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Title
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Culture and Globalization
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Author
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Wherry, Frederick F.
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Research Area
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Culture
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Topic
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Culture and Society
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Abstract
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How should we define culture and globalization? How does each affect the other? And what are our shortcomings in understanding the heterogeneous outcomes for cultural production and expression in a globalizing world? This essay begins with foundational understandings among sociologists, political economists, and anthropologists regarding the facets of globalization and the way that it is shaped by and in turn shapes local cultures. The essay turns to the widely varied, disjointed attempts to explain the phenomenon and then offers suggestions for advancing studies of culture in the context of globalization.
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Identifier
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etrds0065
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extracted text
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Culture and Globalization
FREDERICK F. WHERRY
Abstract
How should we define culture and globalization? How does each affect the other?
And what are our shortcomings in understanding the heterogeneous outcomes for
cultural production and expression in a globalizing world? This essay begins with
foundational understandings among sociologists, political economists, and anthropologists regarding the facets of globalization and the way that it is shaped by and in
turn shapes local cultures. The essay turns to the widely varied, disjointed attempts to
explain the phenomenon and then offers suggestions for advancing studies of culture
in the context of globalization.
INTRODUCTION
What happens to culture in a globalized economy? And how does culture
shape globalization? Culture’s fate is not dependent on globalization but constitutes and is partly constituted by the latter. Culture refers to two things: (i)
the symbols, categories, and material arts a group of people deem significant as well as (ii) the normative interpretations of situations and symbols
that a collectivity largely shares. These constitutive and regulatory forms of
culture explain why groups of people tend to agree on (or contest) the value
of objects and to articulate similar criteria for assessing value and values;
moreover, the regulatory forms of culture (such as rituals and routine practices) shape how people internalize these criteria and how these criteria affect
the organization of production, distribution, and exchange (DiMaggio, 1990,
1997; Swidler, 1986; Wherry, 2012).
The concept of globalization refers to the temporally compressed processes
facilitating commerce and the shared interpretations of what problems are
(and the set of thinkable, appropriate strategies to address them) generating the categories and routines for commercial exchange. In his review of
the debates on globalization, Mauro Guillén explained the phenomenon as
both an ideology (a way of seeing and not seeing the world, regardless of the
empirical evidence) and “a process leading to greater interdependence and
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
mutual awareness (reflexivity) among economic, political, and social units
in the world, and among actors in general” (2001, p. 236). The constitutive
understanding of culture is built into the definition of globalization because
globalization carries a set of values and social categories that facilitate greater
economic, artistic, and political integration. These understandings of globalization build on Roland Robertson’s recognition that it intensifies “the consciousness of the world as a whole” (1992, p. 8) as well as Anthony Giddens’
(1990) claim that it indicates the compression of social ties linking localities
and symbols that are geographically far away. The question remains how
these values and categories affect what is produced, how, and under what
conditions exchanges take place; likewise, the culturally forged systems of
production and exchange have varying effects on the symbols, traditions,
and the material arts of the integrating societies.
Ethnographic depictions of culture in global markets present some indications of how markets may be placed in the service of cultural preservation.
In Mali, for example, villagers gather their artifacts and document their traditional uses and origins. The more verifiable information the villager can
provide, the greater the loan the villager can obtain from the Culture Bank.
The villager’s object acts as collateral, but it is also deposited in the Bank’s
museum, earning money from the entrance fees charged to tourists (Wherry
& Crosby, 2011). What social capital—defined as the capacity to mobilize
resources by virtue of one’s social ties—did for the Grameen Bank (Woolcock,
1998), symbolic capital has done for the Culture Bank, utilizing symbolic
assets to generate economic capital while promoting cultural preservation,
but these villages are not closed systems. Global traders move across local
and national boundaries with greater ease and with fewer regulations as the
speed of globalization accelerates.
Is the diversity of cultural forms increasing or decreasing? And why does
homogenization or cultural deterioration matter for the well-being of individuals, households, and communities? While there are instances of creative
destruction—innovative cultural forms emerging as some traditional ones
wane—in the arts (Cowen, 2001), there are no guarantees that creativity will
overcome the tendency to standardize (Wherry, 2006, 2008). Investigating the
structural and the symbolic systems that culture constitutes enables social
analysts to identify general sources and processes of cultural change in a
globalizing world.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
The foundational texts address what happens to cultural products in the
capitalist marketplace and the role of culture in facilitating (or hindering)
Culture and Globalization
3
commercial exchange. This section begins with the question of how capitalists markets affect the material and performing arts.
CULTURE INDUSTRY THESIS
If one defines globalization strictly in economic terms, it means the spread
of capitalism around the world, and its spread changes the character of arts
and music by transforming its relations of production. In Karl Marx’s Capital (Volume 1), the production of orchestral music became subject to the same
mechanistic market pressures just as the production of any other commercial
commodity would. A single violin player may function as his own conductor,
but at the moment when a musician must coordinate with others to produce
orchestral music, the laws of capitalism apply. By virtue of requiring a division of labor and needing economic capital to facilitate “the work of directing,
superintending, and adjusting” (Marx, [1867] 1906, p. 363) the music and its
performance, the members of an orchestra begin to see themselves as a group
with a shared fate and with a common external antagonist. Marx writes:
A single violin player is his own conductor; an orchestra requires a separate
one. The work of directing, superintending, and adjusting, becomes one of the
functions of capital . . . . As the number of the co-operating labourers increases,
so too does their resistance to the domination of capital, and with it, the necessity for capital to overcome this resistance by counter-pressure. The control
exercised by the capitalist is not only a special function, due to the nature of the
social labour-process, and peculiar to that process, but it is, at the same time,
a function of the exploitation of a social labour-process, and is consequently
rooted in the unavoidable antagonism between the exploiter and the living and
labouring raw material he exploits.
[Ibid., p. 363]
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer ([1944] 1993) extend Marx’s framework to the culture industries and the liberation these industries seemed to
represent. The production of music and the arts proliferates as a result of market incentives, not the authentic impulses of the artists, they argue. The production of culture becomes increasingly monopolized as spontaneous productions become marked as “amateur” and as talent scouts do the bidding
of centralized capitalist control centers (their firms). The illusion of diversity
masks the similarities between a film produced by Warner Brothers versus
one made by Metro Goldwyn Mayer; a car designed by Chrysler versus General Motors. One detail may substitute for another in order to maximize the
customer base. As capital seeks to commodify, it must also create what appear
to be new varieties of goods (the variation is false) so that the markets can
reach the greatest number of consumers.
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
BUREAUCRATIZATION THESIS
In Economy and Society, Max Weber outlines the fate of charisma and creativity in a modern society. These otherwise unpredictable and unstable qualities are made routine through rational management and bureaucratization.
“[C]harismatic authority is naturally unstable” (Weber, [1922] 1978, p. 1114).
The charismatic leader continuously has to prove his worth by miracles or
victories. If a leader becomes associated with an event that has gone badly,
he loses his authority because obviously the gods are no longer smiling on
him. Charismatic leaders are dangers to the state because they defy rationality: “‘It has been written … , but I say unto you . . . .’” (Ibid., p. 1115). Hence,
the state has to coopt charisma.
The state or the large organization can coop charisma through bureaucracy’s three key features: (i) Activities that happen on a regular basis “are
assigned as official duties” (Ibid., p. 956). These activities are not done as a
favor to a patriarch or to any other traditional source of authority beyond
the formal organization. (ii) The distribution of authority to functionaries is
stable and is not capricious. The authority of the bureaucracy’s functionaries
is circumscribed by the rule structure. The visionary cannot upend the
organization’s standard operating procedures. (iii) Functionaries are chosen
because they possess the needed skills to fulfill their duties. “Methodological
provision is made for the regular and continuous fulfillment of these duties
and for the exercise of the corresponding rights” (Ibid., p. 956).
DRAMATURGICAL PERFORMANCE THESIS
Two performance approaches inform studies of culture and globalization.
In the first, nation-states, regional bodies, and businesses are presenting a
favorable image of themselves to various audiences. They engage in backstage preparations to manage the impressions their audiences have of them
(impression management). Performers tend to manage stigma by either pretending that the blot does not exist (covering), acknowledging the stigma
and providing explanations for its emergence and for the integrity of those
it marks, or they embrace the stigma and reject the norms of their observing audiences. These dynamics observed by Erving Goffman (1959, 1961)
translate to globalization and cultural identity as the number of audiences
increases, the capacity to segregate audiences declines, and more information
and resources are brought from outside of a specific community as presentation teams decide how to present more favorable images of the collective self.
The social performance perspective developed by Jeffrey Alexander (2004)
insists on the autonomy of culture, emphasizing that culture cannot always
be utilized strategically in dramaturgical performance because the myths,
narratives, and symbols encasing the commodification of culture become
Culture and Globalization
5
ends in themselves. The social performances of value rely on cultural logics
marking the sacred from the profane, the modern from the primitive, the
developed from the developing, and the orderly from the chaotic. These
cultural codes enable some scripts to resonate and others to fall flat. Not
recognizing what these symbolic binaries are and how different global
audiences interpret them may diminish the value of cultural objects or
traditions because their power does not inhere in the objects or the practices
themselves but rather in the interplay with overarching cultural codes.
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
MCDONALIZATION THESIS
Culture, charisma, and authenticity are likely to become routinized in the
global economy. George Ritzer reformulates Weber’s thesis of bureaucratization in modern society as he identifies how the exotic, the intimate, and
the authentic have been studied, quantified, and repackaged in the service
of global capitalism. Historical sites and “real” outdoor adventures become
repackaged entertainment commodities developed (mostly) with economic
profits in mind.
Ritzer systematizes this critique by identifying four outcomes for culture in
the global economy and the conditions contributing to those outcomes. There
is (i) grobalization [“the imperialistic imposition of an entity on a geographic
area with the goal of seeing its profits, power, and influence grow” (Ritzer,
2003, p. 193)]; and (ii) there is glocalization [“the interpenetration of the local
and the global” (Ibid., p. 193)]. Each manifestation of globalization has two
types. The grobalization of something versus nothing; and the glocalization
of something versus nothing. Grobalization denotes non-local content and
centralized, corporate control; however that content can be something (the
holdings of a museum) or nothing (the fluff of popular culture). Likewise,
glocalization denotes local content and local control, but its contents can represent something (local traditions and motifs made on terms the local control)
versus nothing (tourists’ trinkets lacking a deep connection to local traditions
or meaningful motifs).
