ENCUESTAS A CANALES DE TELEVISIÓN DE LA CIUDAD DE QUITO

The term ‘globalisation’ encapsulates a range of sociocultural and economic processes characterised by, among other things, global movement of capital, economic integration and cultural homogenisation (Appadurai, 1996). These complex, dynamic forces shape local economies. In Australia, for example, many heavy industrial areas such as Broken Hill and Newcastle (NSW) have seen their local economies severely affected by factory closures and high unemployment. This has largely been the result of differentiation and specialisation within mass markets and moving factories to countries with cheaper labour and less onerous laws (Dredge & Jenkins, 2007: 309). In New Zealand, the effects of globalisation have been felt most profoundly in the primary sector, where traditional agricultural export markets in the United Kingdom (UK) and Europe have been lost to emergent regional trading blocs (e.g., the European Union).

As a result of these and other changes, globalisation has brought with it a restructuring of relationships between urban and rural areas. According to Dredge and Jenkins (2007: 309), it has also stimulated the emergence of contrasting landscapes of economic production (e.g., urban economic ‘powerhouses’ characterised by strongly diversified production) and consumption (e.g., landscapes dominated by tourism and leisure). As a result, increasing competition has emerged between urban regions to attract investment, and roles and responsibilities of local government have shifted considerably in attempts to adjust (Dredge & Jenkins, 2003). Rural areas, finding it increasingly hard to compete, are searching for new economic opportunities and replacement activities that can stem out-migration and activities that can assist in reaffirming a sense of community and civic pride (Carson & Macbeth, 2005). It is under these conditions associated with globalisation that local government involvement in tourism is often framed.

Globalisation is a term that has been fashionable since about the mid 1980s, when it began to replace terms like ‘internationalisation’ (as in the increasing interwovenness of national economies through international trade) and ‘trans-nationalisation’ (as in the increasing organisation of production on a cross-border basis by multinational

organisations) as a more suitable concept for describing the ever-intensifying networks of cross-border human interaction. According to Hoogvelt (1997: 241), the processes of globalisation, including those structural adjustments imposed since the 1980s, have significantly and detrimentally impacted upon “fragile social and political orders while further peripheralising their economies”. The marginality associated with Foucauldian conceptualisations of peripherality noted in Chapter Two means that these locations are less able to respond successfully to, or insulate themselves from, the challenges imposed upon them as a consequence of globalisation. It is in these locations, often provincial in geography and rural in character, that the greatest level of social, political, and economic dexterity is required in order to offset the declining sectoral profitability and community depopulation.

To understand this phenomenon we must start with the sociology of globalisation. While the concept of globalisation covers a great variety of social, economic and political change, sociologists have, according to Hoogvelt (1997: 116), been consistently at the

forefront in efforts to give it a rigorous and consistent theoretical status. These include prominent authors such as Roland Robertson, David Harvey and Anthony Giddens. Robertson’s writings are firmly welded to a conventional mainstream sociological theory of society as a social system. Social system theory is elaborated by the well-known

Parsonian formulation in which any social system is thought to have four subsystems that are functionally related to serve the maintenance of the whole system. According to Reid (2003), these subsystems and their functions are:

 The economic (adaptive function)

 The political (mobilisation for collective purposes)

 The social (integrative function)

 The cultural (providing the governing value system necessary for reproducing the system through time)

Robertson (1992) argues that already for some time there has clearly been a process of social system building at the global level. In the economic sphere, it pre-dates even the rise of capitalism and the modern world because of the growing networks of international trade and production. It has also been actively fostered at the level of the political sub- system and with the international co-operation between states and the emergence of international organisations. In earlier works, Robertson argued that the process of globalisation was still being hindered by unresolved ‘cleavages’ in the cultural arena, which thus far had prevented full-system development (e.g., Nettl & Robertson, 1968). In more recent works, however, Robertson (1992) proposes that the potential for closing these cleavages is today greatly enhanced; due mainly to ‘compression of the world’ and ‘global consciousness’.

While, for Robertson, the point of departure of the analysis of globalisation is a well-worn conventional sociological theory, others have theorised it from a completely different perspective. Social geographer David Harvey, for example, argues that symbolic orderings of space and time provide a framework for experience through which we learn who or what we are in society. The organisation of space defines relationships, not only between activities, things and concepts, but also by extension between people (Hoogvelt, 1997:

118). Harvey (1989b) argues that the development of cartography in the Renaissance period permitted the objectification of space and the accurate measurement of land, thus supporting the emergence of private ownership in land and precise definition of

transferrable property rights. This new objectification of space and system of land

measurement replaced the confused and conflicting feudal obligations that had preceded it. Under this conceptualisation the freedom of space therefore holds the key to power and authority.

In the traditions of Marxist theory, Harvey (1989b) proposes that today the freedom to move capital wherever it is needed gives the capital-owning bourgeoisie a decisive advantage over the mass of workers (the proletariat), who are restricted in their movements and migrations by the passports they carry. As is the case with space, time also represents a source of value and power. In capitalist enterprises the costs of production are calculated in terms of the time taken to produce things, and labour is subjected to constant efforts by employers to reduce time spent on a particular task (Hoogvelt, 1997: 118). Time, argues Harvey (1989b), also defines the value of money itself. However, for Hoogvelt (1997: 119) the important thing in all of this discussion is the relationship between time and space.

In capitalist economies, space is expressed as time. The distance needed to travel in order to do business or to transport commodities to market are all calculated typically by the time it takes to cover the requisite distance. Anthony Giddens, whose globalisation theory bears some resemblance to that of Harvey noted above, calls this the ‘time/space

distantiation’, which is a measure of the degree to which the friction of space has been overcome to accommodate social interaction (Hoogvelt, 1997: 119). Importantly, technological progress has compressed the time-space equation enormously. The shrinking of the world to a ‘global village’ amounts to a virtual “annihilation of space through time” (Hoogvelt, 1997: 120). As Giddens sums it up:

Globalisation can thus be defined as the intensification of world wide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa (1990: 64).

Today, people can have social relations and even organised community relations regardless of space; that is, regardless of the territory they share. This has enormous consequences not only for the role of the nation-state as a territorial bounded

community, but also for the organisation of economic production on a cross-border basis (Hoogvelt, 1997: 120). It permits the emergence of ‘imagined’ communities, cultures or even systems of authority and social control that cross borders. Thus, while individuals still have local lives as physical persons, they also experience phenomenal worlds that are truly global.

It is, according to Hoogvelt (1997: 120), this globalisation as shared phenomenal worlds which today drives the processes of economic globalisation. Indeed, it could be argued that tourism is not only a consequence of, but also a contributor to, globalising forces of change. The prominent position presently held by tourism as a global socio-cultural phenomenon, together with factors such as the increased access to international travel, increased knowledge of other places, and sense of personal connection with distant places resulting from historical migration patterns and/or return journey experiences undoubtedly serve to strengthen the process of globalisation.