The transformations in global communications and political economy are causing changes in the categories on which cultures are based - race, gender, ethnicity, class and nation. The essays in this text address these issues.

Paul Hopper leads the reader through the varied issues associated with globalization and culture, including deterritorialization, cosmopolitanism, cultural hybridization and homogenization as well as claims that aspects of globalization are provoking cultural resistance.

Globalization is now widely discussed but the debates often remain locked within particular disciplinary discourses. This book brings together for the first time a social theory and cultural studies approach to the understanding of globalization. The book starts with an analysis of the relationship between the globalization process and contemporary culture change and goes on to relate this to debates about social and cultural modernity. At the heart of the book is a far-reaching analysis of the complex, ambiguous "lived experience" of global modernity. Tomlinson argues that we can now see a general pattern of the dissolution between cultural experience and territorial location. The "uneven" nature of this experience is discussed in relation to first and third world societies, along with arguments about the hybridization of cultures, and special role of communications and media technologies in this process of "deterritorialization". Globalization and Cultureconcludes with a discussion of the cultural politics of cosmopolitanism. Accessibly written, this book will be of interest to second year undergraduates and above in sociology, media studies, cultural and communication studies, and anyone interested in globalization.

In this book leading social scientists from many countries analyze the extent to which we are seeing a globalization of culture. Is a unified world culture emerging? And if so, how does this relate to existing cultural divisions and to the autonomy of the nation state? Differing explanations are offered for trends towards global unification and their relation to an economic world-system. Will the intensification of global contact produce increasing tolerance of other cultures? Or will an integrating culture produce sharper reactions in the form of fundamentalist and nationalist movements? The contributors explore the emergence of `third cultures', such as international law, the financial markets and media conglomerates, as

A pervasive force, globalization has come to represent the export and import of culture, the speed and intensity of which has increased to unprecedented levels in recent years. Here an international panel of intellectuals consider the process of globalization and how the global character of technology, communication networks, consumer culture, intellectual discourse, the arts, and mass entertainment have all been affected by recent worldwide trends. Photos.

A stimulating appraisal of a crucial contemporary theme, this comprehensive analysis of globalizaton offers a distinctively cultural perspective on the social theory of the contemporary world. This perspective considers the world as a whole, going beyond conventional distinctions between the global and the local and between the universal and the particular. Its cultural approach emphasizes the political and economic significance of shifting conceptions of, and forms of participation in, an increasingly compressed world. At the same time the book shows why culture has become a globally contested issue - why, for example, competing conceptions of ′world order′ have political and economic consequences.