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Thesis Eleven

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THE GLOBALIZATION OF

NOTHINGA Review Symposium of GeorgeRitzer: The Globalization of

Nothing(Pine Forge/Sage, 2003)

1. PETER BEILHARZ

Globalization signifies everything, and nothing. George Ritzers greatcontribution in his new book is to manoeuvre these two terms together, tothe extent that they are seen as inseparable, as mutually constitutive. Theresult is a study as catching, or fetching, as his The McDonaldization ofSociety, Expressing America, or Enchanting a Disenchanted World. Perhapsit is more like the metalevel theory which contains these other arguments.For those studies, say of McDonalds and American Express, are cultural butalso institutional and specific in form. The Globalization of Nothingworks at

a different level of abstraction, at the same time more abstract and moreconcrete. The critique of globalized culture here is precisely that it is emptyand time-less, not eternal, but outside time and place.

The focus of Ritzers sociology persists: it is on culture, rather than pro-duction. The logic of Ritzers optic is to view, for example, housing, or beer,or cola, all of which are plainly products, as consumer-side phenomena. Mostof us, in the West, encounter these as consumer phenomena. What is changing,on this account, is the further homogenization of consumption throughglobalization. Nothingness, here, refers to the sense that consumptive life inthe West is increasingly conceived centrally and controlled formally, while com-paratively devoid of distinctive substantive content. Objects or things never-theless need to be plotted conceptually across a somethingnothingcontinuum: there are placesnon-places, thingsnon-things, peoplenon-people, servicesnon-services. And none of this analysis is more than descrip-tive, in the first instance; we may, in fact, individually or collectively prefernon-things to things, and so on. Ritzer, like the rest of us closer to or furtheraway from critical theory, has to deal sociologically as well as personally with

what you might call the democracy of the market, where consumers chooseor select goods and services which are analytically empty. Ritzer does not

Thesis Eleven, Number 76, February 2004: 103114SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)Copyright 2004 SAGE Publications and Thesis ElevenCo-op Ltd[0725-5136(200402)76;103114;040112]DOI:10.1177/0725513604040112


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succumb here to nostalgia, that occupational hazard of cultural critics; but hedoes nevertheless insist that we (us, if not others) need to seek to address whatseems to be a situation ofloss amidst monumental abundance.

Ritzers addition to this consists not only in the innovative coupling or(in a certain sense) identification of globalization and nothingness. He also

wants to modify the emptiness of globalization-talk, by introducing the dis-tinction between glocalizationand grobalization. The first, as in the workof Roland Robertson or various tillers in the field of anthropology, refers tothe creativity of action at local level, or the cultural innovation sometimesreferred to as hybridity. Ritzer coins the term grobalization to refer to theother dynamic, that which Castoriadis calls the dynamic of rational mastery.This is the growth dynamic of globalization, which Ritzer subsets through

three other processes: capitalism, Americanization and McDonaldization.Capitalism frames Americanization and McDonaldization; the three can beread politically as symbolically identical, especially by opponents, forexample those who seek to blow up McDonalds sites in protest against

America and/or capitalism.This world could be viewed as postmodern, but it does not need to be.

As Ritzer has long argued, McDonaldization looks more like modernism, afordism, the further industrialization and rationalization of an already existinginstitutional regime and production culture. The logic of globalization, of

course, means that this is McDonalds for some, and haute cuisine for someothers. On a global scale, they have nothing; we purchase it. As in DavidBrooks Bobos in Paradise, we, with the means, discover the aesthetic blissof imperfection, and faked primitive in consumption, to relieve us of themonotony of a prepackaged world. We combat planned obsolescence withrevived retro. Smaller, on this account, might be more beautiful, or at leastproximity might confer distinction. This is not, however, a romantic yearningfor return, however privileged it might be. Place may be an idea with aromantic calling, but we can also make it modern. As Bauman insists onarguing, place-making is a precondition of politics, even in a restless world.Refusal to commit to place is tantamount to wilfully creating the pile of trashbehind us that drives us forward, to vary Benjamins image. It is good neitherfor politics, nor for ecology.

