Where the word comes from
Roland Robertson brought glocalization into social theory in the early 1990s, borrowing it from Japanese business vocabulary: dochakuka, roughly “becoming native to the land” — originally an agricultural term for adapting a farming technique to local conditions, later used in marketing for adapting a global product to a local market. Robertson’s claim is that the global and the local are not opposites. Anything global has to arrive somewhere, and arriving somewhere is what makes it local. Arjun Appadurai made the same argument with indigenization; Ulf Hannerz with creolization — a world of genuinely mixed forms rather than pure ones being diluted.
Not every layer is equally negotiable. Read the fifteen sites here and a pattern falls out. The layers that change hardest are meaning and practice — exactly the layers no head office controls, because they are made by users. The layers that hold are the sign and, usually, ownership — exactly the layers that are legally defended. Glocalization is not evidence that power is evenly shared. It is evidence that meaning is made where things are used.
The case against. George Ritzer argues that glocalization is the cheerful half of the story. His term McDonaldization describes the worldwide spread of a rationalised model — efficiency, calculability, predictability, control — and he coined grobalization for the growth-driven imposition running alongside all this local adaptation. Hold the corrective: a thoroughly localized meaning can sit on top of a wholly unlocalized balance sheet. Check the bottom row of every site — the owners — before deciding who won.