April 17, 2006
few late notes
We ended today’s (4/17) class with a discussion on the distinctiveness of the web. As a non-talkative internet-lover, our blog is a perfect site for me to share some ideas that I could not have time to raise in class.
So, a few late notes:
1)on the concept of the “imagined worlds”. I have been thinking about the methodology to use in order to study the “imagined” yet concrete things like the idea of state. In relation to our topic, how can we measure the scale of the state, or the power (the ‘relative- autonomy) the state has, if it is a mere imagination? The conclusion I have yet come to is, to borrow a perfect analogy from David Harvey, that when you do an ethnography on the religious practices, you go to a church and observe the practices with the idea of God in your mind whether you believe in God or not. Thus, in my opinion, although we talk about multinational corporation or the globalism, or the state as a corporate entity, the ‘idea’ of the state –and the nation state- does exist. Indeed, the steps taken by those corporations, in many cases, are legitimized through a discourse on the ‘advantages’ that the state is supposed to gain if those steps are taken.
2)On the issue of internet commerce: Interesting characteristic of the internet commerce is the extension of the ‘pleasure’ of shopping. We lengthen the time period of pleasure by browsing, then ordering, then waiting for the shipment. Although we can say the same thing for catalogue shopping, it’s not as pleasurable to just get into store, get whatever you want and then go out. The internet commerce seems to be everywhere and easy to use and hard to challenge YET, as far as I know, you have to be a credit card owner in order to do this kind of shopping, let alone if you have a bank account or not.
3)Talking about resistance: In the reading on the production and consumption of the Walkman, the authors mention about the resistance via consumption, as a “silent” sabotage (which some others call the “camouflaged resistance”). Perhaps we can take “regulation” as another way of resistance. Although we might say that the nation-state is a mere set of practices (bureaucracy etc.), these same practices are what are used in many instances to challenge the idea of unification (the European Union, for instance, is challenged in Poland, in France, in England, and Greece via some regulations in cultural life and/or bureucracy and trade) or in some cases, the ‘foreign’ hegemony. In this example, the resistance seems to occur by nation-states yet in many cases, especially in post-colonial states, the individual actors (bureaucrats, for instance) can and do take steps that limit the permeation of the ‘foreign’ capital. These examples do not necessarily have to be powerful or even ‘good' or 'resistances in a literal sense’ yet I think they show that it’s important to find a methodology that sees the production and consumption as connected to each other.
Posted by Ilgin Yorukoglu at 3:59 PM | Comments (1)
Around the World
Moving from the importance of place to globalization is a bit dizzying: does locale matter or no? Or does our understanding of locale and its limitations shift with each new technological invention?
I think that it is more helpful to think along the lines of my second question, that is of how innovations shift the landscape (playing off of Appadurai’s use of the suffix) rather than assuming that they completely recreate our realities, especially since they usually operate within other existing systems. (Becker’s Art Words can actually be a useful model here.) Hence I wish that the Gereffi article had paid more attention to how the use of the internet has done so. He does make this point on p. 8, when he states that “Electric commerce is not simply about technology; it is also about changes in business organization, market structures, government regulations, and human experience,” but then turns his focus to “global commodity chains.” My two favorite examples (currently) of how the use of the internet has shifted other systems are: firstly, that the internet has provided an unbelievable reach to small-time used booksellers, even as it has wrecked havoc on small-time new booksellers. Second, the rise of internet shopping seems to me to have positively affected the package business of the Postal Office, UPS and others. I think about this every time I happen to see a package delivery to my building. In other words, information can travel around the globe in an instant but objects themselves (not to mention people) must be physically transported along roadways and in vehicles. (In a similar vein in terms of the adoption of tools I imagine that the development of e-mail attachments caused the uses of fax machines to dwindle, just as fax machines displaced messenger services, etc.) These shifts entail both the usage of objects and systems as well as processes. I would like to think about the dot com boom and bust as a period of experimentation: a time of figuring out how this new tool can be useful and how it can be expanded. To my mind the tipping point (forgive me) for the commercialization of the internet had to do with the wide-spread adoption of credit card usage on the internet and I wonder what really caused a large enough percentage of the population to feel comfortable with this form of transaction. I once heard Ami Dar, the founder of idealist.org, state that it was the porn industry that first succeeded in getting site visitors to use credit cards and I wonder if that is really true and if so how it happened. I wonder too about about pushing the metaphor of internet as “site” that Barbara mentioned in class last week. In particular, I wonder about how to define “borders” within the context of the internet, since I think that borders are important definers of locales and also of jurisdiction areas for laws that govern all aspects of commerce. How does the Braithwhaite reading help with this? (I am still absorbing it…) I suspect that if we traveled on this path (could not help the pun) we would eventually connect to our discussion about intellectual property and branding and their protection.
I am fascinated by the development of the internet and how it is reshaping both commerce and knowledge acquisition. I think that some of our discussions about whether Web-based sites are in fact “objects” speak to how the use of the internet is also redefining some of our most basic concepts and experiences. Gereffi notes that “the Internet has diminished many of the information asymmetries (and hence power asymmetries) between sellers and buyers” and yet “intermediation remains vital in the digital economy.” (p. 9) thinking about our discussion regarding the display of objects I am fascinated by how thanks to the internet one can actually learn more about an object that may be purchased by researching it virtually rather than observing it first-hand. And yet there are still objects that must be tried out before determining if they are suitable or comfortable. I wonder if the types of markets that are more successful reflect this in any way. For example, are people less inclined to buy certain kinds of clothing or furniture online? This rumination may simply be similar to the way that duGay et al study the social practices surrounding the way that the use of the Sony Walkman, or any object really, is absorbed into the culture.