Ritzer does not claim this connection, and much of his sympathy is withWeber rather than Marx, but I wonder, in reading this, whether he is notasking us (among other things) to revisit and reopen the idea of alienation.Marx famously concretized and turbocharged the generic romantic idea ofalienation, or strangeness, by fixing it to production, more specifically tolabour. As the notes in the Paris Manuscripts indicate, alienation should

henceforth be connected to the process of labour; to its results, the product;to our fellows; and to our species-being. A hundred and sixty years later, inthe West, the cathedrals of capitalism grow ever taller, and we are, many ofus, interpellated by them as consumers. The point is less, narrowly, that we

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are alienated as consumers than that our experiences as consumers may wellbe empty, or filled only by such glimpses of intimacy or care as we can forceinto them.

Ritzers practical point, here, is simply that it is easier to be human tothe staff or customers in a diner than in McDonalds, where the script is lessdriven by pre-established format. Second-order McDonaldization McHos-pitals, McUniversities forces the template, makes it harder for the partiesinvolved to work outside the box. We need to work outside these boxes, orat least this possibility should be available to us as part of a standard reper-toire of everyday life. The alternative is more alienation, more commodityfetishism, more indifference to the humans who mediate these worlds ofthings.

If all this sounds grim, it does not mean that Ritzers book is forbidding.It is immensely witty and clever. The wiseacre critique of RitzersMcDonaldizationbook, of course, is that the book resembles the object itcriticizes Ritzer is charged with producing McSociology. Is this clever newbook, then, not open to the parallel feedback loop change, that it is vacuous,empty? I dont think so, though we can already hear the critics warming uptheir word-processors. The Globalization of Nothingworks on the glocaliza-tion axis, not that of grobalization. Glocalization works on something. AsRitzer argues, a lot of nothing is still nothing. As he suggests, in closing the

book, the real issue with McSociology is the Americanized grobal textbook,bite-sized, culturally empty or particularistic and full of lard. Ritzers contri-bution is to stay working at the personal worriessocial problems nexus

which C. Wright Mills identified as sociologys primary place of activity.Ritzers work does not claim to be a culture; it is a prosthetic, in Freuds sense,a means to help mediate the world. This is sociology not as hamburger, butas habitus. It is a door, not a window.

2. TREVOR HOGAN

The Globalization of Nothing is a sustained meditation on loss amidstmonumental abundance. Nothing is important to George Ritzer and in thishe is onto something. Nothing is systematically produced; the problem is notthat it is without form but rather without substantive content. We canconceive of nothing, and produce and consume nothing only in relation tosomething. But if the world is increasingly a flux of non-places, non-things,non-persons, and non-services, all continually reinforcing each other andmultiplying a lot of nothing, this is not so much a threat to human socialityas its very expression. Contra Sartres Being and Nothingness, Ritzer is sug-

gesting that we are being in nothing: the world, our world, is becomingempty by the very means by which we are living it. The Globalization ofNothingshows the social form of nothing, how it is produced, observed, atthe point of its consumption.

Beilharz et al.: A Review Symposium of George Ritzer 105




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Ritzer is a sociologist, not a philosopher, so for starters the title has afat five-syllable passive noun that is one of sociologys less edifying contri-butions to global discourses of the past three decades: yep, here it is again,

folks: globalization. But Ritzer is nothing if not smart like Roland Robert-son before him, he puts the term to work by showing how a deceptivelysimple but sustained description of the social processes of globalizationreveal a novel tragedy of culture that confronts humankind in the 21stcentury. By tracing the ways in which nothing is being globalized, Ritzerreveals the spiritual emptiness that confronts us all in our everyday lives.Humans are awfully clever: we have created systems of material culturesthat are comparatively inexpensive, convenient, efficient, fast, mobile,abundant and self-reproductive. These systems are ever expansive and

increasingly incorporate the world as a whole and all human societies in away that, potentially at least, enables all to participate in these benefits. Sofar so good. But these very same processes and systems are empty. As weall learned in math classes at school, more of nothing is still nothing. SoRitzer, being the good sociologist that he is, coins another neologism:Grobalization, defined as globalizing processes that are concerned withgrowth, or rather the production of super-abundance, material wealth,efficient order, speed and the fantasies of the worlds number one culturalempire, America (capitalism, McDonaldization, Americanization). By this

