Glocal in my context: Matsui Glocal
What is glocal? Of course, glocal is an artificial word made from global and local.
According to Oxford dictionary, glocal is “reflecting or characterized by both local and global considerations”. Or in Longman, it is “relating to the connections or relationships between global and local businesses, problems etc”.
Generally, global and local are opposite words each other, as globalization vs localization. Globalization is regarded as enemy from local. In Indonesia and maybe other developing countries, globalization is almost synonym with westernization, capitalism, imperialism, USA & Europe, or sometimes with christianization.
We remember that developing countries had felt to be exploited under colonialism by Western countries. So, the concept structure between globalization – localization and exploit – exploited has not been changed.
However, developing countries should know that many local people in USA or EU also criticize against impact of globalization. Such people played big role to win new USA President last year.
It means that almost all local people of the world, not only in developing countries but also in developed countries, feel and battle the globalization.
I understand that there is a universal basic issue in local society everywhere in the world. Local peoples in USA, EU, Indonesia, and Japan are facing to the same universal issues.
That is the crisis of local identities. Collapse of “who we are, where we live, what our life is”. Local life cannot be separated from so-called globalization, including using mobile phone, internet, or imported consumer goods.
The problem is not developed countries vs developing countries. But, what we keep and develop our own life with local identity.
Local people often think only they are in the worst condition because they know about only their local society. But, you are not alone. Even though the character and level of living is different, almost all local people feel and think the same.
In this context, I myself want to define glocal as global network of locals without border of administrations, and countries.
My glocal has no best model to be learned by others. No intention to apply a model to others. My glocal respects each locality and tries to settle the respect among locals. We start from such respect to others or at least recognition of others. Then, facilitate to learn each other to know more about ourselves in the local, for next step.
I will do more with local anywhere in the world. I believe the local-to-local network in global will change current confrontative situation, if we start from ourselves and our daily life, not from ideology or political jargon.
