Critical reflection essay

SOC103 Introduction to Sociology

Globalisation in everyday life

Globalisation in everyday life

• Everything is connected to everything
• The world is becoming increasingly unified or interconnected
• Far flung individuals bound together
• Thought experiment: your savings in the bank, brand names you use

Babel

• Movie: Babel
  • multiple stories across 4 countries (US, Morocco, Mexico and Japan)
  • interconnectedness of people’s lives in a globalised world

Features of Globalisation

Features of globalisation

• Compression of the world – Roland Robertson 1968, Anthony Giddens 1990, David Harvey 1990

– Complex interrelationships – Increase in interconnectedness – Time-space compression

• Network society – Manuel Castells 2000, Anthony Giddens
  1. David Harvey 1990

– information and communications technologies – Virtual culture, post-industrial

• Privatisation and deregulation – Anthony Giddens 1990, Manuel Castells 2000

– Disembeddedness – Reflexivity – Neoliberalism

Global capitalism

• World systems theory by Immanuel Wallerstein 1979
• Transnational companies, MNCs, international companies
• Rely on foreign labour and foreign production
• Sell in world markets (e.g. China and India)
• Autonomous from national governments
• Flexible with regards to labour processes, labour markets, products, and patterns of consumption

‘McDonaldisation’, ‘Starbuckisation’

• George Ritzer 1996
• Spread of American business values and culture – rationality, efficiency, profitability, calculability
• Homogenisation effect of globalisation
• Unidirectional from the west
• Cultural imperialism

Global capitalism: fantasy vs reality

• Fantasy: the world is your marketplace?
• Reality: international divisions of wealth and labour (Naomi Klein 2000, No Logo), regionalism
• Fantasy: autonomy and freedoms from nation-state constraints, borderless world? Kenichi Ohmae’s The Borderless World 1991 and The End of the Nation State 1995
• Reality: Governments still regulate transnational corporate activity. Hirst and Thompson 1999, Globalisation in Question

Neoliberalism

• Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan
• Reduce government economic regulation
• Privatise state’s activities
• Cut down on expenditure on public services
• High priority on market-based principles not just in business world but different aspects of social life
• Commodification – turning social interaction into objects that can be transacted in the marketplace
• Intense emphasis on profitisation
• Sky is the limit – neoliberalism is globalising, globalisation provides economic impetus for neoliberal pursuits

Americanisation

• Americanisation, American hegemony (Noam Chomsky 1999)
• Take over international economy – impose tariffs, subsidise American industries, spread neoliberalism
• Politics, economics, culture, social life
• Islamphobia

Consumption

Sociology of consumption

• Material perspective
  • who consumes what?
  • structures and institutions
    • expansion of capitalist production
    • colonial empires
    • modernity
    • socio-economic developments
    • class differences; unequal access to goods

Sociology of consumption

• Material perspective

‘American shoppers snap up about 5 times more clothing now than they did in 1980. In 2018, that averaged 68 garments a year …. As a whole, the

world’s citizens acquire some 80 billion apparel items annually …’

- The Wall Street Journal, The High Price of Fast Fashion, 29 August 2019

each. ‘Britons Most buy of 3 it billion end up items being of clothing thrown away’ every year – an average of 50 pieces - Jessica Williams (2004) 50 facts that should change the world. USA: Icon Books Ltd

Sweat shops

• Nike, Adidas, Puma, Bonds, Just Jeans – wear any of these brands?

Source: http://www.oxfam.org.au/explore/workers-rights/are-your-clothes-made-in-sweatshops

• In India, there are 10.1 million child labourers (UNICEF India)
• One child labourer said, “I used to work for 12 to 14 hours in a day.. I was not paid a single penny for a year. A week after joining, I was hung upside down for a minor fault. Whenever I sustained injuries while using a sharp knife to turn the carpet knots, I was denied medical care. Instead my employer used to fill the wound with matchstick powder and burn. My flesh and skin used to burn.”
  • Jessica Williams (2004) 50 facts that should change the world. USA: Icon Books Ltd

Source: http://www.childjustice.org/html/issue605_pr.htm

Culture as meaning-making

• As a process of meaning-making
• Operating in different contexts
• Evident in their social practices and social products
• Account for different meanings
• Examine effects in social life

Sociology of consumption

• Cultural perspective

– ‘doing coffee’

– construction of identities

– social meanings of consuming

coffee

Consumption as ideological manipulation

• Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno (1972)
• ‘Culture industry’, production of consumption
• Industralisation and commercialisation of culture
• Produces mass culture, threatening individuality and creativity
• Consumers are perceived as passive and easily manipulated
• Irony: we turn to consumerism to define ourselves but consumer goods are mass produced

[Miranda and some assistants are deciding between two similar belts for an outfit.

Andy sniggers because she thinks they look exactly the same] Something funny?

Andy: No, no, nothing. Y'know, it's just that both those belts look exactly the same

to me. Y'know, I'm still learning about all this stuff

Miranda: This... 'stuff'? Oh... ok. I see, you think this has nothing to do with

you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don't know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise, it's not lapis, it's actually cerulean. You're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002,

Oscar De La Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn't it, who showed cerulean military jackets?...And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of 8 different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of stuff.

‘Consumer culture’

• Mike Featherstone (1991)
• Instrumental calculation of all aspects of life is possible
• Everything has a calculable logic
• Cultural traditions are quantifiable
• Non-culture? Post-culture?
• Exchange-value triumphs over use-value of goods

Consumption as emulation

• Thorstein Veblen (1899) Theory of the Leisure Class
• Leisure class relies on ‘conspicuous consumption’ to demonstrate wealth
• Fashion as a mark of ‘taste’ and social differentiation
• “our apparel is always in evidence and affords an indication of our pecuniary standing to all observers at the first glance” (Veblen 1899, p19)
• Irony: fashion is an intriguing mix of mimesis and individualism (Cameron 2000)

Consumption as social distinction

• Pierre Bourdieu (1979) Distinction: A social critique of the

judgment of taste

• Social class determines ‘good taste’
• But…“it must never be forgotten that the working class ‘aesthetic’ is a dominated ‘aesthetic’ which is constantly
  • bliged to define itself in terms of the dominant aesthetics…”(Bourdieu 1979, p 41)
• Social distinction marked in everyday things such as food,
  • furniture etc.

Consumption as self-expression

• Consumption, like traffic, is a system of meaning (Jean Baudrillard)
• Focus on the mode of consumption, not as end product of economic production but as practice
• Meanings are actively produced through manipulation of signs
• Identities are actively formed and performed through consumption
• Consumers not cultural dupes, but active and reflexive

Consumption as social

• Arjun Appadurai (1988) The Social Life of Things Commodities
• Commodities are inherently social
• Commodities have their own biography
• Commodified, recommodified, decommodified
• Enters and re-enters the commodity sphere

Consumption as social

• The shopping centre

Le Bon Marche, Paris 1838

See you next week for lecture on Class, Race and Inequalities

Dr Quah Ee Ling Sharon [email protected]