definition, Grobalization is not only the source of nothing but its own mul-tiplier. Ritzers close descriptions of these processes from the side ofconsumer culture shows that the grobalization of nothing is not a neutralprocess but one which actively eats up places, people, things and servicesand replaces them with its own centrally conceived and controlled formsthat are largely lacking in distinctive content. Ritzer provides many examplesof these processes that trigger the readers own. I recently read, for example,a report of a certain US academic expert on Internet usage and addiction

who has since established his own Center for Online Addiction, a virtualclinic providing direct and affordable online counseling: virtual homeopa-thy, or give the dopes more opium.

The Globalization of Nothing seems to have two kinds of readershipsin mind: North American sociologists who need a metatheoretical apparatusto explain to them why and how a sociology of globalization is of deadlyseriousness, and an informed general reader who shares Ritzers sense thatit is possible to live inside the whale and still worry about truth, beauty andthe good. Ritzers urbane, witty critique is a cry of pain from the centre ofgrobalization: America. Readers who live in and off American abundance willimmediately appreciate the truth of his claims, his aesthetic distaste, that

together reveal the moral kernel of his critique. This is not a book to be readby the worlds two-thirds poor for they are not experiencing loss amidstabundance but rather loss because of others abundance. For the poor, thestory is not lamentation for what has been loss in abundance, but that of





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resentment borne of exclusion from it even as they are forced to work forits reproduction.

And yet, I fear that Ritzer is too nice a guy to express the rage, the fury

that nothing really demands of us. Instead of a savage Swiftian satire or arighteous jeremiad, Ritzers critique is well-tempered, his humour is good-natured, and he takes great care to anticipate possible objections to hisargument. Once upon a time, Ritzer would have been called a humanist. Ina world of heartless know-nothings perhaps he might like to wear such alabel as a badge of honour. What is really objectionable about the grobal-ization of nothing, however, is its sheer violence and metaphysical emptinessas it eats up our too-frail capacities to get by in everyday life. Ritzer exposesthe butt-ugly brutality of the grobalization of nothing but seeks not to repro-

duce its horror on the page. Nevertheless, the ethical concerns of the authorare present, if not foregrounded.

I detect three kinds of moral stories at work here, and all of them sharea common concern for the future of humanityquahumanity. The first is theproverbial frog in the water that is boiled alive because it does not realize thatthe temperature is slowly rising. Here Ritzer finds common ground withenvironmentalists that argue that we are unable to act with urgency to globalthreats to human survival simply because we have lost our sensitivity tonature. It is not so much false consciousness, as Marxists decry, as it is no- or

un-consciousness. Another moral issue that appears to animate Ritzer relatesto this lack of consciousness: as grobalization processes increase their per-vasive control of all arenas of everyday life across the globe, could it be thatwe humans also lose all critical perspectives to be able to make meaningfuljudgements and choices? Grobalization not only reduces choices, but itcoerces consumers to make non-choices (without the necessary informationand a broad-enough perspective) within highly constrained and artificialcontexts. Ritzers concern here reminds me of the early 1970s debate triggeredby the planting of plastic trees along an LA freeway: it prompted an infamousarticle with the ironic title of Whats Wrong with Plastic Trees? Indeed.

As Ritzer laments, people come to prefer the empty to the full: theydefine the empty as the full and the full as the empty. In the case of plastictrees, the fullempty dichotomy could be replaced by artificialreal withequal effect. These kind of distinctions are labelled old-fashioned modernbut as Ritzer himself notes in the appendix, that is precisely his point: theerosion of the meaning of such distinctions is not an epistemological errorby those espousing them, but rather a social erosion of distinctions renderedby the grobalization of nothing. Finally, Ritzers third existential anxiety andmoral challenge recalls Greshams Law of Money, that increases in nothing

tend to leave less and less room for something. This might also be called awin-lose, zero-sum game, or again as Ritzer himself puts it: not only does alot of nothing not add up to something, but the increasing quantity of nothingleaves less space for something.





