McDonald’s provides a helpful glimpse at the complexities surrounding postmodernity. On the one hand, the global reach of McDonald’s seems a perfect illustration of one part of the postmodern situation – the global diffusion of American culture and tastes, the plasticity and airiness of postmodern culture, the breaching of national boundaries. On the other hand, as George Ritzer explains, “McDonaldization” involves “the process by which the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of... Read more

Though often conceived as a crisis within Western civilization, postmodernism, Featherstone argues, is partly impelled by globalization. Globalization, he begins, usually conveys two images – the spread of a single, increasingly uniform culture throughout the world, and the “compression” or layering and juxtaposition of various cultures within a particular location (Sushi bars jostling with McDonald’s). His own emphasis is that globalization is less a common global culture than a “field in which differences, power struggles and cultural prestige contests are... Read more

Culture, Mike Featherstone suggests in Undoing Culture , becomes problematic in consumer societies. How? As developed in cultural anthropology, culture is “somehow homologous to the distinctions, differences, and divisions between social groups who unconsciously use culture as relatively fixed markers in status games.” But in consumer societies, there is little control over the “flow of new goods, images, and information,” and this makes reading the status signs difficult: “The problems we encounter in everyday practice because culture fails to provide... Read more