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Session 3 McWorldization, Disneyization, and Standardization

“We’re all living in America”…or, “Tu Vuò Fa’ L’Americano”

Americanization becomes “Globalization”

“America never went to war with a country that had a McDonald's”

Standardization Literacy as Dispossession and Dependence?

Bridgeheads and Beachheads “Globalization” becomes Nothing

McDonaldization Disneyization KFC, McDonalds, and Glocalization

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“We’re all living in America”…or, “Tu Vuò Fa’ L’Americano”

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1950s—1980s, “Americanization” or “Westernization”— Mickey Mouse, Coca-Cola, and McDonalds, chewing gum, and jeans

The “liberation” of Rome, entry of the US 5th Army

Renato Carosone, “Tu Vuò Fa’ L’Americano” (or you want to play like

you’re an American).

Renato Carosone: “I’d rather retire now on the crest of the wave, than being tormented later by the doubt that…new armies wearing blue-jeans may wipe away all that I have achieved in so many years of work and worries”

The dual critique of Americanization/Westernization:

(a) the destruction, bleaching, or remaking of local cultures in order to make them mirror images of the USA, especially through changed consumption patterns (b) the quantitative, technological dominance of US and other Western media

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Americanization becomes “Globalization”

Henry Luce, 1941 cover editorial in Life magazine, “The American Century”.

“Whereas the geographical language of empires suggests a malleable politics—empires rise and fall and are open to challenge—the ‘American Century’ suggests an inevitable destiny. In Luce's language, any political quibble about American dominance was precluded. How does one challenge a century? US global dominance was presented as the natural result of historical progress, implicitly the pinnacle of European civilization, rather than the competitive outcome of political-economic power. It followed as surely as one century after another. Insofar as it was beyond geography, the American Century was beyond empire and beyond reproof” Smith, Neil. (2003). American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude

to Globalization. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (p. 20)

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“’globalization’ was made in America and was built around U. S. interests and ideologies, but it was also established from the beginning of the twentieth century rather than simply at its end” (p. 4)

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“America never went to war with a country that had a McDonald's” http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=eMIiZX8kwwc

“Maybe we should slap down five or six McDonald’s on this strip, then the people would be happy”

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Jean Baudrillard, “The Despair of Having Everything”: “The West’s mission is to make the world’s wealth of cultures interchangeable, and to subordinate them within the global order. Our culture, which is bereft of values, revenges itself upon the values of other cultures....this anthropological conflict pits a monolithic universal culture against all manifestations of otherness, wherever they may be found. Global power — as fundamentalist as any religious orthodoxy — sees anything different or unorthodox as heretical, and the heretics must be made to assume their position within the global order or disappear completely. The West’s mission (we could call it the "former West" since it lost its defining values long ago) is to reduce a wealth of separate cultures into being interchangeable, of equal weight, by any brutal means possible. A culture that is bereft of values revenges itself on the values of other cultures. Beyond politics and economics, the primary aim of warfare (including the conflict in Afghanistan) is to normalise savagery and beat territories into alignment. Another objective is to diminish any zone of resistance, to colonise and tame any terrain, geographical or mental”

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Who has the power to impose standards? Whose cultural consciousness?

Is there a global culture? A culture of globality? The globalization of culture?

Absence of concepts of power, dominance, or hegemony

Standardization “With the coming of literacy and later printing, the development of the modern state and its institutions (Anderson 1991 [1983], Gellner 1983), standardization of phenomena such as language, measurements and law took place at the national level. The development of the banking system contributed to the standardization of money and eventually other financial instruments” (Eriksen, p. 51)

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Literacy as Dispossession and Dependence?

Education = “Head Decay Shun”

Literacy and lack of resources

Mining the person: the “human resource”

Separately: Marshall McLuhan and Edmund Carpenter, the message of literacy is alienation.

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Bridgeheads and Beachheads “globalization continues the work of nation building by creating shared standards, comparability and ‘bridging principles’ of translation between formerly discrete and sometimes incommensurable worlds” (Eriksen, p. 51) “it is indisputable that the range of common denominators is widening in its scope and deepening in its impact, as a result of the accelerated disembedding processes” (Eriksen, p. 51)—“flattening, or leveling forces” (Eriksen, p. 64) “standardization implies comparability” (Eriksen, p. 52) “A world of standardization is a world of many common denominators and bridgeheads for communication” (Eriksen, p. 53) Standardization of morality (Eriksen, p. 64)

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“Whether to put the greatest emphasis on social and economic rights, for example, or civil and political rights, is a political issue” (Eriksen, p. 65) “Standardization is uneven. Speaking about the ‘nodes’ of global communication, such as airports, conference venues and business hotels, Ulf Hannerz (1990) proposes the term ‘global switchboards’. Those who meet there, originating from different societies, speak a shared language (often English) and also have other things in common; they conform to a number of shared cultural standards. However, other members of their respective societies have less in common with each other, and are to that effect less standardized on a global scale” (Eriksen, p. 54) Spread of English is a globalization process proper, not imperialism, Eriksen argues (Eriksen, p. 57)

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“Globalization” becomes Nothing