The development of the Sony Walkman speaks to another phenomenon that I find fascinating: how a new object becomes commonplace the world over. In particular, I find it interesting to wonder about how certain inventions come to be seen as necessities, so ubiquitous that one can no longer imagine life without them. I remember that one evening early on in the life of the cell phone I was walking down Broadway in my neighborhood and spotted a then-unusual phenomenon: a man speaking on a cell phone while walking his dog. It was an aha moment for me: I immediately understood the great appeal and realized that cell phone usage on the street would become commonplace, as indeed it did become shortly thereafter. The cell phone and the Sony Walkman both redefine what is possible in those “down times” of walking down the street or otherwise being engaged in travel. I also often think about how cell phones erase place or locale – one can be contacted anywhere by phone and area codes are no longer tied to specific areas.
Posted by Leah Strigler at 11:21 AM
April 16, 2006
Questions...
I am not very strong discussing globalization (though I enjoy) and my colleagues already posted some interesting comments on the subject. I will follow with what struck me in the readings: their specific approaches in their analysis and how it relates to the work we do with objects.
I was fascinated by the detailed frame of the research of Braithwaite & Drahos, by the grid of analysis they applied to cars, planes, and many other types of businesses. Their study of the regulations on how motorized vehicles should be manufactured is divided in four main sections: history, principal actors, converging principles, and mechanisms. Can we say that they look at cars and plane the same way that Howard Becker would look at an art object? They look at the “world” of those objects (which makes even more sense as it is global) and ask how and why these vehicles came to be made accordingly to certain global standards. They sustain this analysis with many examples, like the 1980s General Motors ‘world car,’ which demonstrates the economic interdependence of many countries in this business. The analysis reveals that the cross-border transactions of good and services is necessary in the making of other goods. After last week’s discussion on location, this is especially interesting. Even if many of the objects we study in this class are not globally regulated, it is worthy to ask how global transaction is taken into account when these objects are manufactured. Are the objects we study made in the effort to satisfy converging standards in different place where they will be marketed? Investigating that might lead to interesting aspects of the productions of our objects.
Appadurai’s approach is different, trying to establish a frame of analysis by evoking short examples, instead of analyzing thoroughly one case. Though he introduced many interesting concepts for the study of “global cultural flows,” like the five “-scapes,” I found this text perhaps too condensed to really understand his argument (and as I said I am not much familiar on theory on globalization.) At some point he seems to discuss some things that would be very helpful in the study of objects, without sustaining it with examples. First, the “fetishism of the consumer” sounds fascinating: I understand it is the way that flow of advertising and marketing (through mediascapes) disseminates an illusion of consumer agency. He basically says that when we shop for goods, we are at best making choices within restricted possibilities, obeying to the rules of a global world of merchandizing, when actually we are induced to think that we are actors. But this is just one paragraph, so I do not feel like I can really understand the idea fully. The other point I would be interested to understand further, is when he suggest that there is a “repatriation of difference” in the form of goods that happens within nation-states to balance the fears of cultural homogenization and heterogenizations. I wish he would get to this argument by making us look through the lense of an object!
Posted by Etienne Meunier at 7:32 PM | Comments (1)
Sorry I'm late
Sorry I'm late. I spent the day with Architectural Terra Cotta, and like all new loves, it absorbs all my attention and I forget other commitments.
In my theoretical bit for the paper I'm trying to connect Becker's Art Worlds with Molotch's Lash-ups (a good fit, they work together) ... and I'm also thinking of terra-cotta as a quasi-museum-style performing object ala Kirshenblatt-Gimblett but then we're looking at a fifty page paper.
I'm unwilling to inflict that much suffering. Once I start with the other things I've read, it gets fairly sticky, so I'll just leave that here:
Terra-cotta indeed has a social life (Appadurai), but the sweatshop aspect is not well documented. In its heyday, employees report enjoying the life. Bear in mind this is a hand-finished product, so the mass produced no-hand-of-maker visible issue isn't there. (Pace Klein).
It's name has been the subject of a great deal of confusion, because terra-cotta is both a clay material and a color. And the clay material doesn't just come in reddish brown. But the name has remained unchanged throughout history and accross languages--terra cotta arrived whole from italian (so much for Lieberson)
There were "equally viable options" in some cases for the uses to which terra-cotta has been put. (Sackett) In fact, I've documented cases where terra-cotta lost out in the bidding wars to concrete, stone, and even wood and metal in decorating buildings. If the "style" resides in the unique properties of terra-cotta, then the ability to create a carved surface with sharp edges and a great deal of undercutting distinguishes it from concrete and stone.
If Hodder is correct, and "style is largely a spatial construct" which "involves simulatneously the obejctive event; the spatial and temporal pattern; the subjective interpretation," etc... than terra-cotta's embeddedness in a historical particularity and a specific type of building lends itself well to his argument. Ah, terra cotta, so malleable, so plastic, all things to all people!
Perhaps the mass-produced images the Ewens describe are part of what did in terra-cotta during this incarnation. When used to resemble what it can uniquely do (see notes on Sackett), terra-cotta looks the opposite of mass-proudced, the opposite of that fashion... Or maybe because terra-cotta was "mass produced" albeit with hand touches, it embodies the illusion of uniqueness ...
