George Ritzer - Globalization

Easternization can extend further into areas that readers might not immediately consider. For example, despite the tremendous financial investments in the West, some major health innovations have come from under-resourced areas of the East. In India and Nepal, community ophthalmology professionals pioneered a new eye surgery to address blindness (Williams 2018). Developed through a process of social entrepreneurship (rather than the for-profit model championed throughout the West) and against prevailing scientific norms, the new procedure has transformed how cataract surgery is conducted. It has quickly spread outwards not only to other countries in Asia and Africa, but to the US, Australia, and Finland. Thus, it is clearly legitimate to discuss Easternization as an important process that is related to globalization. Further, as China continues to explode as a global power, especially economically, we can expect its influence on the West to grow, ushering in a new and expanded form of Easternization. For example, China already has huge reserves in Western currencies, especially American dollars, as a result of its hugely positive balance of trade (far more exports than imports). It possesses the ability, an ability that will grow exponentially in the coming years, to affect greatly the West not only in the way it uses those reserves (e.g. by investing in the West, or not), but also by merely threatening to use those reserves in certain ways. For example, China has so many dollars that should it decide to “dump” them for other currencies (say, the euro), the value of the dollar would go into free fall.

Americanizationis another process that is related to globalization, but is not identical, or reducible, to it (Neil Campbell 2012). We devote the most attention in this chapter to Americanization because it has been such a central part of globalization (at least until very recently), because it continues to be important, and because it has been so widely studied, analyzed, critiqued, and commented upon. We employ Richard Kuisel’s (2003: 96) definition: “Americanization is the import by non-Americans of products, images, technologies, practices and behaviour that are closely associated with America/Americans.” 8

While we are dealing with Americanization in terms of its relationship to globalization specifically, it is worth pointing out there is much more to Americanization than that. Reflective of this greater complexity is the fact that there is an entire field known as American Studies, and even an “Americanization theory” (Grainge 2004: 215) of which the study of America’s role in globalization is only a small part. This complexity and diversity means, among other things, that it is impossible, as some globalization theorists do, to dismiss an idea that clearly is the subject of so much work and study and means so much more than its role in globalization. While it would be wrong to dismiss the idea in its entirety, or more specifically as it relates to globalization, we need to deconstruct Americanization in order to decide which elements of it, if any, can or should be retained in the larger context of a discussion of its relationship to globalization.

By the way, the term Americanization can mean not only the influence of the US, but also that of Canada and Mexico, as well as Central and South America. After all, they are part of America (North, Central, and South). While we will deal with other complexities below, to handle this one, we will focus on the US 9when we discuss Americanization.

Long before globalization became a central academic and lay concern, there were many works over a long period of time that dealt with America’s global influence, especially on Europe. 10In addition, there are a number of very recent works that deal with this topic. 11While the continuation of this work to this day indicates that there has been no diminution of interest in Americanization, there was a particularly heavy concentration on this topic in the 1960s, at or near the summit of America’s global power (especially its industrial power given the decades it took Europe [and Japan] to recover economically from the devastation of WW II), and no work epitomizes this better than the Frenchman J.-J. Servan-Schreiber’s The American Challenge (1968).

Echoing Georges Duhamel’s (1931) notion of an American “menace,” Servan-Schreiber saw America as a business, industrial, and economic threat to Europe. His view, and the fear of the day, is reflected in the opening line of his book (which seems laughable in the light of subsequent developments such as the rise of European [e.g. BMW and Volkswagen], and the decline of American [e.g. GM], industry): “Fifteen years from now it is quite possible that the world’s third greatest industrial power, just after the US and Russia, will not be Europe, but American industry in Europe ” (Servan-Schreiber 1968: 3). Whatever the errors in this view in light of today’s realities (in addition to those mentioned above, the rise of the EU, Japan, and China), it is reflective of the sense of the day of the power, especially, industrially, of Americanization.

In the ensuing years, fears of Americanization, at least of US industries, declined and were replaced by other ideas and fears, most of which were seen as threatening to the US, as well. One such idea, reflective of the remarkable post-war development of Japanese industry, was “Japanization” (Elger and Smith 1994), and that was later supplemented, and to some degree replaced, by fears of the “Asian Tigers” (e.g. Singapore), the European Union and most recently, and likely more enduringly, China (Huntington 2011).

However, other nations’ fears of Americanization and its economic power have certainly not disappeared. Concern about the expansion of American industry was replaced (at least until the Great Recession) to a large degree by a growing fear, reflective of a sea change in the American economy, of American dominance globally in the realm of consumption (Goodman 2007). The fear was no longer of industrial giants, many of which are declining (and disappearing), like US Steel and GM, but rather of the impact of behemoths in the realm of consumption such as Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and Visa (Ritzer 1995, 2009). For its part, Wal-mart has risen to become the world’s largest private employer (Taylor 2015), with $514.4 billion in revenue and $6.7 billion in profits in 2018. This fear of the giants in the realm of consumption is reflected in concerns over processes that have been labeled “Coca-Colonization” (Kuisel 1993) (or even “Coca-Globalization” [Foster 2012]), “McDonaldization” (Ritzer 2018), “Disneyization” (Bryman 2004; Sandlin and Garlen 2016), and “Wal-Martization” (Matusitz 2014). As new leaders in the field of consumption, almost always US in origin, came to the fore, they led to new labels and new fears. For example, the growth of Starbucks (at least until recently) led to concern over “Starbuckization” (Ritzer 2018). Judging by the proliferation of its coffee shops (over 29,865) in many countries in the world (at least 75 as of this writing) there was clear reason for such concern (Ritschel 2019). Such growth illustrates the exportation of America’s consumer products and its “means (or cathedrals) of consumption” (Ritzer 2009) – fast-food restaurants, superstores, shopping malls, and so on – to Europe. (We will deal with all of these, as well as the various processes mentioned above, in Chapter 7.) As of this writing, Amazon – another American-based consumer company – is likely the example that jumps into many readers’ minds. While the focus may have shifted from production to consumption, scholarly and popular work on, and worry over, Americanization persisted and persists to this day.