Glocal
Description
By: Leif Thomas Olsen
"The term ‘glocal’ has Japanese origin (Khondker, 2004). First used by Japanese farmers adopting rice strains to local conditions, it became more widely known as a term used by Japanese multinationals to refer to products developed for global markets, but modified to suit the expectations of the individual markets where it was to be consumed.
In ‘the West’ the term first surfaced in the 1990’s, initially in commerce, but eventually as a cultural term (ibid). A typical translation of it is the slogan “think global, act local”. The term’s popularization in academia was much due to Robert Robertson’s work in the field of sociology. Following e.g. Anthony Giddens, Robertson argued that globalisation did not only involve economic and political streamlining, but also a methodological streamlining – in reality equating to methodological imperialism (Robertson, 1994). In sociological terms that threaten local cultures’ possibilities of expression, and eventually their outright existence. Hence must ‘the local’ be recognised not only as a mere recipient of global influences, but also as an interpreter of the same, mixing such influences with its local culture. From this follows, as Bordieu (1993) also suggests, that the ‘local’ not only plays the role of the ‘receiver’ of global influences, but also that that of a ‘sender’, impacting the shape and form of global influences as they hit the ‘local’, are mixed at the ‘local’, and then continue their flows around the ‘global’, now in a partly modified state (Robertson, 1995; Khan 1998; Kraidy 1999; Raz 1999; Khondker, 2004).
Robertson stresses that ‘glocal’ does not assume global to be pro-active and ‘local’ to be re-active. Since there is mutuality in the relationship will both remain dependent upon the other (Robertson, 1994; 1995). Critics of Robertson’s (et.al) work however point to the fuzziness and fluidness of the ‘local’, making it difficult to identify the ‘locals’ that make up the ‘global’, in turn blurring the analysis as such (Agnew, 1997). In fact, this criticism developed into an entirely new debate surrounding the term ‘glocalism’, now focusing on ‘scale’. This debate tried to specify the exact relationship between ‘local’ and ‘global’, and was to quite an extent (albeit now subsiding) conducted among ‘human geographers’."
Source
Source: Glocal Democracy; a Philosophical Platform for Democracy 2.0. By: Leif Thomas Olsen