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Dialectics of something and nothing: critical reections on Ritzers globalization analysis

Douglas Kellner
University of California, Los Angeles, California, USA
Abstract
Purpose Seeks to provide critical reections on George Ritzers globalization analysis. Design/methodology/approach Draws on a critical reading of Ritzers work, in particular, his most recent book The Globalization of Nothing. Findings Highlights Ritzers neglect of the dialectic of production and consumption, a dialectic that the author views as central to globalization. Originality/value The contributions and limitations of Ritzers book are identied and discussed. Keywords Globalization, Consumption Paper type Viewpoint

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George Ritzers The Globalization of Nothing (Ritzer, 2004) provides a highly original take on globalization that illuminates aspects of globalization neglected in many standard works[1]. Ritzer produces a wide range of categories, some original, to delineate how globalization produces massication, homogenization, and standardization of consumer products and practices. Thus, his recent book is a worthy successor to The McDonaldization of Society (Ritzer, 1992), Expressing America (Ritzer, 1995), and Enchanting a Disenchanted World: Revolutionizing the Means of Consumption (Ritzer, 1999) as well as his other recent work on McDonaldization[2]. In addition, Ritzers The Globalization of Nothing articulates the dialectic between the global and the local, between its empty forms, or nothing in his terminology, and its specic forms of something, of particularity and difference. His recent studies of globalization have many of the virtues of his earlier books in providing a wealth of sociological insight and analysis to a popular audience. The text particularly illuminates and helps develop Ritzers earlier concepts of McDonaldization, Americanization, and delineation of the new means of consumption, and it adds a wide range of important insights into globalization, whilst providing useful categories and distinctions to describe globalization itself. In these comments, rst, I want to critically engage with an issue that Ritzer might have addressed, that in my view would have substantially strengthened his conceptual optic. Then, I will make some comments on things I like and nd important in the book, and will signal some disagreements. Globalization and nothing: the missing dialectic Ritzer sets out his denition of the globalization of nothing as generally centrally conceived and controlled social forms that are comparatively devoid of distinctive content (p. xi), such as the form of Mills corporation shopping malls, airports, chain hotels, credit cards, and of course McDonalds and fast-food restaurants. He presents a
critical perspectives on international business Vol. 1 No. 4, 2005 pp. 263-272 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 1742-2043 DOI 10.1108/17422040510629737

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dialectic of something and nothing in a continuum of social forms with something presented as a social form that is generally indigenously conceived, controlled, and comparatively rich in distinctive substantive content; a form that is to a large degree substantively unique (p. 7). Both presuppose each other and make sense only when paired with, and contrasted to, the other. The dialectic of something and nothing is eshed out with a series of conceptual contrasts between places and non-places, things and non-things, persons and non-persons, and services and non-services, encompassing, as examples, credit card companies, telemarketing, fast food production, and global branding (I will provide further examples and explication as I proceed). He also develops a set of other categories like glocalization (building on Roland Robertson), through which global and local forces hybridize, and grobalization through which global processes absorb and in some cases destroy local artifacts, customs, and culture. Ritzer says he will offend fans of many somethings, such as products or forms of consumption that he critically analyzes, but I am not in the least offended by this critique, and would be happy to see Ritzer and others develop the analysis of nothing and the destruction of something(s) further. Indeed, this brings me to my central critique of Ritzers book. In the Preface, Ritzer states My focal interest in these pages is in the globalization of nothing within the realm of consumption (p. x), and here I wish that Ritzer had embraced the dialectic of production and consumption and critically engaged both, as he does to some extent in his analysis of McDonaldization, which is both a form of production and consumption. Ritzer does have a short section at the end of chapter 1 on the production of nothing (pp. 16-19) where he mentions that he will not engage with the developing world; whose inhabitants often cannot afford, or do not have access to the nothings of globalization; and also, will not engage with global production, such as Nike shoe factories, that have received a lot of attention and criticism. Ritzer says that there has been a productivist bias in social theory and that he wants to compensate for what he sees as a one-sideness in this direction (p. 16). But, while there was perhaps once a problem of a production bias in elds of social theory and consumption studies that needs correction, I would assert that production and consumption are so tightly and importantly linked that one needs a dialectic of production and consumption to adequately grasp the general processes of globalization. In fact, within cultural studies and a lot of social theory, there has been a booming eld of consumption studies, of which Ritzer is an important part, so I am not sure that we need to worry about a productivist bias in social theory and cultural studies, but should rather worry about the production decit (this has been one of my worries and themes in cultural studies for some years now and is reappearing here in the context of the sociology of consumption) (see Kellner, 1995). But, I would also argue that it is imperative to analyze the dialectic of production and consumption which is absolutely central to grasping, and engaging with globalization in order to conceptualize its key dynamics as important, I would argue and perhaps more so, than the dialectic of something and nothing that Ritzer takes on (in fact, I will argue that they go together). To make this point, let me take an example from Ritzers earlier study of McDonalds, surely a sociological classic of our time. One key insight of this text was the analysis of McDonaldization as a mode of production and consumption. McDonalds provides an entire business model (the franchise) and a model of fast-food

