Читать книгу Globalization - George Ritzer - Страница 58

In this view, globalization is an inexorable process and there is nothing that can be done to stop it – it is a “runaway world.” While there is clearly great economic and political power involved in and behind globalization, the idea that nothing can be done about it only serves to reify the process. Reification is the idea, derived from Marxian theory, that people come to accord social processes a reality of their own and come to feel that even though they created, and in fact are in many ways, those processes, there is nothing they can do about them (Ritzer and Stepnisky 2017 : 277). As a result, these processes come to have a life of their own and instead of being controlled by people, they come to control people. While reification certainly occurs, it is not inevitable. Those who see globalization as inevitable and beyond their control are guilty of reifying the process and if they persist in doing so, it will be beyond their control; there will be nothing to be done about it. However, reification, like globalization, is a social process and this means that people are involved in, create, and regularly re-create both reified and globalized structures and processes through their involvement (or lack of involvement) in them (Berger and Luckmann 1967). Thus, just as people create these realities, they can certainly change them by altering the nature of their involvement in them. Of course, this is no easy matter, but in principle no social process, including one as all-encompassing as globalization, is inexorable; all social processes are open to change by those who create them and are involved in them.