PRODUCTION OF CULTURE MODEL
Peter Peterson and A. Anand (2004) develop a model of the six facets of cultural production to explain how new cultural forms emerge in the global
economy. The six facets of the model are as follows: (i) technology, especially
its capacity to change how communication occurs; (ii) laws and regulations
creating or destabilizing barriers to entry; (iii) the industry structure, indicating how competitive pricing is in the market and whether cultural producers
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
and distributors are horizontally or vertically integrated; (iv) organizational
structure of the cultural producers; (v) career ladders that make greater participation by cultural producers more (or less) likely, compared with cultural
producers with access to other career trajectories; and (vi) the market categories differentiating higher versus lower status producers (best seller list,
prestigious awards).
THE SOCIAL SOURCES OF CULTURAL AUTHENTICITY
Frederick Wherry (2006) identifies the contextual conditions promoting or
hindering the glocalization of meaningful content in tourism markets. He
identifies the social sources of authenticity, namely: (i) the reluctance of individual artisans to pursue economic profits, and thereby increasing their profitability and their autonomy in their dealings with global buyers; (ii) the
reactive formation (and protection) of identity that occurs when a community
feels that its cultural identity is being appropriated by outsiders; (iii) the complicit appropriation of local culture by locals with trusted outside partners
possessing genuine goodwill; and (iv) the transcendental values (religious
motifs, beliefs in spirits or in an afterlife) that place restrictions on how some
objects may be modified or exchanged in the marketplace. These sources of
authenticity operate at both the level of the individual artisans/artists and
the level of the group, with cultural symbols tied to the histories of geographically specific places.
MONOPOLY RENTS
These social sources of cultural authenticity, however, may sometimes be
subject to the tendency of market actors to increase barriers to entry for
“goods” so that they can capture monopoly rents. David Harvey writes:
“Some way has to be found to keep some commodities or places unique
and particular enough to maintain a monopolistic edge in an otherwise
commodified and fiercely competitive economy” (quoted in Coombe and
Aylwin, 2011, pp. 2027–2028). Cultural goods generate economic value
(what the author calls rents) because the cultural forms are scarce (hard to
obtain). If the scarcity of cultural goods (uniqueness) declines, so too does
its economic value.
Who will take responsibility for maintaining monopoly rents for collectively held property? No one person owns a cultural tradition; therefore,
there are incentives for people to “free ride” on the cultural tradition’s
reputation. There is an even lower incentive for outsiders to protect the
long-term viability of a local cultural resource. Therefore, one may witness
initial attempts to protect cultural heritage falter with time as the number of
Culture and Globalization
7
cultural offerings increases (decline in scarcity). Attenuating this decline are
transcendental concerns and social movements by local and transnational
actors.
VALUE TOURNAMENTS
The economic price and importance of cultural goods often emerges from
tournaments of value. Arjun Appadurai coined this phrase to represent four
common features observed in auctions and other markets. (i) Tournaments
of value are complex periodic events that are removed in some culturally
well-defined way from the routines of economic life. (ii) Participation in them
is likely to be both a privilege of those in power and an instrument of status
contests between them. (iii) The currency of such tournaments is also likely to
be set apart through well-understood cultural diacritics. (iv) Finally, although
such tournaments of value occur in special times and places, their forms and
outcomes are always consequential for the more mundane realities of power
and value in ordinary life (Appadurai, 1988, p. 21).
Different actors (given their role and their audience) employ different logics of evaluation in the tournament. Participation in an exchange does not
depend on a sense of parity. Instead, the actors occupy different rungs of the
social hierarchy and are expected to engage in the tournament according to
their status/identity.
In special bidding contests, how do superstars emerge? Why do some actors
gain an advantage in the price negotiations? The actor’s ability to gain an
advantage in the market depends on the actor’s skill, yet the actor’s skill
has its basis in social convention. Objects and money flow through culturally conventional routes. And the informal rules governing those flows and
the disruptions thereof can make some valuations of cultural goods resonate
by virtue of how the object circulates rather than what the object is (Bandelj
& Wherry, 2011; Wherry, 2008).
SIGN SYSTEMS AND VALUE REGIMES
The value of cultural commodities generally derives from the object’s sign
position within an entire system of other signs. Jean Baudrillard (1981) argues
that the symbols exemplified by a cultural product are evaluated with regard
to its similarities and differences with other well (or little) regarded signs.
Signals of value do not inhere in the object. Instead, the object becomes intelligible only within the semiotic system.
Arjun Appadurai notes that cultural commodities “circulate in different
regimes of value in space and time” (Appadurai, 1988, p. 4). If there is more
dissonance between the society where the object is produced and the society
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
where the object is sold, retailers gain rents by connecting one regime of value
to another. The dissonance is most stable where consumers in the receiving
society have information about the site of production (Wherry, 2008).
DISJUNCTIVE GLOBAL FLOWS
Arjun Appadurai (1990) explains that facile accounts of globalization leading to cultural homogenization fail to account for the growing disjunctures
between the flows of finance, national politics, multiple networks of state
and non-state actors, and the proliferation of ideas, images, and symbols that
travel the globe. He identifies five elements of global cultural flow that one
should examine on a case-by-case basis when assessing the varied fates of
cultural forms in the world economy. These elements are (i) ethnoscapes (the
movement of people, be they tourists, immigrants, diasporas, and the claims
they make on states and on markets); (ii) mediascapes (the electronic capacity
to produce and disseminate information); (iii) technoscapes (the mechanical
and informational technologies that facilitate alliances and speedier coordination); (iv) finanscapes (global capital, its movement, concentration, and
empowering capacities); and (v) ideoscapes (the images and shared narratives that motivate specific kinds of action). Because these dimensions of cultural globalization are overlapping, emanating from a variety of sources, and
incessantly contested, developing general laws explaining the consequences
for culture in a global economy becomes impossible. Instead, one can use
these concepts to approach cultural forms in their specific historical context
with the specific audiences and stakeholders that are both within and outside
of the geographic territory of production.
Anxiety over national identity may mean that national boundaries become
more porous for the movement of non-cultural goods but less-porous for
goods deemed to have significance for the identity of a people. Scholars like
Patricia Goff (2000) and JP Singh (2008) demonstrate that struggles over how
to classify objects and the rules that those classifications unleash make disjoin
standard market logics (finanscapes) from a range of ethno- and ideoscapes.
THE SOCIOCULTURAL APPROACH
Omar Lizardo (2008) rejects the notion that global flows of finance, technology, and status are disconnected and not predictive of global cultural
production. In networked societies with mobile people, the need for symbolic resources that are difficult to reconvert increases. The changing bases of
power and recognition have undermined the simpler elite-mass binaries that
animated earlier studies of global culture and consumption. Consequently,
there is a great deal of variation in “the national reception, vitality and
Culture and Globalization
9
relative degree of success of both global and domestic culture” (Lizardo,
2008, p. 24). The sociocultural approach explains macro-level patterns of
cultural consumption at the national and the global level that parses out
the direction of influence that local versus global flows of culture have on
the production of music, films, novels, and other media. The sociocultural
approach offers a systemic account of general processes that the usual
ethnographic studies of culture and globalization do not offer. Systemic,
cross-national variations in culture include the following:
[C]ultural flows should be denser within culturally proximate and
socio-economically similar countries and should be weaker between culturally distant and socio-economically dissimilar countries. Suggesting that
intra-core and intra-periphery cultural exchange is a much more important facet of the global cultural economy than traditionally considered,
asymmetric—core-periphery flows . . . .
Demand for global symbolic goods—such as American popular
culture—will be weakest in those regions of the world most disconnected
from other facets of the globalization process (informational, economic,
demographic, etc.), least urbanized, least economically advantaged, and
more structured along segmented and localized ethnic, religious, and
communal boundaries . . . .
[W]ithin all nation-states, but in particular within economically advantaged and less globally connected societies we should observe a bifurcation
or binary segmentation among audiences with the most privileged and
globally connected strata preferring global popular culture, and the least
privileged strata showing a more marked preference for local or regional
cultural goods . . . .
[C]onsumption of global popular culture should be highest among those
who reside in the richest and most globally connected regions of the world,
and should be weakest among those who reside in the least connected and
least socially and economically advantaged regions of the world (Lizardo,
2008, pp. 24–26).
These predictions of the sociocultural model defy the McDonalization thesis and indicate the structural factors shaping the variation in cultural production, distribution, and reception from one site to the next.
CULTURAL WEALTH AND MEANINGFUL GEOGRAPHIES
Nina Bandelj and Frederick Wherry (2011) have coined the term cultural
wealth to refer to the stocks of symbolic capital that are externally recognized
as tied to a geographic territory. They propose that the reputation and status
of a country have interactive effects on economic development, modifying
the pace as well as the direction of development. They and their collaborators
10
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
emphasize how different audiences are developed for cultural consumption
and what processes allow these audiences to recognize, appreciate, and
monetize a country’s symbolic capital.
Centeno, Bandelj, & Wherry (2011) describe how cultural wealth is distributed globally, noting the dramatic inequalities in its distribution. For
example, when comparing the distribution of cultural heritage sites versus
natural heritage sites, Centeno notes that these distributions seem to suggest
that the different regions of the world are roughly equivalent in their “natural endowments” of physical beauty, but only the United States, Western
Europe, and a few parts of Asia seemed to be “naturally endowed” with
cultural wealth. Centeno goes on to show the flows of cultural goods (books,
fashion, and other cultural commodities) across the globe to demonstrate
how some countries are mostly sending and others are mostly receiving
highly valued cultural goods. In conclusion, Centeno outlines the conditions
that facilitate the conversion of symbolic resources into economic ones. In
other words, if we imagine collectives (villages, regions, or nations) as being
similar to individuals, we can examine how a group’s construction and
deployment of symbolic capital facilitates their accumulation of economic
capital.
Dario Gaggio (2011) offers a historical analysis of how cultural resources
become understood as such. Ironically, a landscape’s iconic status might render it unfit for (economic) market work, but political struggles unrelated to
the struggles of cultural producers nonetheless shape the rules and audiences
concerned with its preservation and its use. Gaggio uses the case of the Tuscan landscape to warn against de-contexualized recommendations for how
to develop and convert symbolic resources into economic ones.
GLOBAL VALUE CHAINS
Jennifer Bair (2011) notes that the service sector (tourism) and cultural industries have not received a great deal of attention in the global value chains
literature. The empirical studies of commodity chains have honed in on manufacturing, chiefly autos, apparel, electronics, and agricultural commodities
such as fresh fruits and vegetables, chocolate, coffee, and fresh cut flowers.
