Recent discussions about globalization processes emphasize two apparently contradictory characteristics of such processes: homogenization and universalization, on one hand, and their contribution to an ever more complex and uncontrollable world, on the other. Indeed, the economic power of globally organized transnational corporations increasingly translates into a standardization of mass culture and universal tendencies of wasteful consumption of natural resources. Contrastingly, due to the unequal distribution of wealth, among other factors, the same pressures of homogenization provoke an increasingly diverse spectrum of strategies to cope with these pressures, which leads to an increasingly complex patchwork of social relations. National and regional institutions and traditions in fact play an often neglected mediatory … Continue reading Jürgen Renn, Malcolm D. Hyman