George Ritzer - The Globalization of Nothing 2

The Globalization of Nothing

GEORGE RITZER

University of Maryland

Copyright 2007 by Pine Forge Press, an Imprint of Sage Publications, Inc.

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Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ritzer, George.
The globalization of nothing 2 / George Ritzer.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4129-4021-4 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4129-4022-1 (pbk.)
1. Globalization. 2. GlobalizationSocial aspects. 3. International relations. 4. Nothing (Philosophy) I. Title. II. Title: Globalization of nothing two.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

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George Ritzer is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, where he has also been a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher and won a Teaching Excellence Award. He was also awarded the 2000 Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award by the American Sociological Association, and in 2004 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by LaTrobe University, Melbourne, Australia. He is perhaps best known for several editions of The McDonaldization of Society (translated into more than a dozen languages) and other related books, including Expressing America: A Critique of the Global Credit Card Society (1995) and Enchanting a Disenchanted World: Revolutionizing the Means of Consumption (1999, 2004). He edited the Encyclopedia of Social Theory (2005) and is the founding editor of the Journal of Consumer Culture. He recently completed editing the 11-volume Encyclopedia of Sociology (2007) and The Blackwell Companion to Globalization (2007) and is currently writing a new book, The Outsourcing of Everything, with Craig Lair.

T his should have been a simple and easy revision coming so soon after the publication of the original edition of this book. I felt pleased with that edition and believed that this iteration would involve only minor changes. However, once I began taking the book apart to, as in automobile mechanics, check out each of its component parts, I discovered a number of problems under the hood. Above all, I found that I had really written two books. One, the book I had originally intended to write, was on globalization, especially glocalization and the companion termgrobalizationcoined there for the first time. The second dealt with my sense of nothing and something, as well as the something-nothing continuum. I discovered that I had to spend so much time developing and explaining the way those terms were used, highly counterintuitively, in the book that it ended up taking up more space than, and tended to distract one from, the discussion of globalization.

Therefore, the first thing I decided was that I needed to (re)write only one book that clearly focused on the main topicglobalization. Thus, this is now much more clearly a book about globalization, and that is made abundantly clear in the largely new first chapter that now offers an overview of globalization, of globalization theory, and of the unique ways in which those topics are addressed in this volume. It is also clear in the last four chapters of the book that deal, successively, with elective affinities in the globalization of nothing, implications for the approach developed here for theorizing the relationship between globalization and culture, implications for understanding the globalization of consumer culture and the opposition to it, and ways of coping globally with the key problem identified in this bookloss amidst monumental abundance.

This dramatic expansion of the attention devoted to globalization means that since I wanted, if anything, to shorten the book in order to make its basic argument clearer, the amount of space devoted to nothing and something had to be reduced. The original editions two basic chapters on is new and brings together under the heading of Nothing: Caveats and Clarifications a number of issues that were scattered throughout the original edition of the book. Thus, nothing and something are now dealt with tightly, coherently, and briefly in three contiguous chapters.

In order to make the book shorter and more focused, several things have been deleted from this edition. First, the old have also been eliminated.

Thus, overall, this is a shorter, tighter, and more focused book that deals focally and directly with globalization, at least as it relates to nothing and something.

The major additions to the book are almost all on the topic of globalization. communities) and it is now focused on what can be done about the problem(s) identified in the book. I hope that readers come away from this revision with not only a new way of looking at globalization but also a sense of the problems posed by the grobalization of nothing and the need to find ways to deal with its pernicious aspects.

I would like to thank Becky Smith, developmental editor with Pine Forge Press, for undertaking the initial deconstruction of the original edition of this book. It was that deconstruction that allowed me to see a number of things that I had not seen before, especially the uncomfortable coexistence of two books within one. I added that and other insights provided by Becky to my own sense that the book had to be much more focused on globalization. The reconstruction of the book that follows is not quite what Becky had in mind, but I could not have done it nearly as well, or quite in the same way, without her help.

Finally, I need to thank Ben Penner, my editor at Pine Forge, for his belief in this book, indeed all my books with Pine Forge, and his material and intellectual help with this revision. He also found several excellent reviewers for this new editionDana Stukuls Eglitis, Celestino Fernandez, Karen Bettez Halnon, and a fourth anonymous reviewer. The former three have been, and continue to be, valued reviewers of various plans for, and iterations of, this book as well as of others of mine published by Pine Forge Press.