Bair details how symbolic resources and cultural wealth intersect with global
trade and production networks in the multicountry tourism project known as
the Mayan Path (Ruta Maya). Identity politics and overlapping national jurisdictions constrain attempts to develop a single, coherent narrative about a
regional culture, and the benefits accrued from cultural wealth are unevenly
distributed across the value chain.
Mark Graham (2011) presents a detailed case study of commodity chains in
the Thai silk industry and focuses specifically on attempts to reinvigorate the
Culture and Globalization
11
slowly dying practice of silk production in northeastern Thailand. Producers
of Thai silk usually live in poverty, while intermediaries are able to capture
the bulk of value. As such, development strategies often revolve around eliminating intermediaries on the commodity chains of silk and bringing weavers
into a global virtual marketplace. By contrasting chains that have been altered
by the internet (e-commerce) with those that have not, this essay demonstrates that the Internet is rarely being used to successfully disintermediate
commodity chains. Value within the Thai silk industry is most often created by intermediaries with a detailed knowledge of foreign customer tastes,
marketing strategies, and distribution outlets, rather than simple topological alterations to commodity chains. Therefore, for most weavers, it is the
detailed knowledge of intermediaries, rather than strategies of distintermediation that will continue to connect them with consumers around the globe.
IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT
Lauren Rivera (2011) examines the cultural wealth of stigmatized nations,
using the case of tourism in Croatia. Rivera asks how countries with
tarnished international reputations mobilize their “cultural wealth” for
economic and political ends. She focuses on Goffman’s stigma management
strategies and notes how impression management teams in the government
and the private sector utilize these strategies. In her case study, Croatia’s
government uses tourism to “re-brand” its history and culture after the
war, and to enhance its international status and international revenues. She
presents cultural materials as malleable, with the same history rendered
strategically in different tellings.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
Studies of culture and globalization are flung across a variety of disciplines
and subfields within disciplines. This multitude of approaches is approach
for topic not long studied; however, ethnographic studies need to be brought
into conversation with quantitative treatments of culture and globalization
beyond the sociostructural approach outlined by Lizardo (2008); moreover,
the cultural wealth of nations and regions requires greater measurement
precision for the concept to take hold at the core of social science. Measuring cultural resources and cultural wealth, in particular, proves difficult
because of the lack of longitudinal data on local cultural forms and how
their attributes have changed as these societies have become more tightly
integrated into global society. The measures available are crude, but with
the advent of big data (administrative data sets) and with multidisciplinary
teams of researchers, it may be possible to capture previously unexamined
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
attributes of cultural goods and local music and art. So long as these attempts
to more precisely capture the dynamics of culture and globalization do not
privilege one method over another, big data over deep observation, an
interdisciplinary approach has the potential to transform our understand
of what culture is across a variety of seemingly disjunctured globalscapes
(Appadurai, 1990).
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DiMaggio, P. (1997). Culture and Cognition. Annual Review of Sociology, 23, 263–287.
Gaggio, D. (2011). Selling beauty: Tuscany’s rural landscape since 1945. In N. Bandelj & F. F. Wherry (Eds.), The cultural wealth of nations (pp. 90–113). Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Giddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
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Goff, P. M. (2000). Invisible borders: Economic liberalization and national identity.
International Studies Quarterly, 44, 533–562.
Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Goffman, E. (1961). Encounters: Two studies in the sociology of interaction. Indianapolis,
IN: Bobbs-Merrill.
Graham, M. (2011). Cultural brokers, the internet, and value chains: The case of the
Thai silk industry. In N. Bandelj & F. F. Wherry (Eds.), The cultural wealth of nations
(pp. 222–239). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Guillen, M. (2001). Is globalization civilizing, destructive, or feeble? A critique of five
key debates in the social science literature. Annual Review of Sociology, 27, 235–260.
Lizardo, O. (2008). Understanding the flow of symbolic goods in the global cultural
economy. International Journal of Contemporary Sociology, 45, 13–34.
Marx, K. [1867] (1906). Capital: A critique of political economy. New York, NY: The Modern Library.
Peterson, R. A., & Anand, N. (2004). The production of culture perspective. Annual
Review of Sociology, 30, 311–334.
Ritzer, G. (2003). Rethinking globalization: Glocalization/grobalization and something/nothing. Sociological Theory, 21, 193–209.
Rivera, L. (2011). Impression Management of Stigmatized Nations: The Case of Croatia. In N. Bandelj & F. F. Wherry (Eds.), The cultural wealth of nations (pp. 114–136).
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Robertson, R. (1992). Globalization: Social theory and global culture. Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage.
Singh, J. P. (2008). Agents of policy learning and change: US and EU perspectives on
cultural trade policy. Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, 38, 141–158.
Swidler, A. (1986). Culture in action. American Sociological Review, 51, 273–286.
Weber, M. [1922] (1978). Economy and society: An outline of interpretive sociology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Wherry, F. F. (2012). The culture of markets. Malden, MA: Polity.
Wherry, F. F. (2008). Global markets and local crafts: Thailand and Costa Rica compared.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Wherry, F. F. (2006). The social sources of authenticity in global handicrafts markets:
Evidence from northern Thailand. Journal of Consumer Culture, 6, 5–32.
Wherry, F. F., & Crosby, T. V. (2011). The culture bank: Symbolic capital and local
economic development. In N. Bandelj & F. F. Wherry (Eds.), The cultural wealth of
nations (pp. 222–239). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Woolcock, M. (1998). Social capital and economic development: Toward a theoretical
synthesis and policy framework. Theory and Society, 27, 151–208.
FREDERICK F. WHERRY SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Frederick F. Wherry is Professor of Sociology at Yale University Co-Director
of the Center for Cultural Sociology. He has authored three books on
culture and markets, with the first attending specifically to culture and globalization: Global Markets and Local Crafts: Thailand and Costa Rica Compared
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(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); The Philadelphia Barrio:
The Arts, Branding, and Neighborhood Transformation (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2011); and The Culture of Markets (Malden, MA: Polity
Press, 2012). He has also coedited (with Nina Bandelj) The Cultural Wealth of
Nations (Stanford: Stanford University Press). In 2014 he was elected Chair
of the Consumers and Consumption Section of the American Sociological
Association and serves on the Council of the Economic Sociology Section.
He serves on the policy board of the Journal of Consumer Research and on
the editorial boards of the American Sociological Review, and The American
Journal of Cultural Sociology. With Jennifer Lena and Greta Hsu, he is editing a
forthcoming series at Stanford University Press called Culture and Economic
Life. He is a member of the Sociological Research Association.
RELATED ESSAYS
Domestic Politics of Trade Policy (Political Science), Michaël Aklin et al.
Global Economic Networks (Sociology), Nina Bandelj et al.
Globalization Backlash (Sociology), Mabel Berezin
Domestic Institutions and International Conflict (Political Science), Giacomo
Chiozza
Globalization: Consequences for Work and Employment in Advanced
Capitalist Societies (Sociology), Tony Elger
Global Income Inequality (Sociology), Glenn Firebaugh
Interdependence, Development, and Interstate Conflict (Political Science),
Erik Gartzke
Ambivalence and Inbetweeness (Sociology), Bernhard Giesen
Globalization of Capital and National Policymaking (Political Science),
Steven R. Hall
States and Nationalism (Anthropology), Michael Herzfeld
Reconciliation and Peace-Making: Insights from Studies on Nonhuman
Animals (Anthropology), Sonja E. Koski
Why Do States Sign Alliances? (Political Science), Brett Ashley Leeds
Emotion and Intergroup Relations (Psychology), Diane M. Mackie et al.
Visualizing Globalization (Sociology), Matthew C. Mahutga and Robert
Nash-Parker
Political Psychology and International Conflict (Political Science), Rose
McDermott
Emerging Trends in Culture and Concepts (Psychology), Bethany Ojalehto
and Douglas Medin
Organizations and the Production of Systemic Risk (Sociology), Charles
Perrow
Culture and Globalization
15
Economics and Culture (Economics), Gérard Roland
Trends in the Analysis of Interstate Rivalries (Political Science), William R.
Thompson
Transnational Work Careers (Sociology), Roland Verwiebe
Why Do States Pursue Nuclear Weapons (or Not) (Political Science), Wilfred
Wan and Etel Solingen
Popular Protest, Nationalism, and Domestic-International Linkages in
Chinese Politics (Political Science), Jessica Chen Weiss
-
Culture and Globalization
FREDERICK F. WHERRY
Abstract
How should we define culture and globalization? How does each affect the other?
And what are our shortcomings in understanding the heterogeneous outcomes for
cultural production and expression in a globalizing world? This essay begins with
foundational understandings among sociologists, political economists, and anthropologists regarding the facets of globalization and the way that it is shaped by and in
turn shapes local cultures. The essay turns to the widely varied, disjointed attempts to
explain the phenomenon and then offers suggestions for advancing studies of culture
in the context of globalization.
INTRODUCTION
What happens to culture in a globalized economy? And how does culture
shape globalization? Culture’s fate is not dependent on globalization but constitutes and is partly constituted by the latter. Culture refers to two things: (i)
the symbols, categories, and material arts a group of people deem significant as well as (ii) the normative interpretations of situations and symbols
that a collectivity largely shares. These constitutive and regulatory forms of
culture explain why groups of people tend to agree on (or contest) the value
of objects and to articulate similar criteria for assessing value and values;
moreover, the regulatory forms of culture (such as rituals and routine practices) shape how people internalize these criteria and how these criteria affect
the organization of production, distribution, and exchange (DiMaggio, 1990,
1997; Swidler, 1986; Wherry, 2012).
The concept of globalization refers to the temporally compressed processes
facilitating commerce and the shared interpretations of what problems are
(and the set of thinkable, appropriate strategies to address them) generating the categories and routines for commercial exchange. In his review of
the debates on globalization, Mauro Guillén explained the phenomenon as
both an ideology (a way of seeing and not seeing the world, regardless of the
empirical evidence) and “a process leading to greater interdependence and
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
mutual awareness (reflexivity) among economic, political, and social units
in the world, and among actors in general” (2001, p. 236). The constitutive
understanding of culture is built into the definition of globalization because
globalization carries a set of values and social categories that facilitate greater
economic, artistic, and political integration. These understandings of globalization build on Roland Robertson’s recognition that it intensifies “the consciousness of the world as a whole” (1992, p. 8) as well as Anthony Giddens’
(1990) claim that it indicates the compression of social ties linking localities
and symbols that are geographically far away. The question remains how
these values and categories affect what is produced, how, and under what
conditions exchanges take place; likewise, the culturally forged systems of
production and exchange have varying effects on the symbols, traditions,
and the material arts of the integrating societies.