production and consumption marked by the features of efciency, speed, predictability, calculability, and rationalization. This model spread to many other elds of production and consumption, as Ritzer points out. Indeed, it is McDonaldization as a dialectic of production and consumption, that makes the corporation so paradigmatic for corporate globalization. Now, extending Ritzers argument of the dialectic of production and consumption to the sphere of labor, I would argue that the spread, diffusion, and the impact of the forms of production described as postFordism, McDonaldization, technocapitalism, or the networked society, range from the global spread of assembly-line labor described by Harry Braverman and other, mostly, Marxists as contributing to a deskilling of labor to the forms of labor described by Dan Schiller and other critics of digital capitalism. It is true, however, that there are a couple of mentions of production in Ritzers book, such as a passage on page 177, where Ritzer notes that his analyses of the grobalization of nothing:
Certainly applies as well to consumptions other face production. We literally could not have the grobalization of, for example, non-things without the existence of systems that produce massive numbers of the non-things that are to be sold and distributed worldwide. But even production, or the production-consumption nexus, is too narrow a domain for examining the grobalization of nothing. Nothing spreads globally within politics, or the church, or the criminal justice system, for myriad reasons, many of them specic to each of those domains, that have nothing to do with production or consumption.

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Far from it being for me to deny the relative autonomy of politics, the legal system, or culture, but all of these things are centrally related to production and, increasingly, to consumption. There is also another phenomenon of immense importance that Ritzers analysis suggests, but does not critically engage with, and that is the replacement of human labor power by machines. In terms of one of Ritzers sets of categorical distinctions involving non-places, non-things, non-persons, and non-services (encompassing as examples credit card companies, telemarketing, and computerized services of various sorts), this proliferation of nullities, to use Ritzers terms, involves a rather substantial global restructuring of labor, which both eliminates a lot of jobs and creates a wealth of McJobs that could serve as paradigms of contemporary alienated labor (consider telemarketing, or all the clerical work that credit cards, airline reservations, sales of many sorts and the like involve). Now, as Marx argued in the Grundrisse (Marx, 1939/1993), replacement of human labor power by technology can be progressive, but as we have seen, it can also be disastrous for certain categories of labor, in the sense that it eliminates more creative, unionized and well-paid and secure jobs and creates more deadening, alienating, lower-paid and insecure ones. This is an immense world-historical phenomenon that lies at the heart of current concerns about globalization, and I think that Ritzers dialectic of something and nothing could have interestingly illuminated and critically engaged this phenomenon. There is one passage where Ritzer mentions that Marxs analysis of alienation, while not especially useful in talking about consumption (although some might contest this), is probably more relevant than ever to the less-developed world where much of the kind of production-oriented work analyzed by Marx is increasingly done (p. 143). I would agree with this, but would suggest that alienated labor is also wide-spread in the kind of domains that Ritzer is analyzing, such as telemarketing, computerized services, and most clerical and other ofce work needed to sustain global production.

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Parenthetically, I might mention that the lm One Hour Photo that Ritzer uses to illustrates the empty forms of consumption is about empty forms of production and labor as much as consumption and that the Robin Williams character illustrates the dehumanizing and alienating effects that doing nothing, i.e. laboring in a completely prescribed, impersonalized, and uncreative way, can have distorting effects on the personality. Yet, the lm can also be read as suggesting that, even in the most dehumanizing matrixes of production and consumption, there are attempts to create human relationships and creative work that is something. As a hopelessly Hegelian dialectician, I appreciate the dialectic of nothing and something in Ritzers book, as well as the dialectic of glocalization and grobalization, but would have liked to see him engage more with the dialectic of production and consumption. I would note, also, that there is one important passage and concept thrown out, but not developed, where Ritzer mentions the double afiction of those workers in extremely low paying jobs who are not able to afford the very products that they are producing. Both afictions are heart wrenching, but I fear that they are a widespread global phenomenon, whose development and documentation could provide a sharp critical edge to how we view globalization. I suspect part of Ritzers answer would be his statement, in footnote 88 on page 234 where he writes:
It is worth remembering that it was not too long ago that the United States was the world leader in production. In many ways, consumption has replaced production as the focus of the American economy and it has become the nations prime export to the rest of the world. It is interesting to ponder the implications of what it means to have gone from the world leader in the production of steel to, say, the world leader in the exportation of fast-food restaurants and the shopping mall.