I can't inflict any more of this on you...
Posted by Andrea Siegel at 6:17 PM | Comments (3)
We've de-centered almost everything already
Braithwaite and Drahos (BD) are another one in the series of readings that we had assigned and show how products (regulations) are an outcome of numerous links between different kinds of actors and events. The outcomes are influenced by cooperation as well as competition and the power to fulfill one’s interest lie in the ability to create chains of actors with the same interest and is eventually stronger than opposition. BD do a great job at showing the complexity of cooperation and competition and in this response I confine myself to critiquing them for not de-centralizing all of the actors and for attributing power to ability rather than position.
Although BD successfully de-centralized the state they did not do the same with business organizations (companies). They show us that a state can be an arena of competing interests even when being an actor in international negotiations where one would expect them to be one or ‘as one.’ States consist of different departments with their own interests which can be better aligned with similar departments in other states, or actors of different kind such as NGOs, and form coalitions/chains with them rather than with other department within their own state. BD do not extend such de-centralization to companies as actors and treat them as ‘one’. For example, when it comes to car regulations Germany simply represents interest of Daimler-Chrysler, although the latter’s divisions are far from same with Chrysler cars being different from Mercedes cars and probably competing for resources within the parent company. The same way is with other German car-makers (for which we do not really get reasons why are they not represented by Germany when it comes to regulations): BMW owns British Rolls Royce and Rover among others, and Volkswagen is a proud owner of Spanish Seat and Czech Skoda. It is not only that these companies consist of units across national boundaries, and thus within different contexts and perhaps different interests, but also consist of different functional departments like manufacturing and finance that might have opposing interests.
My second problem with BD is that they do not show who is better at forming strongest chains and who can form relations with whom and when. They attribute it to some sort of ability rather than perhaps structure of an organization (I’ve noticed they were once close to that when discussing unions and feminist movements) and position in the past and existing chains. I believe that actors cannot form relationships just with anybody due to their skill (although that might be a resource acquired from previous hook-ups) but it depends on their position in existing chains and attributes that they have acquired through previous hook-ups that signal to other actors what actions they might take.
Posted by Miodrag Stojnic at 5:34 PM
conflations
I have to admit the combination of words, "corporate organization" is enough to make me snooze. But this week’s readings did make me think of several conflations. I was impressed to learn that it was Ralph Nader (1966), the “consumerist liberal” (456) who was most influential in changing the way American car manufacturers responded to safety, even if his tactic included something like a scare campaign. It would have been very interesting if Nader had been successful in his bid for presidency, moving him from the position of ‘individual’ to ‘state’ in Braithwaite’s table 20.1. Nader lost, so the transition from consumer advocate to head of state was never realized, but interesting to think about his party’s potential scare campaigns (maybe he could have come up with something less elementary than the traffic signal terrorism alert system of our current administration.)
Related to terrorism and ‘systems of reward’ is aircraft hijacking. Braithwaite mentions that after WWII there occurred “harmonizing flight standards concerns from pilot and mechanic training, to standardization on English communication protocols…” (457) and he includes a pithy remark from Boeing executive, “[i]f Arabs are trained in US policies and procedures, they are more likely to buy the US product with systems geared to those standards. Also they learn to trust and ask…” (464) I couldn’t help but think about the September 11 hijackings, where the Arab nationals were trained as pilots (mostly?) in Florida and instead of buying into the American dream (see Appadurai’s mediascape, 299), they rejected it on fundamental religious grounds; opting instead to take advantage of harmonizing knowledge and hijack the merchandise. I wonder where Braithwaite could go with this one, but his article is pre-2001.
The idea of trust and the corporation seems like a conflation to me, but instead it is called insurance. “Selling trust and selling competent regulation is profitable.” (Braith., 493) I thought about insuring types of intangibilities (besides life and death), perhaps heritage. Is this sort of what Appadurai suggests with his consideration of ‘imagined worlds?’ (296, 299) BecausI have to admit the combination of words, "corporate organization" is enough to make me snooze. But this weeks readings did make me think of several conflationse of deterritorialization certain ethnicities are displaced and their traditions become disoriented, but if museumified, then heritage is insured for the future and younger generations receive the pay-off through the ‘mediascape’, when seeing ethnographic films and reading informative labels and charts about their grandparents. (304) This is State sanctioned insurance and it reminds me of the great idea of the US as being a ‘melting pot.’
This idea seems sold down the river with a bottle of snake oil and implies that though disenfranchised, a person or people can immigrate to the US and be just like the characters on “Dallas” or “Miami Vice.” We don’t melt in the US, we rub up against each other like blocks of ice, and it is our difference that makes this territory such an engaging place (and one with airbags.) Braithwaite writes that “states are often best conceived as agents of other actors, particularly private corporations, (484) and it got me wondering which corporation was behind the ‘melting pot’ idea, not sure, but Benetton did a good job of exploiting (sorry, I mean, advertising) the idea through their clothing line in the mid-eighties.
In terms of the military coercion of the automobile industry, what happens when military vehicles become a fashionable commodity-chain? Nothing could be dumber than the Hummer, not only do I hate it because of it’s unethical gas consumption, but that it is a vehicle of imperialiation and nation-state wielding power. Like a ‘manufacturer without a factory’ (Gereffi, 7) the Hummer buyer is a driver without a nation, but conquering just the same, a conflation of fetishes.
