Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

134 Language Planning and Education
Hollywood products to protect the domestic film industry, and as Tomlinson (1997:
174) observes, disagreements about films and TV imports disrupted the 1993 GATT
trade negotiations.
One other reason why one might wish to equate globalisation on the cultural
plane with homogenisation and cultural imperialism is the close association, amply
documented, of globalisation and transnational capitalism, whose expansionary
dynamic and economic power pull many cultures into the ambit of a global capitalist
culture. An illustration of how this process works out may be found in Machin and
van Leeuwen’s (2003) analysis of Cosmopolitan, an internationally popular women’s
magazine. Drawing on data from eight different national versions of the magazine
they argue that, though each of these versions is published in a different language and
represents different local cultural practices, there is an underlying sameness at the
more abstract level of ‘discourse schemas’, of linguistic constructions of reality. Thus,
the world – as discursively constructed in Cosmopolitan – is, according to Machin
and van Leeuwen (2003: 505), one where:
there is no solidarity with fellow human beings, no counsel from religious and
cultural traditions, and there are no structural and political solutions by means of
whatever form of collective action. It is all up to the individual, who must, alone,
face the world using survival strategies in which traditional ‘female wiles’ continue
to play a key role … This ‘survival of the fittest’ and ‘winner takes all’ approach is
the essential message of the discourse schema, its meaning, the way it interprets
the social practices of work and the personal relationships it recontextualises. … it
is clearly an approach that suits the interests of the global neo-capitalist order of
which Cosmopolitan forms part.
What is diffused, then, is no particular language, nor any particular set of solutions
to the vicissitudes of life portrayed in Cosmopolitan, but something more abstract –
values and life-worlds, that are particularly accommodating of global capitalism.
Similar points, no doubt, might be made with regard to McDonald’s, whose global
outlets operate to a common template but one within which culinary products may
be tailored to national tastes and served in a local lingua franca.
However plausible though all these accounts may be, there are reasons for resisting
the assimilation of these phenomena to a cultural imperialism explanatory framework.
First of all, it would be erroneous to read off from the ubiquity of Western
cultural goods any profound and necessary cultural penetration, leading to Westerndominated
cultural homogenisation. As Tomlinson (1997: 180) points out, global
media markets, to take one economic sector, are more complex and pluralised than
is sometimes supposed. TV Globo in Brazil, for example, not only dominates its
domestic market but exports products to other Latin American countries. And local
TV programmes, replete with local, culturally specific references, such as Coronation
Street in the UK, typically and consistently attract more viewers than American
imports.
The more serious problem, however, with the cultural imperialism thesis is
that, rather like linguistic imperialism, it tends to portray the recipients of Western