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Ritzers ethical concerns and political arguments are presented in a sug-gestive and democratic manner (he offers the information and the broadscope for making informed judgement). As such, these concerns remain

much less developed than the meta-theory presented in the first half of thebook. The book might be seen as an interlude in a larger Ritzer symphony.In his earlier tomes he has presented a series of analyses of modern culturesof grobalization and it might now be time to develop a more explicit set ofconstructive arguments for a more liveable and sustainable world that is theglocalization of something.

The ethical challenges of the globalization of nothing might have beenenhanced, too, with another chapter or two exploring more ambiguous casestudies than the Internet. The Internet is the prime example for Ritzers case

but is it the best choice of case study? It is certainly a leading edge infor-mation technology that enables virtual connections and forms of mediatedcommunication between humans in virtual time and space. I wonder, though,

whether or not it might be more illuminating to use examples that we takeas part of our social worlds in real time and space? Whilst The Globalizationof Nothing is best read in conjunction with his earlier books, I would haveliked more on the fields of tensions between grobalization and glocalizationprocesses that Ritzer succinctly delineates in principle such as team sportsand popular music, for example. Both are realms of human endeavour that

require persons, places, things and services interconnected and yet are under-going extraordinary transformations by grobalization processes also. In thissense, team sports and popular music cultures are better test cases for Ritzersarguments than the Internet because they are quintessentially modern formsof culture that were also culture industries from the outset. In other words,I am particularly interested to try to understand how Ritzers approach togrobalization and glocalization processes work in relation to the fields of ourdeepest fantasies and dreams as connected to organized sports, music, film,the performing and visual arts, etc. that is, where people are interacting inreal time and space for no other reasons but to participate in wider endeav-ours that produce meanings and fantasies for others to consume.

Nevertheless, if nothing else, The Globalization of Nothing is reallysomething. In depicting the insidious spread of nothing, its insinuation intoeverything, Ritzer provides both a sociology of nothing and its grobalization.But Ritzer is not an iconoclast here. He is both more modest and moreambitious, for he wants to imagine that nothing need not be our globaldestiny and he invites the reader to join him in imagining the world asotherwise. As John Ruskin lamented over 130 years ago: iconoclasm doesntgrasp the problem you can smash the icons but not convince people of

the emptiness of their imaginations. This is still the problem of modern noth-ingness. Ritzer provides the analytical means for describing the social realityof its spread and reproduction through grobalization processes. Pop will eatitself. Consumption is cannibalism. And as David Byrne once sang: Heaven





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is a place where nothing ever happens. But what to do about our imagina-tions? There is always a buck to made out of our fantasies and dreams, butthe dreams themselves do not need to be empty. Ritzer depicts the night-

mare but we still need to dream otherwise. Then again, Sleepers wake!There is a world outside, and sometimes it is better that it is not given whollyover to our fantasies, or at least to those whose business it is to sell nothingto the world, a world made over in the image of nothing.

3. BERYL LANGER

The Globalization of Nothing is an engaging book on a dispiritingsubject loss amidst monumental abundanceand the death of the local

which will likely play to mixed reviews in a number of theoretical subcul-tures. On globalization, Ritzers thesis of an inexorable shift from global/local to grobal/ glocal has sobering implications for ethnographic andpost-colonial celebration of agency, creativity and vigorous hybridity. Whathappens, he asks, when all thats left of local culture is what remains withinthe glocal, so that hybrid forms are inexorably leached of locally specificcontent (something) and weighted towards the grobal (nothing)? His thesison consumption is similarly provocative to theoretical optimists. For Ritzer,the world of consumption is increasingly characterized by nothing, by which

he means a social form that is generally centrally conceived, controlled andcomparatively devoid of distinctive substantive content. If hes right, the taskof humanizing capitalism through creative consumption might challenge theingenuity of Michel de Certeaus tricky poachers and Daniel Millers thriftyshoppers. Look forward to the inevitable flurry of critical activity in defenceof everyday tactics and DIY construction of something from nothing. Thefact that Ritzers categories are ideal types on a continuum necessarilyinclusive of things more something than nothing, or that his concludingchapter expresses hope for a future defined by the creation of entirely newforms of something, is unlikely to deflect the umbrage of those who chooseto read his analysis as one which denigrates popular taste and defines con-sumers as passive dopes. It doesnt, but thats not going to stand in the wayof argument.

