The world “globalization”, a term which quickly became a status, a magic incantation, something able to open the gates of all present and future mysteries. For some, “globalization” is something that we must achieve if we want to be happy; according to others, our unhappiness resides precisely in globalization. It is however certain for everybody to see that “globalization” is the utmost destiny for which mankind is heading, an irreversible process which affects us all the same and in the same fashion. As we deepen our research on the social causes and results of time and space compression, it will become clearer and clearer that globalization processes are lacking a unity of effects. Globalization equally unites and divides: division causes are identical to those that promote the uniformity of the globe. At the same time as business, commerce and information goes planetary, a “localization” process has started, meaning a clear determination in an area.
What globalization appears to be for some, is actually localization for others. Mobility becomes a paramount value, and freedom of movement - always a scarce and unequal freedom – becomes the main stratification factor in the post-modern age we live in. Some of us truly become “global”:
others are stranded in their “locations” – neither pleasant, nor bearable, in a world where “global individuals” set the pace and make the rules of the game of life.
Globalization brings forth a new version of “absent propriety”: stocks – the freshly gained independence of global elites from political power and cultural limited territory. The company belongs to people who invest in it – not employees, suppliers or cities where it is placed.
Mass production leads to giants. The most effective way for obtaining profit is to put labor to work, the worker’s income. Add massive accumulations at the medium class level, first in England, among retirees which returned from the colonies, then the USA, among the fortunate of the American dream. Stocks completely separated the owner from the producer. Having stocks became a simple wager: which stock will offer a higher and more certain dividend? Regarding everything else, new owners had nothing in common with the investment itself. This phenomenon separated the owner from the “land”, and was generated by the communication system and the American way of taking care of one’s own interests.
Writings on which once seemed to be the main concept of economic thinking – Nationalokonomie – resemble more and more to statistical fiction. There are no further reasons to name McDonald’s or Procter & Gamble American companies. In a world where capital has no certain home, and financial flows have exited the control of governments, many instruments of economic policy no longer work, the national state is eroding. Transnational forces are anonymous
54
and thus, harder to identify. They do not form a uniform or ordered system, rather a conglomerate of systems manipulated by invisible actors.
The type of unity created in small communities by a simultaneous presence and spoken communication, banners and manifests – which require minimum costs – does not survive at a larger scale. Social cohesion is a function of consensus, of common knowledge; it crucially depends upon knowledge of culture, ever since childhood. On the contrary, social flexibility is based on forgetfulness and cheap communication. The Japanese paternalist system is a negative example of the global system. But Japanese companies are among the largest in the world, and regarding the Korean crisis, the populace has had offered its own jewels and savings to help the economy. We must thus speak of local and regional and global principles.
Globalization has its origins in great urban agglomerations, which allowed for mass production which saturated collectivities and forced production to change course and stop being of mass proportions. Richard Sennett was the first great analyst of the contemporary city life which announced the imminent disappearance of the “public man”. In an artificial environment, calculated in order to maintain anonymity and a functional specialization of space, city people confronted with an almost impossible issue of identity. The experience of American cities reveals a series of quasi-universal common traits: suspicion of others, intolerance, resentment towards foreigners and requests to banish or isolate them, as well as the paranoid preoccupation for “law and order”80. Outside connections are made via credit card. Always on the move for “maximum profits”, meaning a bigger salary, the common city inhabitant loses his roots. After Nan Elin the fear factor is ever present, as the increase of security systems, sophisticated locks for both cars and apartments increases, as “barricaded” and “safe” communities are being hailed and destined for all pockets and ages, increased public places surveillance and also the abundance of perils which roam the media. So, not living together, rather mutual avoidance has become the survival strategy in the contemporary megalopolis. There is no longer an issue of hating or loving those close to you. If you keep them at bay, the dilemma is solved. The internet and www are not for everybody and they do not seem to ever be available for all. Even those who have access find it difficult to operate outside an established array of suppliers, which invite them to spend “time and money searching among numerous offers”. For the rest of the population: television. What are they looking at? The many look at the few. Those few are celebrities. They bring the message of an entire lifestyle. Their life, their lifestyle. Asking what impact this may have on the watchers means both worrying and having fixed hopes. This stage of globalization is unknown to the many. And economists often ignore it. Practical people appreciate it. It is the new postmodern consumption:
the client sends electronic cash, and the goods, usually images and signs are delivered without the supplier having to make a single step; producer, distributor, etc. are just notions, precisely quantified elements which act according to a marketing plan. The pressure is immense on the isolated one, and he often bursts, but also in the imposed framework. Usually by tourism.
The most profound sense transmitted by the idea of globalization is the undefined, disorganized, and self propelled character of world issues: a lack of center, of a command panel, of a decision council, of a management office. Today, the richest and certainly the most surprising source of uncertainty is market behavior. Integration and separation, globalization and territorial divide are complementary processes. They represent two sides of the same process:
redistribution of sovereignty, power and freedom of action all across the world, which was provoked (not determined) by a revolutionary leap in speed technology. The so called globalization processes have as a result a redistribution of privileges and lacks, of riches and poverty, of resources and sterility, of power and weakness, of freedom and constraint. We witness a re-stratification process today, during which a new cultural and social hierarchy is being formed:
“glocalization” (term introduced by Roland Robertson, expresses the indestructible unity between
80 We must see the whole, not only the blessed places, and not just Bronx, not the average, but the whole. America is not just a society, but also and firstly a system. And this extends towards other developed states.
55
“globalizing” and “localizing” tendencies – a phenomenon fully included in the globalization concept) which we can define as the process of capital, finance and other resources’ concentration, of efficient action and option, but also of concentrating freedom of movement and action.
