Toward a multi-layered glocalization approach: States, multinational corporations, and the transformation of gender contracts

Refining our understanding of the process of globalization, students of ‘glocalization’ (Robertson 1995), ‘translation’ (Czarniawska-Joerges and Sevon 1996; Czarniawska and Sevon 2005; Frenkel 2005), and hybridization (Pieterse, 1995) of ideas and practices across national boundaries have repeatedly pointed to the transformations both state and organizational policies undergo when implemented in a social setting different than the ones from which they originated. In addition, these theories have (to different degrees) underlined the importance of the social actors involved in the cross-national transfer process and the active and creative role these actors are taking in adjusting ideas and practices to meet local needs and traditions. However, while theories of homogenizing globalization (e.g., Meyer, Boli, Thomas, and Ramirez 1997) tend to take for granted the exposure and receptiveness of all influential local institutions in each society to a powerful global idea or practice (therefore predicting very little resistance toward the global isomorphism process), the theories of glocalization, translation, and hybridization tend to focus, at least empirically, on a single social agent seen as primarily responsible for the importation and alternation of the specific foreign idea or practice. Other social actors in the local setting, if accounted for in these studies, are often portrayed as representing local logics and traditions and as embedded exclusively in their local institutional and cultural environment. Beyond the empirical inaccuracy this ‘single agent glocalization’ perspective implies, it also reproduces the binary distinction between local and global and, therefore, hinders a more complex understanding of the mutual transformation of what we term ‘local’ and ‘global’.