Attitudes towards globalization and cosmopolitanism: cultural diversity, personal consumption and the national economy

Abstract

One of the widely accepted consequences of globalization is the development of individual outlooks, behaviours and feelings that transcend local and national boundaries. This has encouraged a re-assessment of important assumptions about the nature of community, personal attachment and belonging in the face of unprecedented opportunities for culture, identities and politics to shape, and be shaped by, global events and processes. Recently, the upsurge of interest in the concept of cosmopolitanism has provided a promising new framework for understanding the nexus between cosmopolitan dispositions and global interconnectedness across cultural, political and economic realms. Using data from a representative social survey of Australians this paper investigates the negotiation of belonging under the conditions of globalization. The data tap into attitudes and behaviours associated with a broad gamut of cosmopolitan traits in the domains of culture, consumption, human rights, citizenship, and international governance. They show how cosmopolitan outlooks are shaped by social structural factors, and how forms of identification with humanity and the globe are fractured by boundaries of self and others, threats and opportunities, and the value of things global and local.

Are we all transnationals now? Network transnationalism and transnational subjectivity: the differing impacts of globalization on the inhabitants of a small Swiss city

“…Cosmopolitanism has become a hot topic in social science and can mean anything from an attitude or value, to a regime of international governance, or even a set of epistemological assumptions. In the reading of Woodward, Zlatko and Bean (2008) there are three main domains in the literature on cosmopolitanism: institutional, political or cultural dimensions. In this article I will not deal with questions of political and institutional cosmopolitanism, but only with the cultural and identificatory dimensions.…”

Transcultural Brokerage: The Role of Cosmopolitans in Bridging Structural and Cultural Holes

“…Thus, the notion of embodied disposition rejects the dualism or dichotomy between cognition and action (Feldman & Orlikowski, 2011). Accordingly, Bourdieu (1977: 83 -emphasis in original), views habitus as a "… system of lasting, transposable dispositions which, integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions and makes possible the achievement of infinitely diversified tasks…" Habitus can thus be viewed as a set of socially structured cognitive and cultural principles and procedures that generate and organize practice(s) in a specific field of action (Woodward, Skrbis, & Bean, 2008). Embodied disposition encapsulates this interplay between culture, cognition, and practice, which generates practical capacities to act in a manner congruent with an emergent situation.…”

Media, diversity and globalisation in the digital age

“…Cosmopolitanism and global interconnectivity (Woodward, 2008), coupled with the experience of citizenship and its physical and virtual networks also expose other digital fractures, for example, at the individual level, in the peripheral community or in geographically isolated cultures (Norris, 2008), through forms of identification, behaviours and belongings that transcend borders, by cultural rupture or convergence between local and global contexts, and especially by large groups of threats to some of the opportunities discussed in the course of this reflection.…”