I would agree with Ritzer that to some extent consumption has replaced production as the USs prime export, but I think that, globally, production is as important as consumption. As postFordist theory makes clear, production is increasingly moving from one place to another and, to some extent, this process embodies Ritzers analysis, in that the forms of production are increasingly similar, whether sneakers, for instance, are produced in Los Angeles, Indonesia, Vietnam, or China. In general, I would agree with Marxs model in the Grundrisse, that there is a circuit of capital that involves production, exchange, distribution, and consumption, and while one could debate whether production is or is not the primary moment in this circuit, as Marx claims, I think it is clear that, taking globalization as a whole, the dialectic of production and consumption, and circuits of capital are crucial to the process (i.e. that there is no consumption without production and that they are linked in circuits including exchange and distribution, much of which Ritzer engages with, so he might as well take on production as well to complete the circuit). Another criticism of Ritzers McDonalds analysis that could be leveled against The Globalization of Nothing is that he does not have enough on creative consumption, or the ways that something and nothing produce hybrids, or local variants of global products, or forms like McDonalds. Hybridization has been taken as a key form of the construction of local cultures within globalization that postmodernists, and others including Stuart Hall and the studies of McDonalds in Golden Arches East (Watson, 1997), positively valorize as a cultural synthesis of local and global, and traditional and modern. While hybridizations have been exaggerated and many of the celebrations of

hybridization, or local inection of global phenomena, such as the Golden Arches East studies cited above, overlook the elements of cultural imperialism (if I may use an old-fashioned term), of destruction of the traditional, and of loss, as Ritzer repeatedly stresses, nonetheless, more global forms can always be inected globally and creative hybrids can be produced of the global and the local. Yet, Ritzer focuses on the form of consumption and nothing, and downplays creative use and active audience appropriation of commodities, cultural forms, or globalized phenomena of various sorts. British cultural studies highlights the active audience as constitutive of the popular and, while this emphasis can overplay subjectivity and the power of the consumer, I think highlights a potential production of difference, meaning and creative practice (i.e. something) that Ritzer does not adequately address. He might, thus, add a dialectic of nothing and something to the activity of the consumer in the process of consumption, in which one class or pole of consumers is ideal-type characterized as largely passive and consumes in a standardized way, whereby another class or pole can consume in highly creative and idiosyncratic ways that can transform nothing into something (to use Ritzers dialectic). Ritzer does have a section on Making something out of nothing in his internet chapter and he valorizes the slow food movement in a concluding chapter, but I think he needs more on active and creative uses of consumption, or globalized technology like the internet. Both Andrew Feenberg and I, in developing theories of technology, stress how technologies can be reconstructed in ways that people can make something out of nothing, to use Ritzers terminology; that is, use technology for their own self-valorization, projects, and purposes, and not just those of capital or whoever produces the technology. For example, people use traditional medicines, or natural child-bearing, instead of the standardized forms of corporate medicine, and have constructed the internet as a decommodied realm of communication, cultural dissemination, and political organization, often going beyond the purposes of the creators of the technology. Further, whereas I nd many of Ritzers concepts and distinctions in the book valuable, like his analysis Meet the nullities, where he analyses the forms of non-place, non-things, non-persons, and non-services of corporate globalization, I have a conceptual problem with his analysis of non-things where he writes:
Our bodies are covered by an array of non-things and even when we go to bed at night, we are likely to be surrounded by non-things (Sealy Posturepedic mattresses, Martha Stewart sheets and pillow cases, Chanel perfumes or colognes, and so on) (p. 56).