Posted by Pilou Miller at 4:51 PM | Comments (2)
Disjunctures, Uncertainty, Power
In the past few weeks we’ve been rummaging the tensions between indigenization and globalization, so it's well that this week we turn to how things happen on a global scale - how the lash-up looks like a global ratcheting-up in these days of disorganized capitalism.
Of these authors’ attempts to trace capital flows in late modernity, one possible story jumps out from Appadurai, Braithwaite, and Gereffi. It goes like this: with the Internet deconstructing commodity chains, we have an increasing rise of deterritorialization (plus urbanization, cannibalization, probably secularization, why not throw in fragmentation and decentralization too). All this creates disjunctures among the new “imagined” landscapes of global cultural flows. These disjunctures can be cracks, or fissures, of dissent among those in power, and it is in these little cracks where the real decision-making happens. Putnam’s story of the Bonn Summit (in Braithwaite) gives us a picture of faltered state power and discord—a possible disjuncture for Appadurai—in which only internal division allows room for harmony. From Elias to Rose, this is a familiar story of the contingency and limits of power, but are these authors going further to make a claim about the changing nature of power in disorganized capitalism? Indeed, it seems that fragmented power, the virtual connectivity, and uncertainty all reinforce each other.
But to argue the opposite: throughout these readings, business in late modernity is characterized like liquid, uncertain, moving, ready in any minute to wash away—and Appadurai wrote this more than 15 years ago, before the Internet sped things up even more. He must be really sweating it now. To what degree is this justified, or is it a case of projected nostalgia for the slower-paced “good old days?” Part of what Braithwaite does is point out that the world still works. The state may not be an autonomous actor, but the rise of corporate organizations doesn’t mean auto safety run amok; quite the opposite, if safe cars are in the best interests of firms, then safe cars it is. Sounds like self-maximization prevails for the greater good after all.
Perhaps we need to talk about Appadurai’s disjunctures. In the end, he seems to resort to a Marxist scolding, calling consumers fetishized dupes as the outcome of interplays between all the "-scapes" he puts forward. Maybe it’s a matter of seeing the glass as half empty or half full?
Posted by Ashley Mears at 3:10 PM | Comments (1)
"Authentic" and "Counterfeit" goods: whats the difference?
Gerreffi discusses how buyer-driven commodity chains operate. in reading this i started thinking about the market for counterfeit goods, such as the designer bags sold on canal street here in new york. he talks about how buyer-driven goods like apparel is designed and marketed by trans national corporations whose goods are produced in developing low wage countries. he argues that these corporations control the producers of these goods by their power to place orders and set prices and profit margins for producers. so for example a company that sells high end hand bags can set prices and profit margins for producers and can control producers with the threat of shifting production to a different producer. but what he doesnt think of is that producers dont have to necessarily only fill prodcution orders from these companies, but could also produce extra quantities for sale on the black market. when one looks at the "counterfeit" bags on canal street, many of them are obviously fake. for example, they are made of synthetic materials rather than real leather. there is no question that they are fake. but there are some, which are identical to the ones sold in a louis vuitton or gucci store. is it possible that these "fake" bags are made by the same producers as the "real" ones? if so this would demonstrate a manner in which producers can resist control by TNC's by selling extra bags for resale on the black market, thereby earning extra profit beyond what the ordering company intends. difference?
this makes me think of a point made by appandurai. he suggests that mediascapes, particularly advertising, gives consumers the illusion of having agency in their purchasing decisions. in the example of hand bags, high end retail companies convince consumers that they have to buy a bag from the company's stores in order for it to be "real" and have the status of owning one of those bags. but this may very well be an illusion in that a consumer may be able to buy an identical bag made by the very same producer with the same materials and having no real differences, from a street vendor on canal street. but i imagine the buyer of a "fake" bag might suffer the illusion created by the company's advertising and feel bad that their bag is not "authentic" because it was not purchased at the company's store for an exorbitant price, even though it is the same bag from the same producer. the only difference is where it was purchased from and how much was paid for it.
considering this i think if im going to buy a handbag for my wife as a present, i'll buy it from canal street because i'd rather put the money in the producer's hand and his black market middle man, rather than the TNC, which just wants to control how much the producer makes and how much i pay. after all, if i can't tell the difference between a "real" bag and the "fake" one, then whats the
Posted by Robert Weide at 1:35 PM | Comments (1797)
More on globalization
I like the approach that Braithwaite and Drahos took to the almost buzzword-like question about just what effect globalization is having on our concrete realities, examining in detail the way that the regulatory markets for automobiles and commercial aircraft have operated in a globalized world. They conclude that in this case, the particular way that the global has intersected this market has benefitted the flying public (through better safety standards) and the state (no need for states to use their resources to get intensively involved). I wondered, then, if Appadurai’s concept of ideoscapes could be applied to a lurking fear of flying that would have resulted in the airline industry focusing closely on safety as the gold standard for aircraft production. Are people around the world, from one ethnoscape to the next, imbued with a non-specific fear of being confined with hundreds of other people (strangers) 10,000 feet above terra firma? From concerns about crashing or being hijacked to the more mundane concerns about getting sick due to poor circulation and low air quality, it seems somewhat logical to assume that the fear of flying may be part of an ideoscape that is not limited to a particuarly locality. If this is the case, then, it makes sense that the air traffic industry would focus on safety standards as a way of making legitimacy (and profitability). Is it just a lucky coincidence that the largely self-regulated industry happens to have settled on safety, rather than speed or some lowest common denominator?
