Plain-language explanation.
Globalisation connects the world through trade, migration, media, and technology — spreading ideas, goods, and people across borders faster than ever before. But what does this mean for local cultures? Does globalisation create a homogeneous world culture, or do local cultures resist, adapt, and transform global influences into something new? Anthropology explores these questions through local ethnography of global processes.
Core concepts and standard treatment.
Cultural globalisation theories: cultural imperialism (Schiller, Tomlinson: Western — particularly American — media, consumer culture, and values are homogenising global culture); cultural hybridisation (Canclini, Bhabha, Appadurai: local cultures creatively transform global influences, producing new hybrid forms); and glocalisation (Robertson: global and local are co-constitutive — global forms are always localised in practice). Appadurai's global cultural flows: ethnoscapes (movement of people), technoscapes (technology), finanscapes (capital), mediascapes (media images), and ideoscapes (ideologies — creating disjunctures rather than homogenisation).
Deeper theory, debates and edge cases.
Diaspora and transnationalism: diaspora communities (South Asian diaspora, Chinese diaspora, African diaspora) maintain transnational connections — remittances, cultural practices, political involvement in homeland. Transnationalism (Basch, Glick Schiller, Szanton Blanc) describes migrants living lives simultaneously in multiple nations. Second-generation identity: children of migrants negotiating hyphenated identities — British-Pakistani, Indian-American, Brazilian-German — through hybrid cultural practices. Cultural tourism: the commodification of local culture for tourist consumption; staged authenticity (MacCannell: tourists seek authenticity, locals perform it); and the impacts of tourism on cultural practices and self-understanding.
How it is applied in practice.
Cultural change in professional practice: change management must navigate cultural difference within and across organisations. International human resource management: global mobility, cultural adaptation of HR practices, and expatriate adjustment. Marketing in diverse markets: how global brands localise (McDonald's menus, Coca-Cola campaigns) — and the risk of cultural insensitivity. International development: failure of top-down "best practice" transfer highlights the importance of culturally grounded approaches. Global health: cultural factors in disease transmission, healthcare seeking behaviour, vaccine hesitancy, and health system design — illustrated dramatically by Ebola response in West Africa (2014-16) where trust and cultural norms were central to epidemic control.