Beyond Cultural Imperialism: Cultural Globalization as Hybridization

Globalization, in its simple terms, has tended to be seen as a process in which economic unification of the globe comes into being through the integration national economies under a single grid of market. Rather than viewing globalization in merely economic terms, this article first aims to reconceptualize globalization in its broader sense as a multidimensional social process by looking into the various dimensions of globalization in the light of what Tomlinson (1999) calls complex connectivity. In doing so, this study secondly intends to critically examine two widely accepted and interrelated notions; (1) globalization, as a phenomenon, primarily associates with the economic integration of national economies into a single world market, operating in compliance with the creed of capitalism; and (2) globalization, in its cultural sense, refers to hegemonic domination of the West on the rest of the world appearing in the form of "cultural imperialism" or "Americanization". To put it in an argumentative way, the article suggests that globalization does refer neither to the march of capitalism as an all-embracing economic system on a global scale nor to a new version of cultural imperialism signalling the convergence toward common set of cultural traits and practices, goes under the name of Westernization or Americanization