The Blackwell Companion to Globalization

Chapter 17

Cultural Globalization

JOHN TOMLINSON

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN GLOBALIZATION AND CULTURE

It may seem a rather obvious point to begin with, but to understand the meaning and character of ‘cultural globalization’ we first have to understand some defining features of the two constituent terms. So let’s begin with globalization.

Virtually every serious scholar today would accept the broad general proposition that globalization is a multidimensional process, taking place simultaneously within the spheres of the economy, of politics, of technological developments – particularly media and communications technologies – of environmental change and of culture. One simple way of defining globalization, without giving precedence or causal primacy to any one of these dimensions, is to say that it is a complex, accelerating, integrating process of global connectivity. Understood in this rather abstract, general way, globalization refers to the rapidly developing and ever-densening network of interconnections and interdependencies that characterize material, social, economic and cultural life in the modern world. At its most basic, globalization is quite simply a description of these networks and of their implications: of the ‘flows’ around them – and across international boundaries – of virtually everything that characterizes modern life: flows of capital, commodities, people, knowledge, information and ideas, crime, pollution, diseases, fashions, beliefs, images and so forth.

This ...