World Culture Theory Of Globalization

This chapter is divided into three sections. The first section of this chapter reviews the World Culture Theory of Globalization and second section reviews the Cultural Capital Theory, to offer a theoretical explanation for tourist food consumption. Both these theories are related to food consumption and thus provides a strong build for theoretical and empirical objectives of the present study.
The third section is devoted to various other studies highlighting the characteristics, significance and motivation of tourists for cuisine tourism. Furthermore, this section of the chapter also elucidates on the various relationships related to food and tourism as well as destination marketing / image associated with it.
This part of the study write-up

As per World Culture Theory of Globalization (Robertson, 1992), though there exists an impact of globalization on societal and other socio-cultural processes, but still it operates independent of these constituents. It is important to note that, breaking old social orders and enabling new solidarities, there exists global movement of religious ideas, money, tourism, food and technology.
As per (Robertson, 1992), there is no single driving force to globalization, but contrary to this there exists a popular notion that there is a pecuniary interconnection to the globalization process. At different times throughout the history of mankind there have been integrated dominant casual forces in the process of globalization, such as, religion, culture and technology. One has to understand that the basis of World Culture Theory of Globalization forms from the fact that “globalization is not a monolithic concept but has a multidimensional aspect attached to it”. In order words, it is a complex mixture of homo-genization and hetero-genization. People infer globalized goods and thoughts in diversity and integrate them into their lives in varied traditions. Thus most of the times there happens a tension between the global and the local. The consequences are societies either incorporating the global or annexing the global, selectively to suit the

The theory clearly reflects dialectical relationship between the global and the local and convergence as well as divergence of tastes when applied to food consumption. The homogenizing aspect of globalization has been attributed to economic forces, particularly because the economic process of trade liberalization makes it possible for food to be sourced from any part of the world, as regards to food consumption. The role of food corporations, making branded food products, recipes, and ready-to-eat processed foods available throughout the world attributes to be the most powerful reason for the convergence of tastes (Lang, 1999; Nygard & Storstad, 1998; Sklair, 1991). The drift of flavors has primarily been from the overproducing spaghetti western nations to the south, penetrating the more provincially self-reliant marketplaces (Lang, 1997). Even though the west has espoused many immigrant foods, the foods that have been espoused have been mostly transmuted and propagated in their processed and ready-to-eat usage to such a range that epochs old régimes in many countries are being reformed (Barnet & Cavanagh,