The McDonaldization of democracy? Globalization and space-making in practices of innovating mini-publics

The paper proposes an “ontographic approach” to the study of globalization. It focuses on different ontologies of globalization enacted in practices of translocal innovation. We distinguish: (1) modern globalization in practices of regionally expanding functional systems, (2) postmodern globalization in practices of fluidly dispersing heterogeneous assemblages, and (3) reflexive modern globalization in practices of infrastructuring translocal networks. We illustrate these different ways of doing globalization with accounts of democratic innovation practices that seek to spread “mini-publics” as a new form of deliberative democracy. At first glance, this may appear to be the McDonaldization of democracy, referring to Ritzer’s model of globalization as a worldwide expansion of Western functionalist management and standardization. On closer inspection, however, we find that three different ways of doing globalization coexist, each associated with different ways of doing social order and space. We propose the ontographic approach to account for this diversity. We then suggest it as a more general approach to turn the confrontation of modern, postmodern, and reflexive modern theories of globalization into a heuristic repertoire for studying how different forms of globalization are done in practice.