Braithwaite and Drahos do a good bit of work to portray Boeing and the FAA as benevolent dictators, kindly, efficient power brokers with our best interests at heart. And maybe that is true in this case, but it seems highly unlikely that most international companies and regulatory agencies find their way to common ground so easily, or that the public can assume the international corporations are looking out for their best interests. In this sense, then, I felt like Braithwaite and Drahos were being a little too optimistic. But then, I didn’t get the feeling they were trying to make a general statement about multi-national corporations in general. On the other hand, Braithwaite and Drahos have drawn a picture of an industry that has grown beyond the reach of any single state which seems to resonate with globalization as a pattern. I’m not so sure we can trust that all industries will be as well-behaved as the airline industry. Profit and public interest coincide in the ideology of safety standards in the airline industry, but Naomi Klein demonstrated that profit and public interest can diverge rather markedly and without much outcry. In the case of the third world production facilities that she wrote about, the public can be construed in a number of different ways. The public as consumers may, in fact, feel that their best interests are being served through lower cost items. On the other hand, they may perceive third world production facilities as a form of off shoring that is taking jobs away from them. The workers, too, may be happy to have jobs or they may be quite upset if they perceive themselves as being exploited. I feel like this kind of power-wielding and exploitation at the expense of one or more publics is more common than the story of the air traffic industry in terms of the rise of multi-national corporations.
The Appadurai article read like an overview of a bunch of ideas that would/should be elaborated in subsequent work. I found it interesting that his five scapes were heavily reliant on intangible things like ideas and flows of financial capabilities. His most tangible scape was the traffic, through tourism, guest worker-ship, and immigration, of human bodies. To be sure, some of what he was trying to get at was not the idea of a physical body being in a new place, but in the movement of ideas and ways of doing through the vehicle of the body. Still, though, in terms of our interest in the study of objects, in this case, the human has become the object that has the capacity to accept and adapt as well as transmit and force change. Interesting device, for sure. Don’t have much to say on this one, just thought it was odd that, aside from technoscapes, ethnoscapes were the most concrete of the “scapes” in terms of their existences as physical objects. Of all that is moving around in the globalscape, for Appadurai it seems to be the ideas and the intangible that matters. The physical technologies that make much of the movement possible and the physical bodies of replaced, displaced, and misplaced are the only physical flows that he finds worthy of top five status. I suppose the motion of physical bodies can often act as a shorthand for the motion of other things, but still, he drew a line between ideoscapes and mediascapes, but didn’t
Posted by Laura Noren at 1:15 PM | Comments (1)
The Global in the Local
On the face of it, the contrast between Appadurai’s essay and those by Gerreffi and Braithwaite and Drahos is one between splitters and lumpers, with Appadurai creating ‘scapes’ to get at what he calls the “fundamental disjunctures between economy, culture, and politics (p. 296).” However, while Appadurai’s arguments can be fit into a framework created by the other authors, he takes a considerably more critical look at just how globalizing processes play out.
Without a full overview of world systems theory, it is difficult to figure out exactly Appadurai means by calling existing marxist-informed models by authors such as Wallerstein and Amin ‘quirky.’ There seems to be a large amount of relevant research (granted his was published in 1990) dealing with just the sort of disjunctures between the local and the global Appadurai is analyzing. The world cities literature in particular takes as its focus just how these forces get played out on a local level, and in how larger globalizing trends can work to differentiate localities. Much of this literature also focuses on the changing (and often, declining) role of the nation-state within the context of globalization.
This is not to contradict the Braithwaite and Drahos, who argue that the nation-state is still the most important actor. Their focus on business regulation seems to be of a process more naturally worked out on a nation-state level than some other globalizing processes. However, the growing regulations forwarded by states within the U.S. to create their own standards (in everything from auto emissions in California to fair lending legislation in Ohio) has increasingly put these sub-national units in conflict with the larger nation state on the regulatory plane.
However, the central role of the nation-state is still not going away any time soon. As Braithwaite and Drahos argue, the state is the one entity which both ‘reaches’ down to cover everybody and has a distinctive ‘reach up’ to a global level (p. 485). More abstractly, this work links back to Appadurai (through Latour) in not only how power is diffused by imperfect translations of disparate agents, but also in how that power is contingent on the mobilizing power of mass publics (although granted, this second clause is considerably more measured in Appadurai).
The import of these other authors (including Gereffi) on Appadurai, is that they create a framework that allows and accounts for local disjunctures and diversity within a larger system. What I find particularly interesting in the Appadurai is in just how his analysis portrays the conflict between the local and global, and in how this conflict can lead to both positive and negative outcomes. What I find unclear is just how his ‘global cultural flow’ is specifically ‘cultural’.
Objects and products related back to this discussion, because they do not get created in a vacuum – quite the contrary, as Appadurai argues in his discussion of fetishization of production and consumption, one cannot escape transnational processes. Organizations and products are also formed through numerous other actors – not only states and NGOs, but mass publics and individuals. Technology is also central, not only in the products themselves, but in the very composition of the corporations and their operations. Focusing on one of these aspects may result in an interesting narrative, but it would miss the complexity of the lash-up behind it all.
Posted by Mark Treskon at 12:30 PM | Comments (1)
What's the difference and why does it matter
The readings for this week force me into a thought experiment. Jean-Luc states in his posting that “As globalization ‘makes the world smaller’, the local will soon be the only thing left”. Taking Appadurai’s work as the point of departure, I began thinking about what the differences between “global” and “local” are, if they’re real, and how to understand the purchase that they have in conversations about globalization.