Ritzer will not be an easy target for the defenders of popular pleasure;a man who includes Jerry Seinfeld in his list of contributors to the philos-ophy of nothing is hard to cast in the role of a latter-day Adorno. Take thechapter title Meet the Nullities, for example an evocation of Weber (thisnullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never beforeachieved) and TV sitcom (Meet the Flintstones) available only to someone

steeped in both social theory and popular culture. Notwithstanding the gloomof his cultural prognosis, Ritzers tone is cheerfully American Capra ratherthan Kafka Weberian in theory but not in spirit. While this invites criticismfrom yet another quarter, it is clear from Ritzers consistently accessible





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writing that high theorists of the humourless kind are not his target audience.The legions of undergraduates encouraged to engage with Max Weber byreading The McDonaldization of Society are testament to the pedagogical

wisdom of this strategy.Ritzers continuing commitment to Weber is signaled in the construc-

tion of something and nothing as mutually constitutive ideal types usedto generate a further set of ideal-typical oppositions between places/non-places, things/non-things, people/non-people, and services/non-services,and the notion of a powerful elective affinity between grobalization andnothing. It is also apparent in the specification of McDonaldization as aprocess separable from both capitalism and Americanization, but equallyimplicated in grobalization the growing world-wide ability of, especially,

largely capitalistic organizations and modern states to increase their powerand reach throughout the world. For this reader, however, the book hasequally powerful echoes of the Frankfurt School and the early Marx con-nections that Ritzer himself is perhaps unable, and certainly unwilling, toacknowledge. Marx is of course avowedly central to his theory of grobal-ization, but it is the economic Marx of the profit imperative and economicimperialism, not the philosophical Marx of alienation. Indeed, Ritzer explic-itly argues that a concept like nothing is anathema to Marx, declaring it toophilosophical for his tastes and interests. Not according to my reading of the

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, most obviously in the section onEstranged Labour, but also the Power of Money in Bourgeois Society. Thesepassages speak to directly to what Ritzer identifies as the problem of noth-ingness.

The representation of global consumer culture in The Globalization ofNothing calls out for the re-articulation of Marxs theory of alienation tocapture the estrangement and emptiness that is the downside of a social

world shaped by continuous and increasingly meaningless consumption aworld evoked in bleakly comic American films like Clerks and MallRats,novels like Capital, Volume I by Australian writer Anthony Macris, the lyricsof Tom Waits Step Right Up, and so on. Ritzers talent for typology wouldmake easy work of transposing the four-fold process of estrangement fromthe sphere of production to the sphere of consumption. Critical work onalienated consumption is sorely needed, as evidenced by Daniel Millersrecent suggestion, in A Theory of Virtualism, that if social theorists wouldonly stop fixating on production they might recognize consumer society asthe utopian solution to the historical dialectic. There is arguably an urgentneed for a new theory of alienated consumption untainted by any hint of theelitism evoked by critics in their routine rejections of the Frankfurt School.

Were Ritzer to overcome his reluctance to assume the very un-Americanmantle of Marxism, he might be just the theorist to provide one.

On the subject of the Frankfurt School, I would want to argue that thereare strong parallels between Ritzers conceptualization of nothing in terms of





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centrally conceived social forms that are comparatively devoid of distinctivesubstantive content and Horkheimer and Adornos conceptualization of aculture industry which intentionally integrates its consumers from above.

Ritzer explicitly rejects the connection by arguing that his analysis is basedon a set of objective criteria, and that while it does have a critical thrust,the bulk of it is devoted to outlining what is meant by nothing and thendescribing the trend toward, and ultimately the globalization of, nothing. Ithink that the difference between them might be more one of style than sub-stance. While many of Adornos comments on popular culture range frommisguided to offensive, providing fuel for the elitist tag that allows the cultureindustry essay to be dismissed out of hand, the critical fusion of Marx oncommodification and Weber on rationalization is perhaps closer to Ritzer than

he would care to acknowledge.There is so much more to be said about The Globalization of Nothing.