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While many consumer brands are nullities, and so in Ritzers vocabulary are arguably no things, many brands are important things to many people. Reducing so many consumer brands to nullities downplays the importance of logos and branding that Naomi Klein and others claim is at the very heart of globalization. While Ritzer provides a powerful critique of current modes of branding, I am just not convinced that some of the brands Ritzer cites in his text are nothings. Such a concept of brands neglects the kind of sign value and system of difference in consumption stressed by Baudrillard, and worked out more concretely by sociologists like Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson (Goldman and Papson, 1996). Now, some of the brands like Visa and MasterCard that Ritzer engages with are paradigms of brands that are pure forms,

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where there is little if any material difference in the way the cards work, but some people strongly identify with brands of airlines, autos, clothing lines, and other commodities. Admittedly, the distinction is often hard to make regarding whether brands are something or nothing: while arguably a Gucci bag can be seen as a nothing, as Ritzer claims, in which pure form dominates, there are genuine differences in some fashion houses and clothing lines that have passionate detractors and fans. Certainly, as pirating and simulation of original products indicates, replication is big business, but the fact that many products are run off indicates precisely that they are something with commodity sign-value. And although there may be some pure models of strip malls, or even mega malls and other sites of consumption, that appear as nothing (i.e. not distinctive, interesting, locally-inected, and so on), it is precisely the differences that make some malls stand out, like the Grove and Fairfax Farmers Market in Los Angeles, or Edmonton Mall in Canada. Likewise, when Ritzer cites the Ford Edsall as an example of nothing in the appendix, this just seems wrong: Edsall is symbolic of something different, a product line that opped in a spectacular way (as did Classic Coke). Another problem with Ritzers categorization is that he appears sometimes to be too loose with his application of nothing or, at least, one could raise questions whether certain phenomena are something or nothing. I would question, for example, Ritzers citing of the use of audio guides in museums as an example of nothing in chapter 5, note 4, where he writes:
An interesting example of the trend toward nothingness is the increasing use of audio guides and rented tape players at such shows and at museums more generally (p. 236).

While it is true that more and more museums are using similar types of audio guides to accompany their art shows, they are uneven in quality, but more important, facilitate qualitatively different aesthetic experiences and uses. I personally avoided these audio guides at rst, as I thought that they distracted from the aesthetic experience. I found, however, that some were very informative and could, if used properly, enhance the overall experience of the art show. Some, indeed, strike me as quite something. For instance, the audio guide that accompanied the 2003 Kandinsky-Schonberg show at the Jewish Museum in New York, not only had very informative and intelligent commentary, but large sections of music by Schonberg and others, so that one could enjoy Schonbergs music while looking at his paintings, or just take a break, close ones eyes, and imagine they were at a concert. Another place where one could contest Ritzers overly loose use of nothing is his claim that the media are, themselves, . . . purveyors of nothing (for example, the soaps, CNN Headline News, sitcoms) (p. 111). Whereas there are rather empty forms of global news and entertainment (reality TV, headline news, and maybe at least some US sitcoms), other forms like soaps are arguably quite varied, diverse, local, and thus, presumably, something. I have been to telenovella panels at conferences, and read papers on the topic, that insist on the major differences between Latin American telenovellas and American soaps, and the differences between programs of this genre in, say, Mexico, Argentina, Cuba, and Brazil, and even within these countries (acionados can discourse for great length on varieties of Brazilian telenovella, and one friend loaned me tapes of a Cuban soap opera that was a quite interesting political

drama, using certain formats of American soaps but producing something signicantly different, and thus I would conclude, something). Parenthetically, I might note that Ritzer uses nothing, nothingness, nullity, and such cognates interchangeably and while I have learned to live with, and even appreciate, the globalization of nothing and nd the nullities concept amusing and illuminating, I cringe a bit when I read nothingness, no doubt because of my early immersion in Sartre and Heidegger and association of nothingness with anxiety, death, and disturbing forms of non-being. Hence, I would question Ritzer as to whether there is a difference between nothing and nothingness in his categorizations, and why he uses the latter term when it carries a lot of conceptual baggage from existential philosophy. In other words, nothing is an empty enough concept to serve Ritzers purposes, but nothingness is to me branded heavily in terms of Heideggers and Sartres existential philosophy, and does not readily serve as a cognate for Ritzers nothing. Consequently, while Ritzer is using a exible model of ideal types ranging from something to nothing, I think there is room for contestations of at least some of his presentations of nothing, and hope at least that more varied and diverse somethings might proliferate in a global economy, as opposed to the undeniable proliferation of nothing, the grobalization of the local, and general tendencies toward standardization, exchangeability, massication, that it is the virtue of Ritzers analysis to warn us about. Globalization and the contemporary moment Indeed, Ritzer is telling a very dramatic story that comes most alive, for me at least, in the titanic battle between the glocalization of something and grobalization of something and nothing that takes place in the middle of his book. He concludes chapter 5 by stating:
Thus, we live in an era in which a variety of its basic characteristics have led to a tremendous expansion in the grobalization of nothing. Furthermore, current trends lead to the view that the future will bring with it an even greater proliferation of nothing throughout the globe (p. 113).