To start out simply, before we were global, we were local. As Appadurai and Gereffi point out, this meant that we had a core; we were better able to understand the relationship between producers and consumers (and according to Appadurai, consumers had some sovereignty before but none now; Gereffi argues that buyers, as he calls them, have more power and knowledge now); and nations had sovereignty (Braithwaite and Drahos). Now, with globalization, the lines between the core and periphery are blurred, we have shifts in different “scapes” as Appadurai calls them, and corporate regulation is chaotic and disjointed. So in a nutshell, globalization poses a threat, change, or improvement (depending on your politics) to production, consumption and governance.
It seems as if we can only understand the global as distinct from the local if we consider the global to be somewhat homogenizing. If we don’t, then what we have is a plurality of locals in conversation with one another. This seems to be what Appadurai means in his definition of “multiple worlds” (296), and is also present in his discussion of ethnoscape. Braithwaite and Drahos allude to these differences in their discussion of regulation, pointing out that nations do give up sovereignty (or have it wrestled away from them) in order to have a more efficient method of regulation. This seems to dispute the argument that globalization disrupts the core/periphery. It may do so with respect to production and consumption, but perhaps not so much with respect to governance and decision-making – this seems to still be concentrated amongst a few key players. If we follow this argument, it appears that one locals “wins out” over the others. So in this sense, if we export the local, is it somehow less local? Is it always homogenizing or detrimental when we export the local like this? How do we decide?
The readings for this week provide what seems to be a positive or at least neutral view of globalization, which is met with suspicion by some of the posts on the blog, and social scientists more generally, as Owen states. In fact, it seems almost trendy to oppose globalization. But in this leap to describe what’s unjust about globalization, we haven’t discussed just what is so good about the local, or why we have such a sense of nostalgia for it. This is the conversation that needs to happen before we make such strong accusations against the global economy.
Posted by Jane Jones at 12:25 PM | Comments (1)
April 15, 2006
Unorganized Corporate Organization
Ralph Nader is not Japanese. This is possibly the most useful thing to come out of the Braithwaite & Drahos article. Don’t get me wrong, they do a great job of outlining the current global economy of regulation (from the point of view of the producers), but I believe it points to some of the flaws in Appadurai’s “scope” framework.
To start B&D discuss regulation of the product’s safety for the consumer market, but never mention the safety or repercussions of the people producing the product. This echoes Appadurai’s willing neglect for a Marxist model. I’ll agree it is useful to try and examine other economic models, but you can’t all together forget about them, especially when you are trying to integrate all aspects of the global economy. Often NGO’s are interested in regulation of production and most specifically in the buyer-driven chains as described by Gereffi. Of course NGOs are not going to be as influential in the production-driven chains that Braithwaite & Drahas were taking about, these chains are made up of corp.-nation relationships. It is only when things get really screwed up, like B&D say that mass-publics and NGOs will step in.
B&D’s analysis is also problematic because they seemingly use ‘nation’ and TNC based in that nation, interchangeable. I know this issue was pointed out in the reading but though it was over shadowed by their discussion of the Bretton Woods organizations: GATT, WTO IMF, WB. All organizations I see as out dated, especially after this weeks readings. These organizations were needed after WWII as power centralizing institutions, needed to jump start modern globalization. They helped connect the Marshall-localization of last week to global capital/markets. (Though they were never really any good at it.) As these articles show globalization is now a self-sustaining phenomenon, much like air transport regulation and car regulation is shown to be. Gereffi’s work with the Internet helps to show both the problems and advantages concerning this change of global organizational power. Here I agree with Aniko that the Internet is less transparent and possible creates an even larger gap for developing nations to over come then previous means of organization.
Appaduri made me feel sad with his discussion of production fetishism and the fetishism of the consumer. He points to the fact that global factors trump anything concerning local control, national productivity or territorial sovereignty. And that my fight as the consumer (vegetarian/limited shopper/ vintage clothes) it pointless, because “consumers are not real social agents” and have “no agency in the forces that constitute production”. This may be true, but I’m still not ready to buy in. As globalization ‘makes the world smaller’, the local will soon be the only thing left.
One more point to add. It was interesting to read that B&D thought that the courts authority was limited and surprised to see it was more influential than believed. Hello! The court was the one who made American corporations ‘natural citizens’, they are the one’s who allowed for the global economic situation we are in today. After Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886), American corporations were indirectly made the most powerful people in world, granting them equal protection of the law. This I would say has something to do with American corporations domination of several global markets.
Overall, this week’s readings showed the ever-increasing differences between global epistemologies. What is good for some will not be good for all. And what is good for all is, as of yet, far from possible.
Posted by Jean-Luc Howell at 3:18 PM | Comments (1)
Controversies around Globalization
While Appadurai argues for the fragmentation and disjuncture in the contemporary global society, Braithwaite and Drahos as well as Gereffi successfully demonstrate the uniformalization of contemporary business regulation and production. Where lies the truth? Is the age of post-globalization the age of disjunction or conjunction?
While the readings for last week also dealt with the consequences of globalization and the idea of ‘local’ in the world of globalization, my personal impression was that those texts were much less judgmental than the readings for this week. While Storper, Scott and Harvey just highlighted some interesting phenomena of the local, with or without the influence of the global, I feel that Appadurai and Braithwaite and Drahos feel the need to “defend” globalization, and argue for the positive effects it may have in our society.
