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Abstract: Globalization, a multifaceted process with major effects on contemporary societies and communities, has been frequently studied, but it has remained inexhaustible as a studying resource. Through this article, we intend to study the effects of globalization and its direct and indirect implications in relation with social change. In this respect, we have raised two major paradigms in relation with which the meeting of local and global value systems becomes problematic or not: the disjunctive paradigm, that studies globalism vs. localism, respectively, the conjunctive paradigm, that studies the phenomenon called glocalism. Through our study we have succeeded to highlight the internal/external cultural change in relation with the space-time coordinates.
Keywords: globalization, globalism, localism, glocalism, diffusion, acculturation
1. Introduction.
Globalization, an ample, but vaguely defined phenomenon, was often perceived as one of the following: universal tendency toward the inner and ascensional 'concrete totality1, tendency to align with the new meanings of contemporary multicultural phenomenon (referring to correlative aspects, such as cultural homogenization), or an expression of the expansion of commercial systems on a planetary scale2. Globalization is not only a current term associated with the complex, imperceptible and multifaceted process as it is previously described, but also a term that refers to the associated meaning of cultural change. Therefore, globalization can be observed from different perspectives. In relation with the communication principle (principium communicationis), it can be seen, on the one hand, as a dynamic result of a process of internal spontaneous change, on the other, as a result of induction, "as it is perceived by host countries more as pressure than as a free choice", as Mona Mamulea asserted3. Therefore, globalization can be differently perceived, but it also has a general meaning: the result of an unfinished process: 1. which will end sometime, in universalistic consensual perspective, where the meeting between cultures would be nonproblematic; or 2. which will never end, in a realistic perspective, where the meeting between cultures is a temporary experimentation of alterity.
A strict terminological delimitation of globalization would be impossible. Within the fluctuating limits of a 'weak (debolist) thought', globalization had some clusters of content: the cultural mosaic, composed of a pastiche of denationalized styles and motifs, completed by a range of values originating in local cultures; the cultural...