ABSTRACT
The previous chapter addressed the implications of globalization on Israeli political culture, and on its center stage was the concept of Americanization. This chapter addresses the implications of globalization on Israeli popular everyday culture, and on its center stage is the concept of McDonaldization. The enveloping question we inquire about here is whether globalization leads to universal cultural uniformity or whether it leaves room for particular habits and cultural diversity. Among social scientists, the global—local encounter has spawned a continuous polemic between “homogenizers,” who believe that globalization generates a worldwide universalization of culture, and “heterogenizers,” who believe that particular, local, or indigenous cultures survive or even thrive. Yet such dichotomous framing compels a fattened adjudication of what is in fact is a doubly layered outcome. Globalization has diverse effects: it homogenizes on the structural level (the McWorld effect), and it heterogenizes on the symbolic level (the Jihad effect). In this view global technological, organizational, and commercial fows do subsume and appropriate the local, or consume it, so to speak, yet this happens with no necessary abolition of local symbols, cultures, or habits. It is indeed the peculiarity of contemporary structural globalization that it not only enables but also can at points even encourage local symbolic idioms.
