INT 200: Global Capitalism and
its Discontents
Global Capitalism and Culture
Cultural Flows
After breakfast a 100% American smokes a cigar invented in Brazil as he reads
the news of the day in characters invented by the ancient Semites imprinted
by a process invented in Germany on a material invented in China. As he
scans the latest editorial warning of the dire results to our institutions of
adopting foreign ideas, he thanks a Hebrew deity in an Indo-European tongue
that he is 100 percent American.
Cultural Flows
• Our lives are filled with artifacts, ideas, and activities that
originated in other cultures
• Cultural Flows
– In the last few decades TNCs, international travel, tourism, the
internet, television, and immigration have sped up cultural
exchanges.
Cultural Flows
• Cultural homogenization
– blending cultures to a uniform culture that doesn’t show the trace
of the diversity of the different cultures
– McWorld, monoculture, airport culture, strip mall culture
• Cultural appropriation
– the adoption of some specific elements of one culture by a
different cultural group
– cultural assimilation
Cultural Flows
• Hybridity
– the blending of cultures, but not homogenizing, modernizing, and
westernizing
– creolization
• Glocalization
– a complex interaction of the global and local characterized by
cultural borrowing
Cultural Flows
• Cultural Imperialism
– the domination of one culture over another other by a deliberate
policy or by economic or technological superiority
– forced acculturation of a subject population, or to the voluntary
embracing of a foreign culture by individuals who do so of their
own free will?
– Consumerism
• The need for cultural diversity?
• Globalization as Americanization; 4 versions:
–
–
–
–
International Business Culture (Davos Culture)
Faculty Club International
McWorld
Evangelical Protestantism
Cultural Flows
• The Cultural Flows resulting from globalization are good
– cross-cultural exchanges give individuals better access to cultural
diversity
– the markets support diversity and freedom of choice
– cultural mixing improves things
– a global culture would promote peace and understanding
between people
• The Cultural Flows resulting from Globalization are bad
– supplant the local culture, causing reduction in diversity or even
assimilation
– the world distinctive cultures destroyed and threatening to turn
the world into a global monoculture
– borrowing across cultures makes things worse
– while there is freedom to choose may increase, what we see is
standardization and harmonization
– culture is treated a business