Chapter 36 — Further Reading
A short, curated shelf for going deeper on this chapter's core idea — that modernization is not Westernization, that a third-culture generation now runs two systems at once, and that the cultural traffic has reversed. These are starting points, not a syllabus; pick one and follow your curiosity.
Reading-level key: ★ accessible to anyone · ★★ some background helpful · ★★★ scholarly
On "modernization is not Westernization"
- Ronald Inglehart & Christian Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy (2005). ★★★ The scholarly backbone of this chapter. Using the World Values Survey, they show that economic development reliably shifts values without erasing a society's cultural starting point — modernization is real, convergence on the West is not. Reference-grade; dip in rather than read cover to cover.
- Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996). ★★ Controversial and much-criticized, but worth reading critically for one durable insight this chapter borrows: that modernizing societies often become more culturally assertive, not more Western. Read it in argument with, not as gospel.
- Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006). ★★ A humane, beautifully written case for living across cultures without flattening them — the philosophical mood this chapter aims for. A good antidote to both "everyone's converging" and "cultures are sealed boxes."
On the third-culture generation and living between cultures
- David C. Pollock, Ruth E. Van Reken & Michael V. Pollock, Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds (3rd ed., 2017). ★ The foundational book on the third-culture experience. Originally about globally-raised children, its account of belonging to neither pure culture maps closely onto the natively-bicultural young urbanites of this chapter.
- Erin Meyer, The Culture Map (2014). ★ Return to it here for its practical guidance on multicultural and virtual teams — directly useful for the "remote work as mixing-ground" section. Meyer's dimensions remain the best x-ray for what's really happening on a cross-cultural video call.
On the reversed traffic: culture flowing east to west
- Euny Hong, The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation Is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture (2014). ★ A lively, accessible account of how South Korea engineered hallyu — the deliberate, almost national-industrial creation of K-pop and the Korean wave. The clearest single illustration of the chapter's "traffic reversed" thesis.
- Roland Robertson, "Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity" (in Global Modernities, eds. Featherstone, Lash & Robertson, 1995). ★★★ The source of the glocalization concept central to this chapter — global culture absorbed and remade locally, not erasing the local. Scholarly, but the core idea is simple and powerful.
Lighter and free
- The World Values Survey's online "Inglehart–Welzel Cultural Map." ★ Free and interactive: it plots dozens of countries on two value axes and lets you watch how they've moved over decades — a vivid, hands-on way to see that societies modernize along their own tracks without converging. Search "Inglehart-Welzel cultural map."
- Erin Meyer's HBR articles on managing global virtual teams. ★ Short, free, and practical — a good first taste of the remote-work-across-cultures problem before committing to the book.
- Documentaries and reputable longform on the Korean wave, anime's global rise, or China's tech leapfrog. ★ Plentiful and accessible; treat them as appetizers that show the reversed traffic, not as deep cultural analysis.
A reading suggestion. If you do one thing: skim Inglehart & Welzel (or just play with the free World Values Survey map) until the core point lands in your gut — societies move, roughly in parallel, and do not arrive at the West. If you want the human texture of the third-culture generation, read Pollock & Van Reken next. And if you want a single fun, fast illustration that the world is not flattening toward you, read Euny Hong on how Korea exported its cool back to the world.
(Full citations for all sources appear in the Bibliography. Sources here are real, verifiable works; where this book uses composite or illustrative examples, it says so explicitly.)