed for a very bland world: all Lexus and no olive tree. more… (Edward Tanguay's review of Thomas Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree)

Read the Glocalization Project assignment if you haven't already.