Our society is a “consumption” one, in such a profound and fundamental way, the same we would use to say that the society of our predecessors, the industrial society, was a “production”
society. Members of this society were producers and soldiers. “The Quota” was dictated by the duty of fulfilling both functions. But in the late modern stage, second modern, supra-modern or postmodern stages, society have no further need for labor forces for industrial mammoths and regular armies. Rather it has the need to speculate the capacity for consumption of its members. If philosophers, poets and prophets of morals in antiquity reflected on the problem: we work to live or we live to work, the dilemma we hear today is: do we need to consume in order to live or do we live to consume? Consumers are first gatherers of sensation; only then, in a secondary fashion, more intimate, they collect things. But is there a physical to consumption. Not only the capacity of ingurgitating, even that of services, which is believed to be unlimited, but especially the finite state of succeeding in procuring purchasing power. Once you’ve reached the limit, the buyer becomes residual, and is of no interest to anyone anymore81.
Traveling means, for the consumer’s life, a bigger pleasure than actually reaching the destination. The same as with all known societies, the postmodern society, and the consumerist society is stratified. In a consumers’ society, the discrepancy between the two dimensions – “those up” and “those low” – reflects the degree of mobility, their freedom in choosing where to go. In 1975, there were 2 million forced emigrants – refugees – in the care of the U.N.’s High Council. In 1995 there were 27 million. Progressively, visas for entering a country are eliminated. But not passport control. Seen as a metaphor of the new stratification, this unveils the fact that “the access to global mobility” has become the main and most important stratification factor. People pushed in the other pole are overwhelmed by the burden of abundance of a redundant and useless time, which they can not fill. They do not “own” time, but also are not under its rule, like their ancestors which lived under the sign of the clocking-in. Their time is void and null: “nothing ever happens”.
Only virtual time, television time, has a structure, a timetable.
2.3.1. The new economy (experiences’ economy)
The “new economy” expression already has a rather defined meaning in economic theory.
So, Paul Tanase Ghita says that the society towards we are heading is or will be a IS – KS society (Informational society – knowledge society). Expressions which have defined societies so far have contained a keyword (whether slavery, feudalism, capitalism) which synthesizes an array of possible social statuses on which people are inevitably situated, individually and / or as a group, considering some conditions, thus constituting a characteristic economic and social structure.
Obviously, a keyword for the new society, which would reveal its contents, has not been found at this time. IS – KS is an expression which moves the name towards other spheres.
This forming society will create its new economic activity, or, in a more direct way, a changed economy from the ancient one, and even the actual one, which we call new economy so far, an expression which points out the fact that what is new will be so important and significant, that it will justify the name itself…
…we must recall the fact that the last two-three decades, there was a lot of talking around the subject of The New Cambridge School, which founded the New Economy. A group of renowned economists – J. Robinson, P. Sraffa, L. Pasinetti and others which, during their career, worked at Cambridge University for a while, or visited that place or just simply, in their research,
81 As bizarre as this may seem, but such phenomena begin to occur here as well, in temporary “niches”: for example, stock holders (especially the unique ones) of the new limited companies do not present interest for banks as long as they “pay” as wages for themselves only the minimum economy income, not fitting crediting patterns. And this is where most of them lay.
56
they’ve reached the same conclusions – they constitute the hard core of this New Economy.
Premeditated or spontaneous, they studied to what extent neo-classic and classic explanations from the economic science still remain relevant and in accordance with today’s reality. Obviously, they gave new explanations or issued new conclusions, often categorical, which, as a whole, were labeled as “The New Economy”.
We wish to point out another aspect, which is relevant to contemporary tourism from the age of globalization.
The New Economy is, in Samhoud’s Service Management (Netherlands) Hans van der Loo’s vision82, the effect of the passage from PRODUCT => SERVICE => EXERIENCES, EMOTIONS. From a historical point of view, he considers the 40s as the years of organization and mechanization, the 50s the enterprise period, the 60s as the years of urban collectivities, of ecosystems. Since the 70s we even developed systems dynamics. The 1970-1980 period, thanks to the Report of the Rome Club, of 1972 and of the World Conservation Report in 1980 is the industrialization period, of a visible manifestation of its negative effect, of integrating human activity and ecologic activity and eco-factors, participation in decision making.
He even distinguishes between an “American” way versus an “European” way of interpreting “experiences” (emotions, experiences). According to the American way, illustrated by Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck in “The Attention Economy” experiences, emotions are the new modern religion, the “consumption cathedral”, the new currency of business. A draft representation of their evolution is the following:
Value E
V O L U T I O
N comodities
products services
experiencies
transformation
Starting from Max Weber’s “velvet cage” theory of the 70s – 80s, from George Ritzer’s 80s McDonald-ization (under the motto “anytime, anywhere”), where we had:
Value for consumer = results / price
(Not the value of the product, rather the value for the consumer, in the consumption society!)
Once service marketing is introduced, this becomes
Value for consumer = results + “process” / price + effort
including the process itself, not only palpable results, but also the “relation transaction effort”, ergo the one intrinsically bound by the behavior of “the actor producer”.
As soon as economy passed in the experiences domain, the formula becomes Value for consumer = results + “process” + “experiences” / price + effort
while everything is subdued to managing the whole experience of the client.
82 Van de Loo, H. – The consumer perspective: quality of experience – Conferinţa ATLAS “Quality of Life” - Leeuwarden 2003
57
Hans van der Loo also gives, according to Michael J. Wolf – “The Entertainment Economy” a construction of experiences which are made from the classical offer plus:
entertainment, sensation, action, authenticity, personalization, feeling, relations. The first three are characteristics of the first generation of economics where as the last four belong to the second generation.
This theory is, of course, valid in developed countries with great accumulations, which are also generators of the globalization phenomenon. The rest of the world may only tend towards such a state. It must be analyzed however, given its connection with the tourist activity.