Ethnographic depictions of culture in global markets present some indications of how markets may be placed in the service of cultural preservation.
In Mali, for example, villagers gather their artifacts and document their traditional uses and origins. The more verifiable information the villager can
provide, the greater the loan the villager can obtain from the Culture Bank.
The villager’s object acts as collateral, but it is also deposited in the Bank’s
museum, earning money from the entrance fees charged to tourists (Wherry
& Crosby, 2011). What social capital—defined as the capacity to mobilize
resources by virtue of one’s social ties—did for the Grameen Bank (Woolcock,
1998), symbolic capital has done for the Culture Bank, utilizing symbolic
assets to generate economic capital while promoting cultural preservation,
but these villages are not closed systems. Global traders move across local
and national boundaries with greater ease and with fewer regulations as the
speed of globalization accelerates.
Is the diversity of cultural forms increasing or decreasing? And why does
homogenization or cultural deterioration matter for the well-being of individuals, households, and communities? While there are instances of creative
destruction—innovative cultural forms emerging as some traditional ones
wane—in the arts (Cowen, 2001), there are no guarantees that creativity will
overcome the tendency to standardize (Wherry, 2006, 2008). Investigating the
structural and the symbolic systems that culture constitutes enables social
analysts to identify general sources and processes of cultural change in a
globalizing world.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
The foundational texts address what happens to cultural products in the
capitalist marketplace and the role of culture in facilitating (or hindering)
Culture and Globalization
3
commercial exchange. This section begins with the question of how capitalists markets affect the material and performing arts.
CULTURE INDUSTRY THESIS
If one defines globalization strictly in economic terms, it means the spread
of capitalism around the world, and its spread changes the character of arts
and music by transforming its relations of production. In Karl Marx’s Capital (Volume 1), the production of orchestral music became subject to the same
mechanistic market pressures just as the production of any other commercial
commodity would. A single violin player may function as his own conductor,
but at the moment when a musician must coordinate with others to produce
orchestral music, the laws of capitalism apply. By virtue of requiring a division of labor and needing economic capital to facilitate “the work of directing,
superintending, and adjusting” (Marx, [1867] 1906, p. 363) the music and its
performance, the members of an orchestra begin to see themselves as a group
with a shared fate and with a common external antagonist. Marx writes:
A single violin player is his own conductor; an orchestra requires a separate
one. The work of directing, superintending, and adjusting, becomes one of the
functions of capital . . . . As the number of the co-operating labourers increases,
so too does their resistance to the domination of capital, and with it, the necessity for capital to overcome this resistance by counter-pressure. The control
exercised by the capitalist is not only a special function, due to the nature of the
social labour-process, and peculiar to that process, but it is, at the same time,
a function of the exploitation of a social labour-process, and is consequently
rooted in the unavoidable antagonism between the exploiter and the living and
labouring raw material he exploits.
[Ibid., p. 363]
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer ([1944] 1993) extend Marx’s framework to the culture industries and the liberation these industries seemed to
represent. The production of music and the arts proliferates as a result of market incentives, not the authentic impulses of the artists, they argue. The production of culture becomes increasingly monopolized as spontaneous productions become marked as “amateur” and as talent scouts do the bidding
of centralized capitalist control centers (their firms). The illusion of diversity
masks the similarities between a film produced by Warner Brothers versus
one made by Metro Goldwyn Mayer; a car designed by Chrysler versus General Motors. One detail may substitute for another in order to maximize the
customer base. As capital seeks to commodify, it must also create what appear
to be new varieties of goods (the variation is false) so that the markets can
reach the greatest number of consumers.
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
BUREAUCRATIZATION THESIS
In Economy and Society, Max Weber outlines the fate of charisma and creativity in a modern society. These otherwise unpredictable and unstable qualities are made routine through rational management and bureaucratization.
“[C]harismatic authority is naturally unstable” (Weber, [1922] 1978, p. 1114).
The charismatic leader continuously has to prove his worth by miracles or
victories. If a leader becomes associated with an event that has gone badly,
he loses his authority because obviously the gods are no longer smiling on
him. Charismatic leaders are dangers to the state because they defy rationality: “‘It has been written … , but I say unto you . . . .’” (Ibid., p. 1115). Hence,
the state has to coopt charisma.
The state or the large organization can coop charisma through bureaucracy’s three key features: (i) Activities that happen on a regular basis “are
assigned as official duties” (Ibid., p. 956). These activities are not done as a
favor to a patriarch or to any other traditional source of authority beyond
the formal organization. (ii) The distribution of authority to functionaries is
stable and is not capricious. The authority of the bureaucracy’s functionaries
is circumscribed by the rule structure. The visionary cannot upend the
organization’s standard operating procedures. (iii) Functionaries are chosen
because they possess the needed skills to fulfill their duties. “Methodological
provision is made for the regular and continuous fulfillment of these duties
and for the exercise of the corresponding rights” (Ibid., p. 956).
DRAMATURGICAL PERFORMANCE THESIS
Two performance approaches inform studies of culture and globalization.
In the first, nation-states, regional bodies, and businesses are presenting a
favorable image of themselves to various audiences. They engage in backstage preparations to manage the impressions their audiences have of them
(impression management). Performers tend to manage stigma by either pretending that the blot does not exist (covering), acknowledging the stigma
and providing explanations for its emergence and for the integrity of those
it marks, or they embrace the stigma and reject the norms of their observing audiences. These dynamics observed by Erving Goffman (1959, 1961)
translate to globalization and cultural identity as the number of audiences
increases, the capacity to segregate audiences declines, and more information
and resources are brought from outside of a specific community as presentation teams decide how to present more favorable images of the collective self.
The social performance perspective developed by Jeffrey Alexander (2004)
insists on the autonomy of culture, emphasizing that culture cannot always
be utilized strategically in dramaturgical performance because the myths,
narratives, and symbols encasing the commodification of culture become
Culture and Globalization
5
ends in themselves. The social performances of value rely on cultural logics
marking the sacred from the profane, the modern from the primitive, the
developed from the developing, and the orderly from the chaotic. These
cultural codes enable some scripts to resonate and others to fall flat. Not
recognizing what these symbolic binaries are and how different global
audiences interpret them may diminish the value of cultural objects or
traditions because their power does not inhere in the objects or the practices
themselves but rather in the interplay with overarching cultural codes.
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
MCDONALIZATION THESIS
Culture, charisma, and authenticity are likely to become routinized in the
global economy. George Ritzer reformulates Weber’s thesis of bureaucratization in modern society as he identifies how the exotic, the intimate, and
the authentic have been studied, quantified, and repackaged in the service
of global capitalism. Historical sites and “real” outdoor adventures become
repackaged entertainment commodities developed (mostly) with economic
profits in mind.
Ritzer systematizes this critique by identifying four outcomes for culture in
the global economy and the conditions contributing to those outcomes. There
is (i) grobalization [“the imperialistic imposition of an entity on a geographic
area with the goal of seeing its profits, power, and influence grow” (Ritzer,
2003, p. 193)]; and (ii) there is glocalization [“the interpenetration of the local
and the global” (Ibid., p. 193)]. Each manifestation of globalization has two
types. The grobalization of something versus nothing; and the glocalization
of something versus nothing. Grobalization denotes non-local content and
centralized, corporate control; however that content can be something (the
holdings of a museum) or nothing (the fluff of popular culture). Likewise,
glocalization denotes local content and local control, but its contents can represent something (local traditions and motifs made on terms the local control)
versus nothing (tourists’ trinkets lacking a deep connection to local traditions
or meaningful motifs).
PRODUCTION OF CULTURE MODEL
Peter Peterson and A. Anand (2004) develop a model of the six facets of cultural production to explain how new cultural forms emerge in the global
economy. The six facets of the model are as follows: (i) technology, especially
its capacity to change how communication occurs; (ii) laws and regulations
creating or destabilizing barriers to entry; (iii) the industry structure, indicating how competitive pricing is in the market and whether cultural producers
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
and distributors are horizontally or vertically integrated; (iv) organizational
structure of the cultural producers; (v) career ladders that make greater participation by cultural producers more (or less) likely, compared with cultural
producers with access to other career trajectories; and (vi) the market categories differentiating higher versus lower status producers (best seller list,
prestigious awards).
THE SOCIAL SOURCES OF CULTURAL AUTHENTICITY
Frederick Wherry (2006) identifies the contextual conditions promoting or
hindering the glocalization of meaningful content in tourism markets. He
identifies the social sources of authenticity, namely: (i) the reluctance of individual artisans to pursue economic profits, and thereby increasing their profitability and their autonomy in their dealings with global buyers; (ii) the
reactive formation (and protection) of identity that occurs when a community
feels that its cultural identity is being appropriated by outsiders; (iii) the complicit appropriation of local culture by locals with trusted outside partners
possessing genuine goodwill; and (iv) the transcendental values (religious
motifs, beliefs in spirits or in an afterlife) that place restrictions on how some
objects may be modified or exchanged in the marketplace. These sources of
authenticity operate at both the level of the individual artisans/artists and
the level of the group, with cultural symbols tied to the histories of geographically specific places.
MONOPOLY RENTS
These social sources of cultural authenticity, however, may sometimes be
subject to the tendency of market actors to increase barriers to entry for
“goods” so that they can capture monopoly rents. David Harvey writes:
“Some way has to be found to keep some commodities or places unique
and particular enough to maintain a monopolistic edge in an otherwise
commodified and fiercely competitive economy” (quoted in Coombe and
Aylwin, 2011, pp. 2027–2028). Cultural goods generate economic value
(what the author calls rents) because the cultural forms are scarce (hard to
obtain). If the scarcity of cultural goods (uniqueness) declines, so too does
its economic value.
Who will take responsibility for maintaining monopoly rents for collectively held property? No one person owns a cultural tradition; therefore,
there are incentives for people to “free ride” on the cultural tradition’s
reputation. There is an even lower incentive for outsiders to protect the
long-term viability of a local cultural resource. Therefore, one may witness
initial attempts to protect cultural heritage falter with time as the number of
Culture and Globalization
7
cultural offerings increases (decline in scarcity). Attenuating this decline are
transcendental concerns and social movements by local and transnational
actors.
