Читать книгу Globalization - George Ritzer - Страница 76

Consumerism and consumer culture are at the heart of Americanization. Victoria de Grazia’s Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through 20th-Century Europe (de Grazia 2005: 3) examines the deeper forces in the Americanization of consumer culture, but with a somewhat different focus on:

The rise of the great imperium [the United States] with the outlook of a great emporium. This was the United States during the reign of what I call the Market Empire. An empire without frontiers, it arose during the twentieth century, reached its apogee during its second half, and showed symptoms of disintegration toward its close. Its most distant perimeters would be marked by the insatiable ambitions of its leading corporations for global markets, the ever vaster sales territories charted by state agencies and private enterprise, the far-flung influence of its business networks, the coin of recognition of its ubiquitous brands, and the intimate familiarity with the American way of life that all these engendered in peoples around the world. Its impetus and instruments derived from the same revolution in mass consumption that was ever more visibly reshaping the lives of its own citizens.

It was, in her view, the exportation of America’s innovations in the realm of mass consumption that helped lead, through mass marketing, to the “fostering of common consumption practices across the most diverse cultures” (de Grazia 2005: 3).

De Grazia does not focus on seemingly superficial exports like Coca-Cola, but rather on much subtler phenomena that settled far more deeply in the fabric of other, especially European, societies and later many other societies. Among the exports dealt with by de Grazia are the service ethic, the chain store, big-brand goods, corporate advertising, and “supermarketing.” By the end of the twentieth century Americanization had progressed so far, and these and other changes had taken hold so well in Europe (and elsewhere), that the US had lost its leadership position: “Europe was as much a consumer society as the United States” (de Grazia 2005: 463). As China’s economy expands, it stands to become the greatest consumer society in the world and is likely to far surpass the US in its consumption.

The arguments made by de Grazia suggest it is in these deeper, more basic realms, that the most important impact of Americanization is found and felt. In addition, if activists really wish to counter Americanization, it is on these levels and against these phenomena that they really must direct their energies. However, it is far more difficult to locate many of these, let alone attack them. Many of these phenomena have made their way deep into the fabric of societies around the world with the result that an attack on them becomes an assault on one’s own society. It is far more difficult to oppose one’s own society than it is to oppose an external “enemy” like the US. It is this that makes the task of those opposed to Americanization so daunting, if not impossible.