University of Helsinki
THE DOMESTICATION OF WORLDWIDE MODELS
Session chairs: Marjaana Rautalin, Jukka Syväterä and Valtteri Vähä-Savo (University of Tampere)
Globalization is often seen as an unescapable process that leads to convergence and homogenization. Alternatively, the ways local actors adapt global fashions to local contexts, mix them with local traditions and transform them into new hybrid models and styles is often celebrated as an antidote to the homogenizing effects of globalization. But there are also mediating views. Some scholars have talked about glocalization, but there are a host of other concepts, such hybridization, indigenization, vernacularization, and so on.
These concepts stress that global ideas are always domesticated to the local conditions. Then again, world society theorists have talked about decoupling: governments enact worldwide models to look “modern” in the eyes of the global community but fail to implement them in practice. Finally, we can talk about the way local actors align their policies and practices with those adopted elsewhere: throughout the world, actors react to the same signals and events, even though in different, perhaps opposite ways, which results in a global synchronization of actors’ moves, quite like the way birds behave in a flock. For this session, we invite papers that reflect on and employ such mediating concepts.
Key concepts: Globalization, domestication, worldwide models, hydridization, indigenization, vernacularization.