VALUE TOURNAMENTS
The economic price and importance of cultural goods often emerges from
tournaments of value. Arjun Appadurai coined this phrase to represent four
common features observed in auctions and other markets. (i) Tournaments
of value are complex periodic events that are removed in some culturally
well-defined way from the routines of economic life. (ii) Participation in them
is likely to be both a privilege of those in power and an instrument of status
contests between them. (iii) The currency of such tournaments is also likely to
be set apart through well-understood cultural diacritics. (iv) Finally, although
such tournaments of value occur in special times and places, their forms and
outcomes are always consequential for the more mundane realities of power
and value in ordinary life (Appadurai, 1988, p. 21).
Different actors (given their role and their audience) employ different logics of evaluation in the tournament. Participation in an exchange does not
depend on a sense of parity. Instead, the actors occupy different rungs of the
social hierarchy and are expected to engage in the tournament according to
their status/identity.
In special bidding contests, how do superstars emerge? Why do some actors
gain an advantage in the price negotiations? The actor’s ability to gain an
advantage in the market depends on the actor’s skill, yet the actor’s skill
has its basis in social convention. Objects and money flow through culturally conventional routes. And the informal rules governing those flows and
the disruptions thereof can make some valuations of cultural goods resonate
by virtue of how the object circulates rather than what the object is (Bandelj
& Wherry, 2011; Wherry, 2008).
SIGN SYSTEMS AND VALUE REGIMES
The value of cultural commodities generally derives from the object’s sign
position within an entire system of other signs. Jean Baudrillard (1981) argues
that the symbols exemplified by a cultural product are evaluated with regard
to its similarities and differences with other well (or little) regarded signs.
Signals of value do not inhere in the object. Instead, the object becomes intelligible only within the semiotic system.
Arjun Appadurai notes that cultural commodities “circulate in different
regimes of value in space and time” (Appadurai, 1988, p. 4). If there is more
dissonance between the society where the object is produced and the society
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
where the object is sold, retailers gain rents by connecting one regime of value
to another. The dissonance is most stable where consumers in the receiving
society have information about the site of production (Wherry, 2008).
DISJUNCTIVE GLOBAL FLOWS
Arjun Appadurai (1990) explains that facile accounts of globalization leading to cultural homogenization fail to account for the growing disjunctures
between the flows of finance, national politics, multiple networks of state
and non-state actors, and the proliferation of ideas, images, and symbols that
travel the globe. He identifies five elements of global cultural flow that one
should examine on a case-by-case basis when assessing the varied fates of
cultural forms in the world economy. These elements are (i) ethnoscapes (the
movement of people, be they tourists, immigrants, diasporas, and the claims
they make on states and on markets); (ii) mediascapes (the electronic capacity
to produce and disseminate information); (iii) technoscapes (the mechanical
and informational technologies that facilitate alliances and speedier coordination); (iv) finanscapes (global capital, its movement, concentration, and
empowering capacities); and (v) ideoscapes (the images and shared narratives that motivate specific kinds of action). Because these dimensions of cultural globalization are overlapping, emanating from a variety of sources, and
incessantly contested, developing general laws explaining the consequences
for culture in a global economy becomes impossible. Instead, one can use
these concepts to approach cultural forms in their specific historical context
with the specific audiences and stakeholders that are both within and outside
of the geographic territory of production.
Anxiety over national identity may mean that national boundaries become
more porous for the movement of non-cultural goods but less-porous for
goods deemed to have significance for the identity of a people. Scholars like
Patricia Goff (2000) and JP Singh (2008) demonstrate that struggles over how
to classify objects and the rules that those classifications unleash make disjoin
standard market logics (finanscapes) from a range of ethno- and ideoscapes.
THE SOCIOCULTURAL APPROACH
Omar Lizardo (2008) rejects the notion that global flows of finance, technology, and status are disconnected and not predictive of global cultural
production. In networked societies with mobile people, the need for symbolic resources that are difficult to reconvert increases. The changing bases of
power and recognition have undermined the simpler elite-mass binaries that
animated earlier studies of global culture and consumption. Consequently,
there is a great deal of variation in “the national reception, vitality and
Culture and Globalization
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relative degree of success of both global and domestic culture” (Lizardo,
2008, p. 24). The sociocultural approach explains macro-level patterns of
cultural consumption at the national and the global level that parses out
the direction of influence that local versus global flows of culture have on
the production of music, films, novels, and other media. The sociocultural
approach offers a systemic account of general processes that the usual
ethnographic studies of culture and globalization do not offer. Systemic,
cross-national variations in culture include the following:
[C]ultural flows should be denser within culturally proximate and
socio-economically similar countries and should be weaker between culturally distant and socio-economically dissimilar countries. Suggesting that
intra-core and intra-periphery cultural exchange is a much more important facet of the global cultural economy than traditionally considered,
asymmetric—core-periphery flows . . . .
Demand for global symbolic goods—such as American popular
culture—will be weakest in those regions of the world most disconnected
from other facets of the globalization process (informational, economic,
demographic, etc.), least urbanized, least economically advantaged, and
more structured along segmented and localized ethnic, religious, and
communal boundaries . . . .
[W]ithin all nation-states, but in particular within economically advantaged and less globally connected societies we should observe a bifurcation
or binary segmentation among audiences with the most privileged and
globally connected strata preferring global popular culture, and the least
privileged strata showing a more marked preference for local or regional
cultural goods . . . .
[C]onsumption of global popular culture should be highest among those
who reside in the richest and most globally connected regions of the world,
and should be weakest among those who reside in the least connected and
least socially and economically advantaged regions of the world (Lizardo,
2008, pp. 24–26).
These predictions of the sociocultural model defy the McDonalization thesis and indicate the structural factors shaping the variation in cultural production, distribution, and reception from one site to the next.
CULTURAL WEALTH AND MEANINGFUL GEOGRAPHIES
Nina Bandelj and Frederick Wherry (2011) have coined the term cultural
wealth to refer to the stocks of symbolic capital that are externally recognized
as tied to a geographic territory. They propose that the reputation and status
of a country have interactive effects on economic development, modifying
the pace as well as the direction of development. They and their collaborators
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
emphasize how different audiences are developed for cultural consumption
and what processes allow these audiences to recognize, appreciate, and
monetize a country’s symbolic capital.
Centeno, Bandelj, & Wherry (2011) describe how cultural wealth is distributed globally, noting the dramatic inequalities in its distribution. For
example, when comparing the distribution of cultural heritage sites versus
natural heritage sites, Centeno notes that these distributions seem to suggest
that the different regions of the world are roughly equivalent in their “natural endowments” of physical beauty, but only the United States, Western
Europe, and a few parts of Asia seemed to be “naturally endowed” with
cultural wealth. Centeno goes on to show the flows of cultural goods (books,
fashion, and other cultural commodities) across the globe to demonstrate
how some countries are mostly sending and others are mostly receiving
highly valued cultural goods. In conclusion, Centeno outlines the conditions
that facilitate the conversion of symbolic resources into economic ones. In
other words, if we imagine collectives (villages, regions, or nations) as being
similar to individuals, we can examine how a group’s construction and
deployment of symbolic capital facilitates their accumulation of economic
capital.
Dario Gaggio (2011) offers a historical analysis of how cultural resources
become understood as such. Ironically, a landscape’s iconic status might render it unfit for (economic) market work, but political struggles unrelated to
the struggles of cultural producers nonetheless shape the rules and audiences
concerned with its preservation and its use. Gaggio uses the case of the Tuscan landscape to warn against de-contexualized recommendations for how
to develop and convert symbolic resources into economic ones.
GLOBAL VALUE CHAINS
Jennifer Bair (2011) notes that the service sector (tourism) and cultural industries have not received a great deal of attention in the global value chains
literature. The empirical studies of commodity chains have honed in on manufacturing, chiefly autos, apparel, electronics, and agricultural commodities
such as fresh fruits and vegetables, chocolate, coffee, and fresh cut flowers.
Bair details how symbolic resources and cultural wealth intersect with global
trade and production networks in the multicountry tourism project known as
the Mayan Path (Ruta Maya). Identity politics and overlapping national jurisdictions constrain attempts to develop a single, coherent narrative about a
regional culture, and the benefits accrued from cultural wealth are unevenly
distributed across the value chain.
Mark Graham (2011) presents a detailed case study of commodity chains in
the Thai silk industry and focuses specifically on attempts to reinvigorate the
Culture and Globalization
11
slowly dying practice of silk production in northeastern Thailand. Producers
of Thai silk usually live in poverty, while intermediaries are able to capture
the bulk of value. As such, development strategies often revolve around eliminating intermediaries on the commodity chains of silk and bringing weavers
into a global virtual marketplace. By contrasting chains that have been altered
by the internet (e-commerce) with those that have not, this essay demonstrates that the Internet is rarely being used to successfully disintermediate
commodity chains. Value within the Thai silk industry is most often created by intermediaries with a detailed knowledge of foreign customer tastes,
marketing strategies, and distribution outlets, rather than simple topological alterations to commodity chains. Therefore, for most weavers, it is the
detailed knowledge of intermediaries, rather than strategies of distintermediation that will continue to connect them with consumers around the globe.
IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT
Lauren Rivera (2011) examines the cultural wealth of stigmatized nations,
using the case of tourism in Croatia. Rivera asks how countries with
tarnished international reputations mobilize their “cultural wealth” for
economic and political ends. She focuses on Goffman’s stigma management
strategies and notes how impression management teams in the government
and the private sector utilize these strategies. In her case study, Croatia’s
government uses tourism to “re-brand” its history and culture after the
war, and to enhance its international status and international revenues. She
presents cultural materials as malleable, with the same history rendered
strategically in different tellings.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
Studies of culture and globalization are flung across a variety of disciplines
and subfields within disciplines. This multitude of approaches is approach
for topic not long studied; however, ethnographic studies need to be brought
into conversation with quantitative treatments of culture and globalization
beyond the sociostructural approach outlined by Lizardo (2008); moreover,
the cultural wealth of nations and regions requires greater measurement
precision for the concept to take hold at the core of social science. Measuring cultural resources and cultural wealth, in particular, proves difficult
because of the lack of longitudinal data on local cultural forms and how
their attributes have changed as these societies have become more tightly
integrated into global society. The measures available are crude, but with
the advent of big data (administrative data sets) and with multidisciplinary
teams of researchers, it may be possible to capture previously unexamined
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
attributes of cultural goods and local music and art. So long as these attempts
to more precisely capture the dynamics of culture and globalization do not
privilege one method over another, big data over deep observation, an
interdisciplinary approach has the potential to transform our understand
of what culture is across a variety of seemingly disjunctured globalscapes
(Appadurai, 1990).
REFERENCES
Adorno, T., & Horkheimer, M. [1944] (1993). Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York,
NY: Continuum Press.
