Critique of Ritzer & Lair's (2009) the Globalization of Nothing

A Critique of “The Globalization of Nothing and the Outsourcing of Service Work”,
a chapter written by George Ritzer & Craig Lair (2009)

In the chapter written by Ritzer & Lair (2009) the concept of nothingness is introduced. The term ‘nothing’ refers to the lacking of distinctive or unique features of a product or service, while ‘something’ means that it has unique features. Take fast food restaurants, for example: they are highly standardized and almost exactly the same around the world. The products they offer, how they offer it, and the entire design of their restaurants – from the painting on the walls to the menu cards – are all centrally conceived and controlled. Therefore, they contain a high degree of ‘nothingness’. Take, on the other hand, a restaurant using locally sourced products and offering dishes thought out and prepared by the owner or chef. That is a unique product, “rich in distinctive substantive content” (Ritzer & Lair, 2009, p. 32), and therefore contains a high degree of ‘something’ because you cannot get exactly the same somewhere else. As Ritzer & Lair (2009) explain, a high degree of nothingness translates into multiple dimensions of nothing: ‘non-places’, ‘non-things’, ‘non-services’, and even ‘non-people’. This means that, respectively, the physical space, the products offered, the services provided, and the interactions with the people providing them all lack distinctive features. The reason that, according to Ritzer & Lair (2009) the spread of ‘nothing’ tends to prevail over ‘something’ is that centrally designed and controlled standard formats are much easier to export to a global market. The globalization of standardized products and concepts is based on rational principles such as efficiency, predictability and (central) control, and according to Ritzer & Lair (2009) this often leads to a focus on systems at the expense of content or substance.

Furthermore, when it comes to ‘forms’ of globalization, Ritzer & Lair (2009) make a distinction between the ‘grobal’ and the ‘glocal’, or: ‘grobalization’ and ‘glocalization’. Grobal(ization) entails the spread of homogenous social products throughout the world (e.g. McDonalds, based on the rational principles described above), what Appadurai (1990) calls “cultural homogenization”. Glocal(ization) is about hybrid forms, combining the global and local elements (e.g. Mexican-American food). The latter can be seen as a combination of globalization and localization as described by Rosenau (1997): while globalization is about broadening borders and allowing the movement of people, goods, information, culture etc. across boarders, localization heightens the borders and stop these same movements. Glocalization (Ritzer & Lair, 2009) can therefore be seen as a hybrid form where the movements of people and their culture do take place, but instead of the local cultures being replaced or washed away by the indistinctive global products they are actually contained. Appadurai (1990) uses a comparable term for more or less the same principles that he calls “cultural heterogenization”. Although Ritzer & Lair (2009) strongly argue that there is a powerful movement towards the globalization of nothing, it is also worth noting that globalization at the same time allows the spread of many good and useful ideas, principles and practices. As Rosenau (1997) puts it, “globalization operates to extend ideas, norms, and practices beyond the settings in which they originated, while localization highlights or compresses the original settings and thereby inhibits the inroad of new ideas, norms, and practices.

Ritzer & Lair (2009) write that many service jobs are very standardized, even to the point that for example call centres not only prescribe what their employees must say but even how they say it, and thus contain a high amount of ‘nothingness’. With many of these (standardized) service jobs being outsourced; Ritzer & Lair (2009) argue that this may therefore be another example of the ‘globalization of nothing’. Their view on this subject can be seen in the light of imperialistic theories of globalization such as Wallerstein’s world systems theory. In the world systems view a distinction is made between core and (semi) periphery countries whereby the core countries hold the power and focus on capital-intensive production while the peripheral countries are dependent on the core countries and focus on labour-intensive production (Martínez-Vela, 2001). In the case of outsourcing (low skilled) service work as described by Ritzer & Lair (2009), the host organization located in the core country outsources its service work to a peripheral country, thereby exploiting the low cost labour of that country and maintaining the core-periphery relationship. Using Appadurai’s (1990) terminology of global flows, consisting of ethnoscapes (landschape/flow of people), technoscapes (movement of technology and information), finanscapes (international financial markets and their interdependencies), mediascapes (global flow of news and media), and ideoscapes (flow of ideologies), the outsourcing of service work is mediated by technology in two ways. Not only because the ‘technoscape’ makes this possible, e.g. through global lines of communication shrinking the relative global distance in time and space (Rosenau, 2004), but also because of the role that technology plays in the positioning of a region into the core or (semi) periphery, according to the world systems view. According to the world systems view the core country has better developed technology compared to the peripheral country making it a core country focusing on capital-intensive production and outsourcing its labour-intensive production, in this case the service work, to a peripheral country Martínez-Vela, 2001).

Another statement Ritzer & Lair (2009) make is that jobs containing a high degree of nothingness can lead to certain social pathologies, because employees that are treated as though they lack distinctive content may feel dehumanized. They explain that it is not only the case that jobs with low distinctive content are outsourced, it is also the jobs that may actually have a potential ‘something’ are organized and dictated to be carried out in a certain way that prevents the possibility of employees contributing something (distinctive) to it.

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