It is theoretically sharp and substantively rich, but I have some quibblesaround the edges. Why, for example, does mass-production necessarilymovetowards the nothing end of the continuum? Does this mean the end of allhope that technology might be used to produce what William Morris referredto as a beautiful world to live in, a world in which something is accessibleto the many rather than the few? Is Ritzers use of the term enchantment inrelation to everything from tasty food to great good places too broad? Is his

use of the term in this way quite what Weber had in mind when he spokeof the disenchantment of the world? At the same time, Im aware that mostof the questions I might raise are probably answered already by Ritzer thisis a remarkably tight book and that in any case such quibbles are triflingin the context of the book as a whole. In the face of nothing and its globaliz-ation, we have at least the consolations of comedy, such as Woody Allenseternal nothingness is OK if youre dressed for it.

4. GEORGE RITZER

Running through this excellent set of review essays is the issue: Whydont I use more Marxian and neo-Marxian (especially critical theory)approaches to address the concerns ofThe Globalization of Nothing? This,of course, is not the first time that issue has been raised about my work inthis area, especiallyThe McDonaldization of Society. (By the way, I thinkBeilharz is right to say that Nothingis a more meta-level argument, but it isone that not only encompasses my earlier books of this genre, but goesbeyond them in a number of ways.) Marxian theory is, of course, representedin Nothing, especially in the discussion of capitalism as one of the driving

forces in the grobalization of nothing. And Marxian ideas appear elsewherein my work, especially the means of consumption in Enchanting a Disen-chanted World, as well as in various places in Expressing America: A Critiqueof the Global Credit Card Society. Nonetheless, it is true that I tend to





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de-emphasize Marxian approaches while privileging others, especiallyWeberian theory.

The irony is that I am probably more comfortable with a Marxian

approach and have written a great deal about it in an array of textbooks andother outlets. I am a great admirer of Marxs own theory and often describeit to my theory students as the most beautiful, the most symmetrical, of allsocial theories. I also think that it is, if anything, even more relevant today

with the demise of communist societies and the fact that capitalism is nowfree to roam the world without any significant alternative to it. I have a similarfamiliarity with, and appreciation for, many neo-Marxian theories includingthose of the critical school, Walter Benjamin and even the early Baudrillardbefore his break with Marx and Marxism. Given all of that, why am I so infre-

quently drawn actually to usea Marxian approach?One factor is the optimism of Marxs own theory, as well as that of many

neo-Marxists. I cannot abide the optimistic view that all will be well in thefuture when the proletariat (or some other set of agents) sees the light, whenthe inherent contradictions finally bring the system low, when we are finallyable to communicate with one another freely and openly, and so on. They allseem to me the kind of hokey, overly romantic endings common to hundredsof Hollywood B movies that I saw in my youth. I much preferred the raremovie that lacked a happy ending, a deus ex machinathat magically solved

all problems in the end. Hence, in social theory I am far more drawn to suchimages as the iron cage of rationality and the tragedy of culture than thoseof a communist (or any other type of) nirvana. Behind the former images isa view of the world in which there is no escaping the cage and the onlypossible outcome is tragic. I dont like those images, I wish it were otherwise,but in the end they offer what seem to me to be the most likely scenarios.My own contributions here, my own efforts to be even more depressing anddistressing than Weber and Simmel, include the grobalization of nothing, thedeath of the local, and loss amidst monumental abundance. Hogan is right;my book is a cry of pain from the centre of globalization.

Given such a world view, how can I be such a nice guy (Hogan) or,as Langer puts it, cheerfully American Capra rather than Kafka (the latteranother of my heroes with a suitably depressing outlook on life)? One answer,I guess, is that it is better to whistle past the graveyard (or the iron cage)than to spend all ones time weeping about it and the fact that one will soonbe in residence there. Another is that despite my jaundiced view of the world,and my bleak view of its future, in the end I hope that I am wrong and thatmy work will help lead people to see the light and to alter our seeminglyinexorable march in the direction of nothingness (okay, so Im not as immune

to those B movies as Id like you to think). It is my hope that readers aremore taken with a good-humored Capraesque critique than being beatenupside the head by a Marxian (Karl) analysis (although Groucho Marxsapproach might work better!).





