Navigating Local and Global Worlds: Opportunities and Risks for Adolescent Cultural Identity Development

Abstract

This essay focuses on the opportunities and risks that adolescents face when developing cultural identities in the context of globalization. It starts by illustrating how globalization entails that adolescents increasingly have interactions with people from diverse cultures in myriad domains. Adolescents navigate local and global worlds, for example, with regard to language, diet, dating, and work. With the exposure to diverse cultures, new opportunities and risks arise. The nature of and evidence for three of these are highlighted. One is the risk of adolescent cultural identity confusion, with attendant internalizing and externalizing pathological behaviors. A second is the emergence of cultural gaps between adolescents and parents, a phenomenon that may constitute both a risk and a necessity. The third issue discussed is the way that globalization may open up more opportunities for youth civic involvement, even if such involvement sometimes aims to resist globalization.

The young adult cohort in emerging markets: Assessing their glocal cultural identity in a global marketplace

“…Collectively, our findings are consistent with prior research (Jensen, 2003(Jensen, , 2011Mazzarella, 2003), and demonstrate that consumer glocal cultural identities are not static, but evolving, and that these transformations appear to be more noticeable in markets undergoing greater marketplace shifts (Hermans & Dimaggio, 2007;Kinnvall, 2004).…”

“…Glocal cultural identity takes shape and transforms over time as an individual negotiates between global and local cultures (Arnett, 2002;Eckhardt, 2006;Ger & Belk, 1996;Jensen, 2003Jensen, , 2011. Our work, by contrasting Russia in 2009 with 2010, and also contrasting Russia with Brazil in 2010, provides an opportunity to speculate about how macro-environmental factors might affect the evolution of glocal cultural identity.…”

“…A challenge faced by young adults in the age of globalization is making decisions about how their worldview beliefs and behavioral practices relate to global and local cultures-that is, their glocal cultural identity (Berry, 2001;Jensen, 2003Jensen, , 2011. We recognize and discuss three forces at play in how young adults in the modern world form their glocal cultural identity: (1) the co-dependency of globalization and localization, (2) dialogical use of global and local identity markers, and (3) brands as key components of glocal cultural identity.…”

“…Branded products constitute a key part of cultural identity (Askegaard, 2006). Hence, changes in brandscapes occurring as a result of globalization are likely to influence the cultural identity developments of young adults (Hermans & Kempen, 1998;Jensen, 2011;Manning, 2010). Specifically, "brands can align themselves with respect to social imaginaries such as the nation by situating themselves within local or global trajectories of circulation…or they can gesture to diasporic, aspirational, or exotic elsewheres on the horizons of imaginative geographies of alterity" (Manning, 2010, p. 39;Mazzarella, 2003;Özkan & Foster, 2005).…”

“…First, we contribute to current theory on glocal cultural identity (Ger & Belk, 1996;Jensen, 2003Jensen, , 2011Kjeldgaard & Askegaard, 2006, Varman & Belk, 2009) by considering the theory's grounding in three global-local identity beliefs, including one global cultural belief (belief in global citizenship through global brands) and two local cultural beliefs (nationalism and consumer ethnocentrism). Therefore, we extend the previous research that developed measures of either global or national identity dimensions (Der-Karabetian & Ruiz, 1997;Keillor et al, 1996;Zhang & Khare, 2009) to incorporate a profiling approach as an alternative strategy to understanding glocal cultural identity.…”