Abstract

Two things can be said about globalization with some certainty, and on which all commentators appear to agree. The first of these is that globalization is ongoing, and in some parts of the world the processes of globalization are both effecting and affecting cultural, economic, and environmental change at such an accelerating rate that the term hyper-globalization is often used to describe these conditions. The second is that even in such contexts, not everything ‘goes to plan’. By this we mean that, while globalizing processes are recognizable because of certain shared commonalities, such as time–space compression, standardization, and de-territorialization, thereby making it possible to make a case for the identification of older episodes of globalization around the world (e.g. Jennings, this volume), neither the consequences of globalization nor local and regional responses to these processes are uniform. Such context- and historically specific reactions to, and accommodations of, globalizing processes are now commonly glossed in the scholarly and more popular literature as ‘glocalization’ (Robertson 1995; Roudometof 2016), and there is a growing body of scholarly literature on these kinds of dialectical and recursive relationships between universalizing and particularizing tendencies in a variety of settings, including Africa and China (e.g. Mensah 2006; Hahn 2008; Wu 2008; Nederveen Pieterse 2015).