George Ritzer (2004): “the grobalization of nothing, and the glocalization of something. He defines glocalization as that which is ‘locally conceived and controlled and rich in distinctive substance’ (2004: 8), while grobalization is defined as ‘generally centrally conceived, controlled, and comparatively devoid of distinctive substantive content’ (2004: 3). In other

words, standardized, mass-produced goods catering to an assumed common denominator of disembedded market tastes are the outcome of grobalization, while anything that couldn’t have been produced anywhere but in a particular location is defined as glocalization” (Eriksen, p. 58)

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essay on ‘non-places’, the anthropologist Marc Augé (1992) describes a condition he labels ‘supermodernity’ (la surmodernité), which continuously produces uprootedness and alienation because it lacks historically rooted places imbued with particularity (Eriksen, p. 29)

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“Antigonish” (Hughes Mearns, 1899): Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today, I wish, I wish he’d go away... When I came home last night at three, The man was waiting there for me But when I looked around the hall, I couldn’t see him there at all! Go away, go away, don’t you come back any more! Go away, go away, and please don’t slam the door... Last night I saw upon the stair, A little man who wasn’t there, He wasn’t there again today Oh, how I wish he’d go away...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XY66ZJ0TFUI McDonaldization “Ritzer says that there ‘is a gulf between those who emphasize the increasing grobal influence of capitalistic, Americanized, and McDonaldized interests and those who see the world growing increasingly pluralistic and indeterminate’ (Ritzer 2004: 80)” (Eriksen, p. 58)

Ritzer: rationality, convenience, efficiency, speed, standardization—creation of uniform urban spaces—streamlining, homogenization; the fast-food restaurant as an exemplar of rationalization, possibly more so now than bureaucracy was when Weber wrote about rationalization. Rationality = “efficiency, predictability, calculability, substitution of nonhuman for human technology, and control over uncertainty”

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“Efficiency,” speed, focus on means “Predictability,” discipline, order, systematization, formalization,

routine, consistency, methodical operation Quantification, metrics—grades, GPA Mechanization, automation: “When human robots are found,

mechanical robots cannot be far behind. Once people are reduced to a few robot-like actions, it is a relatively easy step to replace them with mechanical robots”

Control: reduction of uncertainty, or unwanted certainties Irrationality of rationality: (a) all of the negative effects of rationalization; (b) opposite of rationality; (c) opposite effects; (d) rational but not reasonable

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Disneyization

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Bryman: Disneyization, process by which the principles of the Disney them parks dominate more and more sectors of society: theming, dedifferentiation of consumption, merchandising, and emotional labour

“Disney theme parks are sites of McDonaldization too. A number of

Ritzer’s (1993) illustrations of the four dimensions of McDonaldization – efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control – are drawn from Disney parks and from theme parks that appear to have been influenced by them. There are, moreover, numerous parallels between McDonald’s restaurants and the Disney parks” (p. 26)

“Theming represents the most obvious dimension of Disneyization.

More and more areas of economic life are becoming themed. There is now a veritable themed restaurant industry, which draws on such well-known and accessible cultural themes as rock and other kinds of music, sport, Hollywood and the film industry more generally, and geography and history” (p. 29)

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“The term ‘dedifferentiation of consumption’ denotes simply the

general trend whereby the forms of consumption associated with different institutional spheres become interlocked with each other and increasingly difficult to distinguish. For one thing, there has been a tendency for the distinction between shopping and theme parks to be elided” (p. 33)

“I will use the term ‘merchandising’ simply to refer to the promotion

of goods in the form of or bearing copyright images and logos, including such products made under licence” (p. 36)

Emotional labour: beyond deskilling, regimentation—control over how

employees feel, view themselves, express emotion in service transaction—“The Disney University was created precisely in order to inculcate the necessary training and was responsible for a new vocabulary. According to the founder of the Disneyland University, one of the central elements of the early training approach was to

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inculcate the principle that ‘[i]n addition to a “friendly smile”, we sold the importance of “friendly phrases” ’” (p. 41)

“Ritzer positions McDonaldization in relation to the classical concern

in social theory with rationalization exhibited by Weber and others, whereas the intellectual heritage of Disneyization is much closer to recent more theoretical concerns about consumerism” (p. 42)

“Disneyization can be depicted as having points of affinity with many

of the attributes of a consumer culture identified by writers like Baudrillard (1970/1988), Bauman (1998), Featherstone (1991) and Jameson (1991) who emphasize the sign value of goods and their connectedness to notions of life style and individuals’ personal identity projects. There are different aspects to this current of thought, not the least of which is that it encapsulates both the propensity of people to respond to goods and services in terms of sign value and the conscious manipulation of signs by the suppliers of goods and services” (p. 42)

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“McWorld, in Barber’s usage, ‘is a product of popular culture driven by expansionist commerce’. It is a close relative to the old Marxist term ‘monopoly capitalism’ wedded to consumerism. Barber describes the spread of standardized popular culture, such as MTV, at some length, showing that nearly all countries outside Africa had access to MTV as early as 1995” (Eriksen, p. 60)

* Path dependence * Shared grammar

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KFC, McDonalds, and Glocalization KFC worldwide http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2013/08/12/unique-kfc-meals-from-around-world/ List of McDonald’s menu items worldwide http://www.aboutmcdonalds.com/mcd/our_company/amazing_stories/food/catering_to_local_tastes.html http://foodnetworkhumor.com/2009/07/mcdonalds-menu-items-from-around-the-world-40-pics/ http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-mcdonalds-food-around-the-world,0,5168632.photogallery