Global, national and local perspectives; Introduction

First of all this refers to the Americanization of the world, characterized by the mass consumption of products delivered by multinational corporations such as McDonald's; in short, the existing Coca Cola culture familiar to all of us. [...]the globalization approach deals with scale enlargement processes - not from rural to urban areas as was the case in the 1950s and 1960s, or from city and region to the state and international level as in the 'linkages' approach of the 1970s and 1980s (Nas et al. 1989), but from local and state to the world. Rightly or wrongly, these theories are also criticized for underestimating the aspect of culture, when in fact a new culture is being generated at world level (see the discussion between Wallerstein 1990a, 1990b and Boyne 1990). [...]modernization is often perceived as an ideal to be striven for, which is generally not appreciated by the advocates of globalization, who have an eye for the less desirable effects of these processes. [...]notwithstanding the stream of publications describing a new type of global, informational, or network society (see Harvey 1990; Castells 1996), the concept of globalization meets with a certain scepticism within the circle of Indonesianists as represented in this special issue.