I most feel this positive judgement in Braithwaite and Drahos’ article in the conclusion of the “Air Transport” chapter, when they argue that even though the domain of aviation is “the clearest case of US hegemony over a global regulatory system,” Australians also have to admit that “their elected government would deliver less safe, more expensive air travel if it opted out of the US-hegemonic order of skies.” (469) I find this argument compelling, because it might actually challenge our prejudices against globalization. What is interesting about Braithwaite and Drahos’ article is that even though they investigate how international regulations have become standardized through international negotiation, they always come to the conclusion at the end of the day there is always a hegemonic power which ultimately shapes these regulations.
They also argue that the agents/actors of these international negotiations are not nations but corporates these days. I am wondering if this argument has different consequences for Europe and for the United States. From a European perspective, a large percentage of those corporate companies which take over the business sphere are identified as multinational and most often American companies. Therefore, for a nation to adjust itself to international regulations may mean to give up something of the local, to give in to a hegemonic power. This might challenge local identity, and the political debate is not so much about whether a regulation would have positive effects on our country (safer traffic, better air coordination), but whether we are willing to give up something of ourselves. (This often becomes part of a narrow-minded nationalist discourse.) Since US is the greatest hegemonic power at the moment, we tend to identify those multinational corporates with the United States itself.
With the spread of the Internet, this actually might change and eventually it may become impossible to identify e-companies with one hegemonic power. Although Gereffi states that “the Internet has diminished many of the information asymmetries between sellers and buyers” (12) and created a more transparent organizational structure, I am not sure if I agree with this argument. I feel that in a way Internet, with its faceless vendors, is less transparent, which is why companies, such as Amazon or Ebay are so careful about the reliability of their sellers. However, smaller companies do not fight so successfully against those who try to take advantage of the anonymity Internet offers.
What I am interested in Gereffi’s idea is the ‘global commodity chains’ relation to the Internet. It seems today everything can be and is purchased on the Internet. However, I wonder, where are the limitations of this selling method? Are there any limitations at all? Here I suggest that we should return to our every objects and every day world and I would be curious to hear which are the things that you would never purchase on the Internet. I always thought that one would not buy groceries / vegetables without actually checking them out; nevertheless, fooddirect.com has developed into one of the most successful online companies here in the States. I could never understand how can people buy clothes without first trying them on, but the success of online department stores proves that I am wrong.
Returning to the more theoretical material, I am not sure if I can read Appadurai without taking the postcolonial discourse into consideration. Although I would also like to think that the global social order has changed so much in the past decades, nevertheless, I am wondering if those who were once oppressed could identify with these arguments. Appadurai’s proposition of the five dimensions in the global cultural flow, which inevitably results in disjuncture and difference, raises two questions. On one hand, I am wondering, what happens to those who are not part of this flow? Is it possible that there are people, whose ethnoscapes/technoscapes/financescapes are not affected by the global flow? Here I am thinking about those who live in such poverty (not only in the postcolonial countries, but also in Eastern Europe or the slums of Western Europe), that they simply do not have a technoscape or finanscape as such. And if such a group exists, is it possible that Appadurai’s dimensions of disjunctures in reality reproduce the same global order with the same hierarchy?
On the other hand, where does this ‘reproduction’ take place in reality? Appadurai’s perspective of macro-analysis shifts to the microenvironment as he takes a closer look how the “scapes” shape individual lives. The author primarily emphasizes the frustration and failure of deterritorialization, nonetheless, I imagine that it is also possible to emphasize the positive effects, the cultural exchanges and multiculturalism of such a transnational flow (on a macro-level). Appadurai claims earlier in his paper that “the globalization of culture is not the same as its homogenization,” (16) and I think that the fall of the iron curtain, the immediate globalization of the former soviet bloc justifies his statement. If you travel in that region, what you will find is that despite the visible similarities of consumptive facilities, these nations have successfully preserved cultural differences. My last question is about looking at Appadurai’s essay from the present perspective: to what extent can we agree with his points fifteen years later? What factors or social/political phenomena have justified or refuted his hypothesis?
Posted by Aniko Szucs at 1:21 PM | Comments (1)
April 14, 2006
The Deterritorialized Mr. Klein
I was at a Calvin Klein guest lecture arranged by the Department of Culture and Communication this week, where the talk was to orbit around “race, class and gender” in the company’s branding and advertising strategies, but more generally it was about corporate communication and organization. Mr. Klein, in my view, did not really enlighten us with any information that anyone with the slightest knowledge about these issues did not already know. But, despite my finding him a bit too trite, I do acknowledge he has managed to build a truly successful company, so I by no means doubt his smartness and creative intuition. Also I got to see him drink from a Styrofoam cup, his power point presentation juxtaposed to a billboard size version of the periodic system of the elements. I saw the suit-clad gentleman doing little nervous ballet-like twirls on the stage before us. And not least, I witnessed him posing in profile, when a faculty member tried to document the whole scenario with her digital camera during the electrically charged minutes just before the show began. Priceless.
Anyway, what I more specifically found to be lacking in Mr. Klein’s lecture was the role of the traditional intermediary which Gereffi talks about, in this case the retailers. The way he presented his business, it revolved mostly about existing in a “mediascape” than about the encounter with the actual objects his company manufactures, which he gave merely a nod or two during his one-hour talk. In the light of this class’ tracing of the object and our uncovering of the biography of physical objects, I could not help but find that his approach to how, where and what his objects are communicating was painfully reductive.
