ABSTRACT
Since the end of the global competition, characteristic of the cold war era, processes of international competition have played a lesser role than domestic ethnic confl icts, which took center stage in areas with weakly developed democratic institutions in the South. Nevertheless, with the increase of global modernity during the last decade, the breakdown of most of the communist states, and the spread of the neo-liberal credo, the notion of competition resurfaced as a prominent issue in understanding socioeconomic development in a globalized world. The discussion has centered on the question of whether the economic ideology brought about by global modernity would have an impact on countries socially and culturally very different from the Western core countries. As there seems to be no real alternative to the Western economic competition ideal, economists and sociologists have asked whether institutions of competitive markets could be integrated into the social, cultural, and economic systems of Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The answer has largely depended on the social-structural makeup of societies in different world regions. It seems now obvious that some societies are better positioned to become active participants in the global modernity than others. Perhaps such positioning would be best conceptualized by the notion of cultural life-worlds than mere socioeconomic and political constellations (Jacquin-Berdal et al. 1998a; Tetzlaff 2000; Mozaffari 2002; Arjomand and Tiryakian 2004; Nederveen Pieterse 2004). If so, then a refl ection on the cultural construction of social life-worlds in global modernity seems to be a precondition for the analysis of discourses and practices on economic globalization in non-Western civilizations. Global players exert pressures for adaptation and effi ciency on local and regional cultures. The world market defi ned by competitive capitalism, the importance of private property, and the virtue of individualism have become the dominant principles introduced by colonial and postcolonial forces in non-Western societies during the last centuries and in more recent years. Civilizations have become defi ned
by their adaptability to global economic processes. The culture as a given system for capital investment and capital use has become the criterion of selection. According to global players, a competition around social systems that permit the highest profi ts, has become established on cultural values. Societies that are capable to adopt these principles receive higher scores than societies that resist changes required by the capitalist logic.