Alexander, J. C. (2004). Cultural pragmatics: Social performance between ritual and
strategy. Sociological Theory, 22, 527–573.
Appadurai, A. (1990). Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy.
In M. Featherstone (Ed.), Global culture: Nationalism, globalization and modernity
(pp. 295–310). London, England: Sage.
Appadurai, A. (1988). Introduction: Commodities and the politics of value. In
A. Appadurai (Ed.), The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective
(pp. 3–63). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Bair, J. (2011). Constructing scarcity, creating value: Marketing the Mundo Maya. In N.
Bandelj & F. F. Wherry (Eds.), The cultural wealth of nations (pp. 177–196). Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Bandelj, N., & Wherry, F. F. (2011). Introduction: An inquiry into the cultural wealth
of nations. In N. Bandelj & F. F. Wherry (Eds.), The cultural wealth of nations
(pp. 1–20). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Baudrillard, J. (1981). For a critique of the political economy of the sign. St. Louis, MO:
Telos Press.
Centeno, M. A., Bandelj, N., & Wherry, F. F. (2011). The political economy of cultural
wealth. In N. Bandelj & F. F. Wherry (Eds.), The cultural wealth of nations (pp. 23–46).
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Coombe, R. J., & Aylwin, N. (2011). Bordering diversity and desire: Using intellectual property to mark placed based products. Environment and Planning A, 43,
2027–2042.
Cowen, T. (2001). Creative destruction: How globalization is changing the world’s cultures.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
DiMaggio, P. (1990). Cultural aspects of economic action and organization. In R.
Friedland & A. F. Robertson (Eds.), Beyond the marketplace: Rethinking economy and
society (pp. 113–136). New York, NY: Aldine de Gruyter.
DiMaggio, P. (1997). Culture and Cognition. Annual Review of Sociology, 23, 263–287.
Gaggio, D. (2011). Selling beauty: Tuscany’s rural landscape since 1945. In N. Bandelj & F. F. Wherry (Eds.), The cultural wealth of nations (pp. 90–113). Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Giddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
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Goff, P. M. (2000). Invisible borders: Economic liberalization and national identity.
International Studies Quarterly, 44, 533–562.
Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Goffman, E. (1961). Encounters: Two studies in the sociology of interaction. Indianapolis,
IN: Bobbs-Merrill.
Graham, M. (2011). Cultural brokers, the internet, and value chains: The case of the
Thai silk industry. In N. Bandelj & F. F. Wherry (Eds.), The cultural wealth of nations
(pp. 222–239). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Guillen, M. (2001). Is globalization civilizing, destructive, or feeble? A critique of five
key debates in the social science literature. Annual Review of Sociology, 27, 235–260.
Lizardo, O. (2008). Understanding the flow of symbolic goods in the global cultural
economy. International Journal of Contemporary Sociology, 45, 13–34.
Marx, K. [1867] (1906). Capital: A critique of political economy. New York, NY: The Modern Library.
Peterson, R. A., & Anand, N. (2004). The production of culture perspective. Annual
Review of Sociology, 30, 311–334.
Ritzer, G. (2003). Rethinking globalization: Glocalization/grobalization and something/nothing. Sociological Theory, 21, 193–209.
Rivera, L. (2011). Impression Management of Stigmatized Nations: The Case of Croatia. In N. Bandelj & F. F. Wherry (Eds.), The cultural wealth of nations (pp. 114–136).
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Robertson, R. (1992). Globalization: Social theory and global culture. Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage.
Singh, J. P. (2008). Agents of policy learning and change: US and EU perspectives on
cultural trade policy. Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, 38, 141–158.
Swidler, A. (1986). Culture in action. American Sociological Review, 51, 273–286.
Weber, M. [1922] (1978). Economy and society: An outline of interpretive sociology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Wherry, F. F. (2012). The culture of markets. Malden, MA: Polity.
Wherry, F. F. (2008). Global markets and local crafts: Thailand and Costa Rica compared.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Wherry, F. F. (2006). The social sources of authenticity in global handicrafts markets:
Evidence from northern Thailand. Journal of Consumer Culture, 6, 5–32.
Wherry, F. F., & Crosby, T. V. (2011). The culture bank: Symbolic capital and local
economic development. In N. Bandelj & F. F. Wherry (Eds.), The cultural wealth of
nations (pp. 222–239). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Woolcock, M. (1998). Social capital and economic development: Toward a theoretical
synthesis and policy framework. Theory and Society, 27, 151–208.
FREDERICK F. WHERRY SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Frederick F. Wherry is Professor of Sociology at Yale University Co-Director
of the Center for Cultural Sociology. He has authored three books on
culture and markets, with the first attending specifically to culture and globalization: Global Markets and Local Crafts: Thailand and Costa Rica Compared
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); The Philadelphia Barrio:
The Arts, Branding, and Neighborhood Transformation (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2011); and The Culture of Markets (Malden, MA: Polity
Press, 2012). He has also coedited (with Nina Bandelj) The Cultural Wealth of
Nations (Stanford: Stanford University Press). In 2014 he was elected Chair
of the Consumers and Consumption Section of the American Sociological
Association and serves on the Council of the Economic Sociology Section.
He serves on the policy board of the Journal of Consumer Research and on
the editorial boards of the American Sociological Review, and The American
Journal of Cultural Sociology. With Jennifer Lena and Greta Hsu, he is editing a
forthcoming series at Stanford University Press called Culture and Economic
Life. He is a member of the Sociological Research Association.
RELATED ESSAYS
Domestic Politics of Trade Policy (Political Science), Michaël Aklin et al.
Global Economic Networks (Sociology), Nina Bandelj et al.
Globalization Backlash (Sociology), Mabel Berezin
Domestic Institutions and International Conflict (Political Science), Giacomo
Chiozza
Globalization: Consequences for Work and Employment in Advanced
Capitalist Societies (Sociology), Tony Elger
Global Income Inequality (Sociology), Glenn Firebaugh
Interdependence, Development, and Interstate Conflict (Political Science),
Erik Gartzke
Ambivalence and Inbetweeness (Sociology), Bernhard Giesen
Globalization of Capital and National Policymaking (Political Science),
Steven R. Hall
States and Nationalism (Anthropology), Michael Herzfeld
Reconciliation and Peace-Making: Insights from Studies on Nonhuman
Animals (Anthropology), Sonja E. Koski
Why Do States Sign Alliances? (Political Science), Brett Ashley Leeds
Emotion and Intergroup Relations (Psychology), Diane M. Mackie et al.
Visualizing Globalization (Sociology), Matthew C. Mahutga and Robert
Nash-Parker
Political Psychology and International Conflict (Political Science), Rose
McDermott
Emerging Trends in Culture and Concepts (Psychology), Bethany Ojalehto
and Douglas Medin
Organizations and the Production of Systemic Risk (Sociology), Charles
Perrow
Culture and Globalization
15
Economics and Culture (Economics), Gérard Roland
Trends in the Analysis of Interstate Rivalries (Political Science), William R.
Thompson
Transnational Work Careers (Sociology), Roland Verwiebe
Why Do States Pursue Nuclear Weapons (or Not) (Political Science), Wilfred
Wan and Etel Solingen
Popular Protest, Nationalism, and Domestic-International Linkages in
Chinese Politics (Political Science), Jessica Chen Weiss
Culture and Globalization
FREDERICK F. WHERRY
Abstract
How should we define culture and globalization? How does each affect the other?
And what are our shortcomings in understanding the heterogeneous outcomes for
cultural production and expression in a globalizing world? This essay begins with
foundational understandings among sociologists, political economists, and anthropologists regarding the facets of globalization and the way that it is shaped by and in
turn shapes local cultures. The essay turns to the widely varied, disjointed attempts to
explain the phenomenon and then offers suggestions for advancing studies of culture
in the context of globalization.
INTRODUCTION
What happens to culture in a globalized economy? And how does culture
shape globalization? Culture’s fate is not dependent on globalization but constitutes and is partly constituted by the latter. Culture refers to two things: (i)
the symbols, categories, and material arts a group of people deem significant as well as (ii) the normative interpretations of situations and symbols
that a collectivity largely shares. These constitutive and regulatory forms of
culture explain why groups of people tend to agree on (or contest) the value
of objects and to articulate similar criteria for assessing value and values;
moreover, the regulatory forms of culture (such as rituals and routine practices) shape how people internalize these criteria and how these criteria affect
the organization of production, distribution, and exchange (DiMaggio, 1990,
1997; Swidler, 1986; Wherry, 2012).
The concept of globalization refers to the temporally compressed processes
facilitating commerce and the shared interpretations of what problems are
(and the set of thinkable, appropriate strategies to address them) generating the categories and routines for commercial exchange. In his review of
the debates on globalization, Mauro Guillén explained the phenomenon as
both an ideology (a way of seeing and not seeing the world, regardless of the
empirical evidence) and “a process leading to greater interdependence and
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
mutual awareness (reflexivity) among economic, political, and social units
in the world, and among actors in general” (2001, p. 236). The constitutive
understanding of culture is built into the definition of globalization because
globalization carries a set of values and social categories that facilitate greater
economic, artistic, and political integration. These understandings of globalization build on Roland Robertson’s recognition that it intensifies “the consciousness of the world as a whole” (1992, p. 8) as well as Anthony Giddens’
(1990) claim that it indicates the compression of social ties linking localities
and symbols that are geographically far away. The question remains how
these values and categories affect what is produced, how, and under what
conditions exchanges take place; likewise, the culturally forged systems of
production and exchange have varying effects on the symbols, traditions,
and the material arts of the integrating societies.
Ethnographic depictions of culture in global markets present some indications of how markets may be placed in the service of cultural preservation.
In Mali, for example, villagers gather their artifacts and document their traditional uses and origins. The more verifiable information the villager can
provide, the greater the loan the villager can obtain from the Culture Bank.
The villager’s object acts as collateral, but it is also deposited in the Bank’s
museum, earning money from the entrance fees charged to tourists (Wherry
& Crosby, 2011). What social capital—defined as the capacity to mobilize
resources by virtue of one’s social ties—did for the Grameen Bank (Woolcock,
1998), symbolic capital has done for the Culture Bank, utilizing symbolic
assets to generate economic capital while promoting cultural preservation,
but these villages are not closed systems. Global traders move across local
and national boundaries with greater ease and with fewer regulations as the
speed of globalization accelerates.