As a first one could argue that Calvin Klein is part of what Gereffi calls a breed of “manufacturers without factories”, in that the company separates the physical production of goods from the design and marketing stages of the process. That he did not take the production process into account, as a part of the story that his products communicate is perhaps not that big a surprise. I mean if some of his high street stuff is produced in third world countries (I don’t know if it is), I guess it’s an issue that is just so much easier not to deal with for all of us. However, the intermediaries, the actual commercial venues where his stuff is being sold, be it in an actual Calvin Klein flagship store or Filene’s Basement or with a street vendor god knows were, strikes me to be crucial to acknowledge in terms of securing that there is a consistency between what his objects communicate in “mediascape” and what they communicate in an actual lived social experience – which could perhaps be a combination of “ethnoscape” + ”ideoscape” (+ perhaps a “politoscape”…or is political exactly what the “ideoscape” is?).
It is my understanding that the dynamics of indigenization, which Appadurai suggests as an antithesis to cultural imperialism and homogenization (295), is in conceptual tune with the anthropocentric approach that has followed in the wake of the cultural turn, in so far that it acknowledges that for example forces of Americanization are given over to “push and pull” once they hit new societies. Likewise one could say that his transnationally marketed products and his brand sooner or later hit a concrete context where their “global traits” are given over to indigenization in localized imagined worlds.
I remember BKG spoke about the Amazon experience in a way that seems to relate to Gereffi’s writings on the internet as a facilitator of mass customization. Personally I do not do much shopping on the internet, so I have not yet reached a state where I feel that Amazon’s electronic “customers who bought this also got this” commerce strategy equals or outdoes the potential of the traditional intermediary. But I do recognize that it has the potential of fetishizing the consumer in a whole different way. Borrowing from Appadurai (307), it seems that when shopping on Amazon the agency is to a large extent given over to the agency of the producer.
Now back to Mr. Klein. From a business perspective, it would be ideal to have your clients twisted firmly around your pinky. However, investing too much in a mediascape and forgetting about the actual encounter between client and product (which he can be somewhat in charge of by scrutinizing the commercial venue where his products are sold) allows for an indigenization of his products that are perhaps not in the business best interests.
On a different note….and mostly because I don’t really know how to integrate this into my disintegrated writings above.
Is what Gereffi identifies as the dominant (third) scenario of the internet’s impact on B2B and B2C transactions quite in tune with where Appadurai winds up? It seems that they both identify a status quo of sorts, or a “different, different but same” corporate organization. Appadurai arguing that homogenization is absorbed into local political and cultural economies, only to be repatriated as heterogenerous dialogues of free enterprise. Gereffi giving over the internet to the co-optation and internalization of the biggest and most powerful companies whose organizational structure may change significiantly in the process, but nevertheless will wind up as the arbiters of the structures of technological businesses.
Posted by Sarah Carlson at 7:49 PM | Comments (4)
The Race to the Top?
Most of discourse on globalization, among leftist political groups and social sciences alike (except for economists of course), is critical, often painting a bleak portrait of the global world it yields. Cultural critics lament the homogenization, or McDonaldization, of cultural forms. Both anthropologists and geneticists (strange bedfellows indeed) search for vanishing peoples in the hope of “saving” them from extinction, or at least archiving their artifacts. Communitarians mourn the lost of face-to-face interaction. And, perhaps most vehemently, anti-globalization activists point to the growing inequality between the core and the periphery, the environmental degradation, and the race to the bottom. These activists brandish Naomi Klein’s No Logo as the final word on the issue of globalization. Indeed, the critical picture of globalization is so prevalent that we, as sociologists, tend to accept it, uncritically.
Into this discourse steps this week’s reading from Braithwaite and Drahos. These authors paint a decidedly different picture of globalization, at least as it relates to business regulation. Sure, they note the inordinate influence of the U.S. in dictating global policy, the key decision-making made by unelected representatives behind opaque doors, and the increasing power of global companies to dictate policy. No problem says Braithwaite and Drahos. Globalization and this messy system of interrelated actors have actually achieved some benevolent regulation. This system may not seem fair or equitable but in this case, it works! Regulations have improved. Things have become safer. Who cares what Naomi Klein says?
Is his reading a measured counterbalance to the hysteria over globalization offered by the left? Or is it a defense for unbridled free markets? I’m not sure. What is clear is that the argument offered, while compelling in the face of its opposition, is rife with problems. First, in dismissing some of the major problems with the undemocratic, unequal decision-making processes, Braithwaite and Drahos seem to be arguing that the ends justifies the means. If we can achieve a more regulated, safer world, who cares how it happens? Clearly this argument does not address the concerns of those who want a freer world based on popular governance. Secondly, while Braithwaite and Drahos may be right in noting an improvement over the past, they never address whether this improvement justifies these problems. If the process were structured differently, if people had more of a say, couldn’t it be possible that we’d have even better regulation? Have the ends been as significant as they could have been if things were elsewhere? Maybe the gains can be attributed to resistances within the global system that have won some small battles (i.e. Nader) instead of the process itself. And finally, can Braithwaite and Drahos’s rosy (or rosier) picture fit for environmental regulation? It seems to me that globalization undermines any ability of local or national groups to regulate environmental degradation.
Does globalization encourage a race to the bottom? Braithwaite and Drahos say no, but I’m not convinced.
Posted by Owen Whooley at 7:40 PM | Comments (1)