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Yet, the critics are right to argue for the relevance of various Marxianconcepts, not onlyalienation(how many people are naturally interconnectedto the various forms of nothing that predominate increasingly across the

globe?), but also false consciousness(many, perhaps most, think of nothingas something) and commodities(increasingly nothing) and theirfetishizationas well as the reificationof systems that are nothing and are productive ofadditional forms of nothing. Indeed, the whole issue of commodities (as wellas use valueand exchange value) needs to be rethought in light of the factthat in the contemporary world almost all of them are nothing (what is theuse value and exchange value of nothing?).

It is the idea of alienation that has the most obvious relevance to mywork. In a way, that work amounts to an extension of that Marxian idea from

production to consumption. It is a 21st century critique of alienated con-sumption based on the assumption that, at least for much of the developed

world, consumption is coming to rival, if not supplant, production at thecenter of most peoples lives. Such people are clearlynotinterconnected withtheir fast food restaurants and other franchises, their credit cards and the com-panies that purvey them, the many cathedrals of consumption to which theyare lured, and most clearly the wide array of forms of nothing that increas-ingly pervades their lives. Of course, many come to fetishize these inter-related systems leading to a reified world of consumption that comes to

exercise increasing domination over peoples lives. The idea of exploitationcan also be extended to apply to this domain since consumers are generallypaying a great deal for what amounts to little, in fact to nothing.

In spite of such a critical view, I am generally reluctant to do whatHogan suggests and develop a more explicit set of constructive argumentsfor a more liveable and sustainable world. As desirable as it might be, sucha vision, especially if it is totalized, would be yet another of those happyendings that make me so uncomfortable. In any case, I adopt Marxs ownposition here that it is far more useful to critique existing social realities thanit is to create yet another utopian vision of the world. Nevertheless, there areplaces in my work e.g. the last chapter ofMcDonaldization, my essay onMcUniversity in Hayes and Wynyards The McDonaldization of Higher Edu-cation(2002) where I do offer a number of constructive suggestions suchas the use of advanced technologies in the classroom to help de-McDonaldizeeducation.

One point in the Marxian vein raised by Hogan is the seeming irrele-vance ofThe Globalization of Nothingto the two-thirds of the world that ispoor. However, as is pointed out in the book, many of them are increasinglythe producersof nothing. Their tragedy, in this sense, is that they are sur-

rounded by various forms of nothing that they cannot afford to buy. Yet, ina perverse way they are advantaged since this often forces them to continueto consume something. Lest we romanticize this, most would gladly swaptheir abundance of something for just a bit of the rest of the worlds nothing.





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Hence, continuing with a Marxian approach, the world of consumption, likeproduction, is upside down and is in need of being righted that is, the rushto nothing needs to be supplanted by a search for something.

Unlike many of my value-free colleagues in mainstream American soci-ology (and increasingly much of the rest of the world, as well), I think goodsociology is passionate sociology, stemming often from some set of thingsthat the analyst finds painful. Well, the global spread of fast food restaurants,credit cards, the various cathedrals of consumption, and now nothing inflictpain on me, and a variety of good natured analyses have sprung from thatpain. I am staking out a domain in social theory similar to that of MichaelMoore, the documentary film maker, who is famous for his kindly andhumorous treatments of painful subjects in movies like Roger and Me(plant

closings and unemployment in the auto industry) and Bowling for Columbine(firearms abuse).

Finally, one key point that is lost in these reviews is the argument madein my most recent book that nothing is not necessarily bad and somethingis not necessarily good. The global sale of life-preserving medicines is anexample of nothing, and a pogrom is an example of something. Thus, whilethe thrust of my book is to critique the grobalization of nothing, a far morecomplex and nuanced argument is embedded there that invites the reader totease out carefully the relationships between grobalization/glocalization and

something/nothing. Yes, all the power lies with nothing, especially its grobal-ization, but there is hope in something, especially in its glocalized forms. Ihate to let you down and close on such a seemingly positive note, but Imrunning out of space. Furthermore, Seinfeld(about nothing, as usual) is aboutto begin and it is the episode in which George (the other George) pushespast children attending a birthday party so that he can save himself from whathe thinks is a burning building.


at SAGE Publications on January 3 2008http://the sagepub comDownloaded from

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