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Anyone in the least bit familiar with the British press will recognise that Americanisation remains a modern preoccupation, whether for good or ill. Few stop to address the many and varied, indeed multifarious and often incompatible ways, in which the seemingly self-defining term is used. Is it merely a term to describe a creeping modernisation rooted in the American experience? Is it a way of describing the overt exporting of American agendas, whether geo-political or cultural? Or is it the way people outside the USA ape America?
Perhaps Americanisation is but a synonym for an imperialism that treats the rest of the world as little more than a market and a resource for American products? But on a day that the Yale historian-pundit Paul Kennedy writes in The Guardian about the inevitability of anti-Americanism so long as the USA is the only empire in town and as The New York Times continues to debate what redevelopment might be appropriate to replace the World Trade Center the relationship between globalisation and Americanisation remains a current, vital and immediate issue, long after such diverse British writers as Hoggart and Hoskins reacted to changes in the post-war British landscape as we too were occupied by a foreign power. In a world still preoccupied with a seemingly US led celebration of globalisation it seems doubly appropriate that such topics be discussed by those BAAS members keen to engage with American and local debates given the current British preoccupation with courses relevant to the real world that are then deemed mickey mouse. Whatever such populist criticism of higher education may mean, it is reassuring that American Studies colleagues from around the UK and beyond have been part of the University of Central Lancashire-based project on Americanisation, which has been taken not as a given, but as something inherently problematic. But this very problematic dimension has been recognised as an essential strength throughout this project, no less in this final conference. Sponsored by HEFCE the project has been concerned to direct its eventual outcomes towards students learning experiences, initially through the provision of workshops, but latterly by their publication on the web of examples of best practice teaching.
Patrick Ma Ghee, the Pro-Vice Chancellor opened the conference by recognising that American Studies enjoyed possibly a unique ability to make use of students existing knowledge of things American from which critical reflection could flow. Philip Davies (De Montford University and the Eccles Library, Chairperson BAAS) reminded participants that the AMATAS project had been the only successful FTTL bid to emerge from within American Studies. The project provided a useful opportunity to counter the pervasive and corrosive belief that America could be fully appreciated by the British merely by listening to Radio 4 and reading the broadsheets. The Lancashire USA links (first Mormon bishopric/ Butch Cassidy the son of Lancashire Mormon pioneers/King Cotton) clearly illustrated how links between the USA and the UK were deeply set and often as much local and national. The guest lecture Americanisation and Globalisation was given by the man who gave us the term Mcdonaldisation, George Ritzer (College Park, Maryland) who was over just for this occasion.
He chose to focus his remarks around a concern for the globalisation of nothing, perhaps the ultimate post-modern experience, which recognises the need to appreciate that with US markets saturated US corporations need to grow overseas hence Grobalisation is already a more appropriate term than globalisation. Widely seen as a form of expansionist imperialism, globalisation runs counter to what many commentators prefer myopically perhaps to see, globalisation. Certainly the interaction between globalisation and globalisation needs serious investigation. But where once it was American productive capacity that threatened to undermine foreign industry (as British cotton manufacturers had done in the nineteenth century in places such as India) today Americans are more concerned to export their culture of consumption, with its assumptions of high rates of mobility, excess as the norm, cathedrals of consumption, high rates of affluence and the democratisation of excess.
Nevertheless it remains unwise to equate Mcdonaldisation with Americanisation, for the roots of the former clearly lie in the kinds of bureaucratic predictability associated with Weber, and increasingly it is foreign firms (Body Shop and IKEA) that now promote the next stage of Mcdonaldisation within the USA. Indeed Mcdonaldisation increasingly has its centre of gravity beyond the USA, whereas other supposedly international rather than US organisations such as the IMF seem increasingly to promote an essentially American agenda over such things as free trade. So George Ritzer is now going beyond his initial model to consider how Mcdonaldisation impacts upon local-global tensions. He suggested that such local flourishes within say McDonalds restaurants (such as beer in Germany) were essentially cosmetic and no way challenged the basic features of Mcdonaldisation. Nevertheless he is attempting to develop new theoretical insights into the tensions between global and local processes, with particular interest in the significance of a shift from place specific to place neutral production and, increasingly consumption, the contrast between a craft centre (US craft barn) where craftspeople work and sell their products and souvenir shops (as in the Magic Kingdom) where American flags probably come from South Korea, Mickey Mouse T-shirts from Morocco. Emphasising that place / non -place produces and services are linked by an often wide continuum he fended questions that tended to centre around his models seemingly lack of interest in the role of the state, whether the USA or rivals such as the EU.
Some present were a little worried that Mcdonaldisation was somewhat of a theoretical steamroller, applicable in so many circumstances it, despite the authors personal stance, encouraged an essentially pessimistic attitudes towards globalisation its inevitable, so go with it, reminiscent of the nineteenth century cry You cant fight city hall.
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Research essay sample on Mickey Mouse Nineteenth Century