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This is a rather ominous prospect concerning the growing hegemony of the grobalization of nothing, of pure forms or models of production and consumption that could obliterate the local, singularity, heterogeneity, and difference. Of course, there are countervailing tendencies that varieties of postmodern theory and Roland Robertson extol, but I think Ritzer provides an important cautionary warning that major trends of globalization are destroying individuality and particularity, and producing standardization and homogeneity. To some extent this is a familiar story, told by various neo-Marxists, Weberians and other critics of modernity, but it is salutary to rehear the story as a warning against too enthusiastic globophilac embraces of a globalization that is producing, according to its postmodern champions, bountiful heterogeneity, hybridity, and difference. Ritzer claims, near the end of the book, that his major conceptual contribution to this story, and to theorizing globalization, is his account of the growing conict between glocalization and grobalization. This optic helps balance tendencies to celebrate and overrate the local and catches the fact that the anti-corporate globalization movement

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that wants to protect the local and the human from corporate domination, or grobalization in Ritzers vocabulary, is itself global in nature and thus represents a form of glocalization. But, I think more concrete goals need to be attached and defended via the anti-corporate globalization movement (that is not any longer, strictly speaking, anti-globalization tout court, but anti-corporate or anti-capitalist globalization). In particular, the anti-corporate globalization (or social justice movement) is not just for preserving the local over global appropriation and control, but also for specic goals like human rights, labor rights, the rights of specic groups, like women, gays, the otherly-abled, or animals, as well as for goals like environmental preservation, safe food, democratization, and social justice. These goals are at least somewhat universal in many conceptualizations, so there is something of a synthesis of the global and local in the anti-corporate globalization movement. Hence in my view, these universal values and goals are valuable somethings, and the anti-corporate and social justice movement is important for defending important universal values, preserving local sites, cultures, and values, and providing innovative alternatives and political strategies and practices (though as Ritzer warns, they may erode into nothings if they merely repeat the same slogans and actions time after time). I am not sure that one can quite as easily or cavalierly dismiss the local as Ritzer does, suggesting it has largely disappeared and cannot be resuscitated, as you cannot have glocals without locals and there are still many places, cuisines, products, peoples, cultures, and the like that have not yet been largely glocalized (or so I would imagine, though here Ritzer may be right in the long term). For instance, the day before a panel on Ritzers book at the Eastern Sociology Association conference in New York in February 2004, I took a walk down Lexington Avenue and encountered on one block the stores Good Old Things, Fine Antiques, and other specialty shops. The next block had Indian vegetarian restaurants next to one that read Non-Vegetarian Indian and even Kosher Vegetarian Indian, as well as a variety of other foreign restaurants. I passed the Armory that had the famous 1913 modern art exposition and was having an antiques fair that weekend. At Union Square there was a market that was selling fresh bison meat, ostrich burgers, and freshly brewed hot apple cider that I tasted. Beyond the Square, the Strand bookstore still exists along with a few other surviving used bookstores in the neighborhood. And best of all, I found on the way back that the Grammercy Cinema was now the home of the MOMA Cinematique and was showing, for a six dollar a day pass, lms by major Iranian and Korean directors, as well as a pair of Godard classics. So, while somethings and the local are clearly under attack through corporate globalization (and one could give a detailed analysis of the grobalization of New York starting with the Disneycation of 42nd Street and corporatization of Times Square), nonetheless, there are some locales still existent and they should be treasured, defended and supported. Shifting the register, I would also quibble about Ritzers interpretation of the 9/11 attacks and, more broadly, why a certain breed of fundamentalist terrorism is anti-US Ritzer rightly calls attention to a growing anti-Americanism and growing hostility to the grobalization, to use his term, of American culture, values, politics and the military, but he does not mention George W. Bush, and I would argue that much of the skyrocketing anti-Americanism evident in the PEW polls, that Ritzer cites as evidence