Is the diversity of cultural forms increasing or decreasing? And why does
homogenization or cultural deterioration matter for the well-being of individuals, households, and communities? While there are instances of creative
destruction—innovative cultural forms emerging as some traditional ones
wane—in the arts (Cowen, 2001), there are no guarantees that creativity will
overcome the tendency to standardize (Wherry, 2006, 2008). Investigating the
structural and the symbolic systems that culture constitutes enables social
analysts to identify general sources and processes of cultural change in a
globalizing world.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
The foundational texts address what happens to cultural products in the
capitalist marketplace and the role of culture in facilitating (or hindering)
Culture and Globalization
3
commercial exchange. This section begins with the question of how capitalists markets affect the material and performing arts.
CULTURE INDUSTRY THESIS
If one defines globalization strictly in economic terms, it means the spread
of capitalism around the world, and its spread changes the character of arts
and music by transforming its relations of production. In Karl Marx’s Capital (Volume 1), the production of orchestral music became subject to the same
mechanistic market pressures just as the production of any other commercial
commodity would. A single violin player may function as his own conductor,
but at the moment when a musician must coordinate with others to produce
orchestral music, the laws of capitalism apply. By virtue of requiring a division of labor and needing economic capital to facilitate “the work of directing,
superintending, and adjusting” (Marx, [1867] 1906, p. 363) the music and its
performance, the members of an orchestra begin to see themselves as a group
with a shared fate and with a common external antagonist. Marx writes:
A single violin player is his own conductor; an orchestra requires a separate
one. The work of directing, superintending, and adjusting, becomes one of the
functions of capital . . . . As the number of the co-operating labourers increases,
so too does their resistance to the domination of capital, and with it, the necessity for capital to overcome this resistance by counter-pressure. The control
exercised by the capitalist is not only a special function, due to the nature of the
social labour-process, and peculiar to that process, but it is, at the same time,
a function of the exploitation of a social labour-process, and is consequently
rooted in the unavoidable antagonism between the exploiter and the living and
labouring raw material he exploits.
[Ibid., p. 363]
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer ([1944] 1993) extend Marx’s framework to the culture industries and the liberation these industries seemed to
represent. The production of music and the arts proliferates as a result of market incentives, not the authentic impulses of the artists, they argue. The production of culture becomes increasingly monopolized as spontaneous productions become marked as “amateur” and as talent scouts do the bidding
of centralized capitalist control centers (their firms). The illusion of diversity
masks the similarities between a film produced by Warner Brothers versus
one made by Metro Goldwyn Mayer; a car designed by Chrysler versus General Motors. One detail may substitute for another in order to maximize the
customer base. As capital seeks to commodify, it must also create what appear
to be new varieties of goods (the variation is false) so that the markets can
reach the greatest number of consumers.
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
BUREAUCRATIZATION THESIS
In Economy and Society, Max Weber outlines the fate of charisma and creativity in a modern society. These otherwise unpredictable and unstable qualities are made routine through rational management and bureaucratization.
“[C]harismatic authority is naturally unstable” (Weber, [1922] 1978, p. 1114).
The charismatic leader continuously has to prove his worth by miracles or
victories. If a leader becomes associated with an event that has gone badly,
he loses his authority because obviously the gods are no longer smiling on
him. Charismatic leaders are dangers to the state because they defy rationality: “‘It has been written … , but I say unto you . . . .’” (Ibid., p. 1115). Hence,
the state has to coopt charisma.
The state or the large organization can coop charisma through bureaucracy’s three key features: (i) Activities that happen on a regular basis “are
assigned as official duties” (Ibid., p. 956). These activities are not done as a
favor to a patriarch or to any other traditional source of authority beyond
the formal organization. (ii) The distribution of authority to functionaries is
stable and is not capricious. The authority of the bureaucracy’s functionaries
is circumscribed by the rule structure. The visionary cannot upend the
organization’s standard operating procedures. (iii) Functionaries are chosen
because they possess the needed skills to fulfill their duties. “Methodological
provision is made for the regular and continuous fulfillment of these duties
and for the exercise of the corresponding rights” (Ibid., p. 956).
DRAMATURGICAL PERFORMANCE THESIS
Two performance approaches inform studies of culture and globalization.
In the first, nation-states, regional bodies, and businesses are presenting a
favorable image of themselves to various audiences. They engage in backstage preparations to manage the impressions their audiences have of them
(impression management). Performers tend to manage stigma by either pretending that the blot does not exist (covering), acknowledging the stigma
and providing explanations for its emergence and for the integrity of those
it marks, or they embrace the stigma and reject the norms of their observing audiences. These dynamics observed by Erving Goffman (1959, 1961)
translate to globalization and cultural identity as the number of audiences
increases, the capacity to segregate audiences declines, and more information
and resources are brought from outside of a specific community as presentation teams decide how to present more favorable images of the collective self.
The social performance perspective developed by Jeffrey Alexander (2004)
insists on the autonomy of culture, emphasizing that culture cannot always
be utilized strategically in dramaturgical performance because the myths,
narratives, and symbols encasing the commodification of culture become
Culture and Globalization
5
ends in themselves. The social performances of value rely on cultural logics
marking the sacred from the profane, the modern from the primitive, the
developed from the developing, and the orderly from the chaotic. These
cultural codes enable some scripts to resonate and others to fall flat. Not
recognizing what these symbolic binaries are and how different global
audiences interpret them may diminish the value of cultural objects or
traditions because their power does not inhere in the objects or the practices
themselves but rather in the interplay with overarching cultural codes.
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
MCDONALIZATION THESIS
Culture, charisma, and authenticity are likely to become routinized in the
global economy. George Ritzer reformulates Weber’s thesis of bureaucratization in modern society as he identifies how the exotic, the intimate, and
the authentic have been studied, quantified, and repackaged in the service
of global capitalism. Historical sites and “real” outdoor adventures become
repackaged entertainment commodities developed (mostly) with economic
profits in mind.
Ritzer systematizes this critique by identifying four outcomes for culture in
the global economy and the conditions contributing to those outcomes. There
is (i) grobalization [“the imperialistic imposition of an entity on a geographic
area with the goal of seeing its profits, power, and influence grow” (Ritzer,
2003, p. 193)]; and (ii) there is glocalization [“the interpenetration of the local
and the global” (Ibid., p. 193)]. Each manifestation of globalization has two
types. The grobalization of something versus nothing; and the glocalization
of something versus nothing. Grobalization denotes non-local content and
centralized, corporate control; however that content can be something (the
holdings of a museum) or nothing (the fluff of popular culture). Likewise,
glocalization denotes local content and local control, but its contents can represent something (local traditions and motifs made on terms the local control)
versus nothing (tourists’ trinkets lacking a deep connection to local traditions
or meaningful motifs).
PRODUCTION OF CULTURE MODEL
Peter Peterson and A. Anand (2004) develop a model of the six facets of cultural production to explain how new cultural forms emerge in the global
economy. The six facets of the model are as follows: (i) technology, especially
its capacity to change how communication occurs; (ii) laws and regulations
creating or destabilizing barriers to entry; (iii) the industry structure, indicating how competitive pricing is in the market and whether cultural producers
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
and distributors are horizontally or vertically integrated; (iv) organizational
structure of the cultural producers; (v) career ladders that make greater participation by cultural producers more (or less) likely, compared with cultural
producers with access to other career trajectories; and (vi) the market categories differentiating higher versus lower status producers (best seller list,
prestigious awards).
THE SOCIAL SOURCES OF CULTURAL AUTHENTICITY
Frederick Wherry (2006) identifies the contextual conditions promoting or
hindering the glocalization of meaningful content in tourism markets. He
identifies the social sources of authenticity, namely: (i) the reluctance of individual artisans to pursue economic profits, and thereby increasing their profitability and their autonomy in their dealings with global buyers; (ii) the
reactive formation (and protection) of identity that occurs when a community
feels that its cultural identity is being appropriated by outsiders; (iii) the complicit appropriation of local culture by locals with trusted outside partners
possessing genuine goodwill; and (iv) the transcendental values (religious
motifs, beliefs in spirits or in an afterlife) that place restrictions on how some
objects may be modified or exchanged in the marketplace. These sources of
authenticity operate at both the level of the individual artisans/artists and
the level of the group, with cultural symbols tied to the histories of geographically specific places.
MONOPOLY RENTS
These social sources of cultural authenticity, however, may sometimes be
subject to the tendency of market actors to increase barriers to entry for
“goods” so that they can capture monopoly rents. David Harvey writes:
“Some way has to be found to keep some commodities or places unique
and particular enough to maintain a monopolistic edge in an otherwise
commodified and fiercely competitive economy” (quoted in Coombe and
Aylwin, 2011, pp. 2027–2028). Cultural goods generate economic value
(what the author calls rents) because the cultural forms are scarce (hard to
obtain). If the scarcity of cultural goods (uniqueness) declines, so too does
its economic value.
Who will take responsibility for maintaining monopoly rents for collectively held property? No one person owns a cultural tradition; therefore,
there are incentives for people to “free ride” on the cultural tradition’s
reputation. There is an even lower incentive for outsiders to protect the
long-term viability of a local cultural resource. Therefore, one may witness
initial attempts to protect cultural heritage falter with time as the number of
Culture and Globalization
7
cultural offerings increases (decline in scarcity). Attenuating this decline are
transcendental concerns and social movements by local and transnational
actors.
VALUE TOURNAMENTS
The economic price and importance of cultural goods often emerges from
tournaments of value. Arjun Appadurai coined this phrase to represent four
common features observed in auctions and other markets. (i) Tournaments
of value are complex periodic events that are removed in some culturally
well-defined way from the routines of economic life. (ii) Participation in them
is likely to be both a privilege of those in power and an instrument of status
contests between them. (iii) The currency of such tournaments is also likely to
be set apart through well-understood cultural diacritics. (iv) Finally, although
such tournaments of value occur in special times and places, their forms and
outcomes are always consequential for the more mundane realities of power
and value in ordinary life (Appadurai, 1988, p. 21).
Different actors (given their role and their audience) employ different logics of evaluation in the tournament. Participation in an exchange does not
depend on a sense of parity. Instead, the actors occupy different rungs of the
social hierarchy and are expected to engage in the tournament according to
their status/identity.
In special bidding contests, how do superstars emerge? Why do some actors
gain an advantage in the price negotiations? The actor’s ability to gain an
advantage in the market depends on the actor’s skill, yet the actor’s skill
has its basis in social convention. Objects and money flow through culturally conventional routes. And the informal rules governing those flows and
the disruptions thereof can make some valuations of cultural goods resonate
by virtue of how the object circulates rather than what the object is (Bandelj
& Wherry, 2011; Wherry, 2008).
