homogenized global culture took the form of
debates over Americanization during much of
the twentieth century. America seemed to be the
point of origin and power for specifically entic-
ing goods, for a system of production, marketing
and consumption, and for a generally materia-
listic value system that equated freedom and
progress with increasing satisfaction of private
wants. Successful export of American con-
sumerism seemed based not only on the inherent
dynamism of the system but also on the political,
military and media power that ensured a global
reach and a globe dominated by Coca-Cola and
McDonald’s. However, the presumption that the
export of American goods, services and media
representation directly translates into homo-
geneous global culture rests at least partly on the
same image of the passive consumer and the
automatic determination of consumption by pro-
duction that also underwrote mass consumption
perspectives. Media studies of the different sense
made of ostensibly hegemonic global culture
products (for example, Ang, 1985; Liebes and
Katz, 1990; Silj, 1988) pioneered a concern with
the local mediation of goods that clearly
extended to consumption in general (Howes,
1996; Miller, 1994). Consumption is an active
process of assimilation at the global level, given
the overall structure of unequal power, a process
captured by the unlovely word ‘glocalization’.
Moreover, it is argued that multinational compa-
nies are as clear about the lack of global homo-
geneity as academics are learning to be, moving
from older models of international marketing to
their own versions of glocalization (for example,
Kline, 1993; 1995).
Another important perspective that has served
to introduce a more complex spatial sense of
local–global connections into consumption studies
has been commodity chain analysis or systems of
provision approaches. These labels embrace quite
some divergence but we might takeas paradigm
cases two non-geographers. Mintz’s (1986)
Sweetness and Power demonstrates how
production and consumption of a single commod-
ity – sugar – brings together spatially dispersed
histories. Fine and Leopold (1993) advocate a
systems of provision approach in which relations
internal to a commodity sector are shown to struc-
ture each other. Examples from the food and
clothing industries are used to argue that this kind
of analysis throws up findings that would be
counter-intuitive on the basis of analysis of con-
sumption as a separate social moment. Work
within this perspective generally points to the
multiple lines of mediation and connection, inwhich consumption structures production as
much as the other way around, and cultural and
financial intermediaries – above all, marketing
and retailing – take on decisive strategic roles. At
the same time, this approach places the spatial
distribution of these connections to the fore.
Globalization of consumer culture is also not a
particularly even process. The older image of
American dominance has given way to a concern
with competition between regional blocks
(for example, the power of Asian production and
consumption), and with conflict directly
provoked by consumerism as a value system
(e.g. Castells, 1997, on the resurrection of
traditionalist identities and politics). Appadurai
(1990) offers a particularly complex attempt to
map the different economic, social, political and
cultural flows that generate this unevenness.
Moreover, as developed in his earlier work
(Appadurai, 1986), the idea that the rise of con-
sumer and commodity relations is inexorable
rests on a mistaken assumption that these
processes are irreversible within any system of
consumption (see also Carrier, 1994). In fact,
within consumption objects move into and out of
commodity status, from consumerist frameworks
to many others.
Finally, globalization arguments, like the mass
consumption ones before them, generally assume
an opposition between pristine indigenous
cultures existing before the intrusion of con-
sumer culture, and their afterlife as commodity
cultures – a fall from grace. Even where gains
such as wealth and standard of living are con-
ceded, there is a sense that consumer culture is
neither as good nor as authentic as what came
before. Names such as McDonald’s or Nike are
identified with global culture and the evils of
production (environment, labour relations and
exploitation) (Klein, 2000). Anthropological
research (most notably Thomas, 1991) has
pointed out both the extent and the complexity of
trade relations and non-immediate consumption
in non-modern societies, as well as the ‘entan-
glement’ of supposedly pristine consumption
cultures in wider and negotiated social networks.
Romanticization of the premodern is one
problem here, as is the idea that autonomy and
isolation could ever be a proper standard for
assessing cultures. To do so is to reify them out-
side all the history of contact and communica-
tion. It is also to assume the kind of cultural
absolutism that underlies all relativism: the
assumption that whatever a people value is
unquestionable so long as it has been self-
defined (Slater, 1997b). Rather more interesting158 THE CULTURE OF ECONOMY3029-ch07.qxd 03-10-02 10:46 AM Page 158