Glocalization

Globalization theorists have coined the term glocalization to better understand how global economic and social forces affect individuals. This neologism, combining global and local, shifts the study of globalization to the periphery of transnational organizations. Whereas the idea of globalization connotes an overwhelming, unidirectional, and homogenizing force, in practice globalization rarely is experienced as a compulsion to eat the same foods, wear the same clothes, and sing the same songs. Instead, these theorists assert, one often sees a mélange of the global and the local in everyday life. By looking at the ways in which the global and the local interpenetrate, these theorists seek to establish the extent to which individuals have the ability to act when faced with the force of globalization.

The term was first popularized by Roland Robertson, who feels it is absurd to suggest that globalization originates from a particular country or a particular corporation. He obtained the idea of glocalization from the term dochakuka, which was popular in Japanese business circles in the 1980s. Dochakuka, derived from dochaku, or “living on one's own land,” suggests that one must adapt the principles of farming to one's immediate situation; among business leaders, this term came to describe the practice of creating products for specific markets. Robertson uses this concept of a global marketing strategy masking itself in local traits to point to an important difference between what is one's home territory and the sense of the same that one receives in the shadow of the global. Even though one might think of the local as being opposed to the global, he asserts that this is a false dichotomy. A global mind-set creates a particular sense of the local; there is no need to describe certain traits as local if one does not have the sense of an encroaching globalization. He uses the term glocal to mark this local identity that only exists in conjunction with a global awareness.

In spite of this origin, glocalism is sometimes cast as a positive ethic. John Tomlinson, for instance, suggests that in a global society one needs to promote a sort of “ethical glocalism.” The appropriate stance for policy makers or citizens of the world is to understand how their local world is touching the outside world, avoiding ethnocentricity and paternalism, and cultivating the sense that there is no “other” in the world; “we” are all “us.” Others such as Richard Giulianotti and Roland Robertson point to the important process of identity formation as an individual negotiates local traditional and global culture, emphasizing individual agency. Some theorists go so far as to suggest that the “glocal” can be a site of resistance. Embracing the collaborative possibilities between local knowledge and global resources, these thinkers praise hybridity as an appropriate aesthetic for the 21st century.

The idea of glocalization is so ensconced in the transnational business community that it becomes difficult to recuperate it as an ethical position. Businesses have realized that baldly foreign products will not fare well in the markets they wish to exploit; this is readily seen in restaurant marketing, where standardized menus are customized to local dietary restrictions or tastes as an affected concession to customer needs. Television networks like MTV and CNN have epitomized this lesson. Glocalized marketing is recently seen in telecommunications, where it is difficult to identify the global corporation(s) behind companies because of branding and promotional material that seems to firmly root the companies in the country in which they operate. Glocalization is such an integral part of transnational businesses' best practices that there are theorists who are uncomfortable with the positive spin that others attempt to apply to the term.

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