SIGN SYSTEMS AND VALUE REGIMES
The value of cultural commodities generally derives from the object’s sign
position within an entire system of other signs. Jean Baudrillard (1981) argues
that the symbols exemplified by a cultural product are evaluated with regard
to its similarities and differences with other well (or little) regarded signs.
Signals of value do not inhere in the object. Instead, the object becomes intelligible only within the semiotic system.
Arjun Appadurai notes that cultural commodities “circulate in different
regimes of value in space and time” (Appadurai, 1988, p. 4). If there is more
dissonance between the society where the object is produced and the society
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
where the object is sold, retailers gain rents by connecting one regime of value
to another. The dissonance is most stable where consumers in the receiving
society have information about the site of production (Wherry, 2008).
DISJUNCTIVE GLOBAL FLOWS
Arjun Appadurai (1990) explains that facile accounts of globalization leading to cultural homogenization fail to account for the growing disjunctures
between the flows of finance, national politics, multiple networks of state
and non-state actors, and the proliferation of ideas, images, and symbols that
travel the globe. He identifies five elements of global cultural flow that one
should examine on a case-by-case basis when assessing the varied fates of
cultural forms in the world economy. These elements are (i) ethnoscapes (the
movement of people, be they tourists, immigrants, diasporas, and the claims
they make on states and on markets); (ii) mediascapes (the electronic capacity
to produce and disseminate information); (iii) technoscapes (the mechanical
and informational technologies that facilitate alliances and speedier coordination); (iv) finanscapes (global capital, its movement, concentration, and
empowering capacities); and (v) ideoscapes (the images and shared narratives that motivate specific kinds of action). Because these dimensions of cultural globalization are overlapping, emanating from a variety of sources, and
incessantly contested, developing general laws explaining the consequences
for culture in a global economy becomes impossible. Instead, one can use
these concepts to approach cultural forms in their specific historical context
with the specific audiences and stakeholders that are both within and outside
of the geographic territory of production.
Anxiety over national identity may mean that national boundaries become
more porous for the movement of non-cultural goods but less-porous for
goods deemed to have significance for the identity of a people. Scholars like
Patricia Goff (2000) and JP Singh (2008) demonstrate that struggles over how
to classify objects and the rules that those classifications unleash make disjoin
standard market logics (finanscapes) from a range of ethno- and ideoscapes.
THE SOCIOCULTURAL APPROACH
Omar Lizardo (2008) rejects the notion that global flows of finance, technology, and status are disconnected and not predictive of global cultural
production. In networked societies with mobile people, the need for symbolic resources that are difficult to reconvert increases. The changing bases of
power and recognition have undermined the simpler elite-mass binaries that
animated earlier studies of global culture and consumption. Consequently,
there is a great deal of variation in “the national reception, vitality and
Culture and Globalization
9
relative degree of success of both global and domestic culture” (Lizardo,
2008, p. 24). The sociocultural approach explains macro-level patterns of
cultural consumption at the national and the global level that parses out
the direction of influence that local versus global flows of culture have on
the production of music, films, novels, and other media. The sociocultural
approach offers a systemic account of general processes that the usual
ethnographic studies of culture and globalization do not offer. Systemic,
cross-national variations in culture include the following:
[C]ultural flows should be denser within culturally proximate and
socio-economically similar countries and should be weaker between culturally distant and socio-economically dissimilar countries. Suggesting that
intra-core and intra-periphery cultural exchange is a much more important facet of the global cultural economy than traditionally considered,
asymmetric—core-periphery flows . . . .
Demand for global symbolic goods—such as American popular
culture—will be weakest in those regions of the world most disconnected
from other facets of the globalization process (informational, economic,
demographic, etc.), least urbanized, least economically advantaged, and
more structured along segmented and localized ethnic, religious, and
communal boundaries . . . .
[W]ithin all nation-states, but in particular within economically advantaged and less globally connected societies we should observe a bifurcation
or binary segmentation among audiences with the most privileged and
globally connected strata preferring global popular culture, and the least
privileged strata showing a more marked preference for local or regional
cultural goods . . . .
[C]onsumption of global popular culture should be highest among those
who reside in the richest and most globally connected regions of the world,
and should be weakest among those who reside in the least connected and
least socially and economically advantaged regions of the world (Lizardo,
2008, pp. 24–26).
These predictions of the sociocultural model defy the McDonalization thesis and indicate the structural factors shaping the variation in cultural production, distribution, and reception from one site to the next.
CULTURAL WEALTH AND MEANINGFUL GEOGRAPHIES
Nina Bandelj and Frederick Wherry (2011) have coined the term cultural
wealth to refer to the stocks of symbolic capital that are externally recognized
as tied to a geographic territory. They propose that the reputation and status
of a country have interactive effects on economic development, modifying
the pace as well as the direction of development. They and their collaborators
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
emphasize how different audiences are developed for cultural consumption
and what processes allow these audiences to recognize, appreciate, and
monetize a country’s symbolic capital.
Centeno, Bandelj, & Wherry (2011) describe how cultural wealth is distributed globally, noting the dramatic inequalities in its distribution. For
example, when comparing the distribution of cultural heritage sites versus
natural heritage sites, Centeno notes that these distributions seem to suggest
that the different regions of the world are roughly equivalent in their “natural endowments” of physical beauty, but only the United States, Western
Europe, and a few parts of Asia seemed to be “naturally endowed” with
cultural wealth. Centeno goes on to show the flows of cultural goods (books,
fashion, and other cultural commodities) across the globe to demonstrate
how some countries are mostly sending and others are mostly receiving
highly valued cultural goods. In conclusion, Centeno outlines the conditions
that facilitate the conversion of symbolic resources into economic ones. In
other words, if we imagine collectives (villages, regions, or nations) as being
similar to individuals, we can examine how a group’s construction and
deployment of symbolic capital facilitates their accumulation of economic
capital.
Dario Gaggio (2011) offers a historical analysis of how cultural resources
become understood as such. Ironically, a landscape’s iconic status might render it unfit for (economic) market work, but political struggles unrelated to
the struggles of cultural producers nonetheless shape the rules and audiences
concerned with its preservation and its use. Gaggio uses the case of the Tuscan landscape to warn against de-contexualized recommendations for how
to develop and convert symbolic resources into economic ones.
GLOBAL VALUE CHAINS
Jennifer Bair (2011) notes that the service sector (tourism) and cultural industries have not received a great deal of attention in the global value chains
literature. The empirical studies of commodity chains have honed in on manufacturing, chiefly autos, apparel, electronics, and agricultural commodities
such as fresh fruits and vegetables, chocolate, coffee, and fresh cut flowers.
Bair details how symbolic resources and cultural wealth intersect with global
trade and production networks in the multicountry tourism project known as
the Mayan Path (Ruta Maya). Identity politics and overlapping national jurisdictions constrain attempts to develop a single, coherent narrative about a
regional culture, and the benefits accrued from cultural wealth are unevenly
distributed across the value chain.
Mark Graham (2011) presents a detailed case study of commodity chains in
the Thai silk industry and focuses specifically on attempts to reinvigorate the
Culture and Globalization
11
slowly dying practice of silk production in northeastern Thailand. Producers
of Thai silk usually live in poverty, while intermediaries are able to capture
the bulk of value. As such, development strategies often revolve around eliminating intermediaries on the commodity chains of silk and bringing weavers
into a global virtual marketplace. By contrasting chains that have been altered
by the internet (e-commerce) with those that have not, this essay demonstrates that the Internet is rarely being used to successfully disintermediate
commodity chains. Value within the Thai silk industry is most often created by intermediaries with a detailed knowledge of foreign customer tastes,
marketing strategies, and distribution outlets, rather than simple topological alterations to commodity chains. Therefore, for most weavers, it is the
detailed knowledge of intermediaries, rather than strategies of distintermediation that will continue to connect them with consumers around the globe.
IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT
Lauren Rivera (2011) examines the cultural wealth of stigmatized nations,
using the case of tourism in Croatia. Rivera asks how countries with
tarnished international reputations mobilize their “cultural wealth” for
economic and political ends. She focuses on Goffman’s stigma management
strategies and notes how impression management teams in the government
and the private sector utilize these strategies. In her case study, Croatia’s
government uses tourism to “re-brand” its history and culture after the
war, and to enhance its international status and international revenues. She
presents cultural materials as malleable, with the same history rendered
strategically in different tellings.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
Studies of culture and globalization are flung across a variety of disciplines
and subfields within disciplines. This multitude of approaches is approach
for topic not long studied; however, ethnographic studies need to be brought
into conversation with quantitative treatments of culture and globalization
beyond the sociostructural approach outlined by Lizardo (2008); moreover,
the cultural wealth of nations and regions requires greater measurement
precision for the concept to take hold at the core of social science. Measuring cultural resources and cultural wealth, in particular, proves difficult
because of the lack of longitudinal data on local cultural forms and how
their attributes have changed as these societies have become more tightly
integrated into global society. The measures available are crude, but with
the advent of big data (administrative data sets) and with multidisciplinary
teams of researchers, it may be possible to capture previously unexamined
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
attributes of cultural goods and local music and art. So long as these attempts
to more precisely capture the dynamics of culture and globalization do not
privilege one method over another, big data over deep observation, an
interdisciplinary approach has the potential to transform our understand
of what culture is across a variety of seemingly disjunctured globalscapes
(Appadurai, 1990).
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Goff, P. M. (2000). Invisible borders: Economic liberalization and national identity.
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FREDERICK F. WHERRY SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Frederick F. Wherry is Professor of Sociology at Yale University Co-Director
of the Center for Cultural Sociology. He has authored three books on
culture and markets, with the first attending specifically to culture and globalization: Global Markets and Local Crafts: Thailand and Costa Rica Compared
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(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); The Philadelphia Barrio:
The Arts, Branding, and Neighborhood Transformation (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2011); and The Culture of Markets (Malden, MA: Polity
Press, 2012). He has also coedited (with Nina Bandelj) The Cultural Wealth of
Nations (Stanford: Stanford University Press). In 2014 he was elected Chair
of the Consumers and Consumption Section of the American Sociological
Association and serves on the Council of the Economic Sociology Section.
He serves on the policy board of the Journal of Consumer Research and on
the editorial boards of the American Sociological Review, and The American
Journal of Cultural Sociology. With Jennifer Lena and Greta Hsu, he is editing a
forthcoming series at Stanford University Press called Culture and Economic
Life. He is a member of the Sociological Research Association.
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