of growing anti-Americanism, is a specic reaction to the Bush administrations militarist unilateralism, nationalistic chauvinism, and just plain arrogance (Kellner, 2003, 2005). While the 9/11 and other Jihadist attacks might have happened no matter who was president, and while many parts of the world resent American grobalization, as Ritzer suggests, I think these resentments and reaction have been greatly intensied, perhaps dangerously so, by the Bush administration. Another caveat, in presenting Ben Barbers (1995) Jihad vs McWorld, Ritzer saliently presents McWorld as an example of grobalization, or nothing, but wrongly, in my view, presents Jihad as something. There is little so formulaic as bin Ladens anti-west ravings, and I suggest that terrorism has been extremely formulaic and repetitive (look at suicide bombings in Israel or Iraq), much more so than the anti-corporate globalization movement that Ritzer claims is repeating empty forms of internet connections and protest, rather than creating new and original forms of protest (only partly true, in my opinion, but a salutary warning to be creative, innovative, and surprising in constructing forms of global protest and oppositional politics). Finally, in regard to Jihad, I would argue that the Islamic schools, or madrassa, are as formulaic as the textbooks and McSchools that Ritzer rightly complains about. And so in conclusion, I nd George Ritzers The Globalization of Nothing highly provocative, useful in its dialectic of something and nothing and glocalization vs grobalization in terms of theorizing globalization. As noted, I would have liked to see more of a dialectic of production and consumption, which I think would have enriched the project. Someone still needs to rewrite Marxs account of capitalism and the alienation of labor, in terms of global and hi-tech production and labor and new forms of culture and consumption. Nick Dyer-Witheford in CyberMarx (Dyer-Witheford, 1999) has begun this enterprise, and those wishing to continue this thematic could well use many of Ritzers categories applied to production and labour. Hence, whereas Ritzers text is useful for illuminating aspects of consumption and globalization, the dialectic of production and consumption on local, national, and global scales still needs to be taken up.
Notes 1. This text draws on presentations on Ritzers text from panels at the Eastern Sociology Association and Pacic Sociology Association conferences in 2004. Thanks to Ritzer, Roland Robertson, and others for spirited discussion of the ideas engaged here, and to Joanne Roberts for helping to produce a published version of the intervention. 2. For my previous reections on Ritzers works, see Douglas Kellner, Foreword: McDonaldization and its discontents: Ritzer and his critics, in McDonaldization Revisited, edited by Mark Alno, John S. Caputo, and Robin Wynard, Praeger Press, London, 1998, pp. vi-xiv and Theorizing McDonaldization: a multiperspectivist approach, in Resisting McDonaldization, edited by Barry Smart, Sage Publications, London, 1999, pp. 186-206. References Barber, B. (1995), Jihad vs. McWorld, Times Books, New York, NY. Dyer-Witheford, N. (1999), Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism, Illinois University Press, Urbana and Chicago, IL.

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Goldman, R. and Papson, S. (1996), Sign Wars: The Cluttered Landscape of Advertising, Guilford, New York, NY. Kellner, D. (1995), Media Culture, Routledge, London and New York, NY. Kellner, D. (2003), From 9/11 to Terror War: The Dangers of the Bush Legacy, Rowman and Littleeld, New York, NY. Kellner, D. (2005), Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy, Paradigm Press, Boulder, CO. Marx, K. (1939/1993), Grundrisse, Penguin Books, London. Ritzer, G. (1992), The McDonaldization of Society, Pine Forge Press, Thousand Oaks, CA. Ritzer, G. (1995), Expressing America, Pine Forge Press, Thousand Oaks, CA. Ritzer, G. (1999), Enchanting a Disenchanted World: Revolutionizing the Means of Consumption, Pine Forge Press, Thousand Oaks, CA. Ritzer, G. (2004), The Globalization of Nothing, Pine Forge Press, Thousand Oaks, CA. Watson, J.L. (Ed.) (1997), Golden Arches East: McDonalds in East Asia, Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, CA. (Douglas Kellner is George Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education at UCLA and is author of many books on social theory, politics, history, and culture. Recent books include a study of the 2000 US presidential election, Grand Theft 2000: Media Spectacle and the Theft of an Election: The Postmodern Adventure (co-authored with Steve Best); Media Spectacle; and September 11, Terror War, and the Dangers of the Bush Legacy. He has just published Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy: Terrorism, War, and Election Battles. Kellners web site is at: www.gseis. ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/kellner.html and his weblog Blogleft is at: www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ ed253a/blogger.php)