Glocalization

Glocalization in a Two-Level System

Sociologist Roland Robertson, who has popularized the term glocalization, believes Japanese economists invented it to explain Japanese global marketing strategies. In the marketing context, glocalization means the creation of products or services for the global market by adapting them to local cultures. For example, in France, McDonald's replaced its familiar Ronald McDonald mascot with Asterix the Gaul, a popular French cartoon character.

Robertson rejects essentialist polarities between the global and the local, such as between economic globalization and local culture. Traditionally, local identities have been invented and nurtured mainly through contacts with others. They have been stimulated and shaped primarily by translocal interaction, comparison, and trends. There are two typical reactions and results of this interplay of global and local forces—both encourage diversity. The opportunistic reaction is the creation of hybrids. Especially in world cities where immigrants and elites must adjust to each other and maintain ties abroad, mixed cultures and identities arise. The rebellious reaction is to foster a resistance identity defending local history, traditions, and authentic cultures.

The local is fundamentally shaped by the global, but the opposite is also true. Location has never been as important for economic life as now, when free trade regimes have opened national boundaries to trade and investment. Similarly, the expanding information economy has not dispersed production and consumption across geographic space. The new economy is instead characterized by the clustering of companies in specific city-regions and by geographic concentration. The most popular examples are the financial districts in London and New York, or the Silicon Valley computer industry in the 1990s. Thus, globalization increases territorial differentiation in both cultural and economic terms. Local milieus play an important role in a networked economy and society by providing content and contextual support for innovations. Furthermore, there is leeway for local agency—there are many divergent scales and flows linking places and people. Certainly, the economy is at the forefront of glocalizing processes, but beyond the dynamics of capital accumulation, there are further motives. Culture and environment, for example, provide other focal points and perspectives for glocalized networking and innovation.

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