Globalization, Global Culture and Cultural Deviance

Globalization has the potential of threatening the traditional cultures and spreading the norms and values of global or Western culture. This is considered as a critical issue for Iranian society that experienced a revolution on the basis of moral and religious values and has proclaimed being distinctive from dominant global culture. Meanwhile, some evidences indicate the violation of traditional and official values by some parts of society; particularly this has been increasing among the youths. This paper addresses the question if there is a relationship between having contact with globalization process and tendency towards global culture and consequently cultural deviancy?This question has been examined by the data which were gathered from a sample of 376 students of Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran, in the spring of 2007. The data indicate having contact with globalization process has a weak positive relation with tendency toward global culture and a positive medium relation with cultural deviation. Nevertheless, the relation between tendency to global culture and cultural deviation is relatively strong. Among the four dimensions of global culture, as defined by Berger, the respondents show a strong tendency towards those which refer to market economy and citizenship rights while their tendency toward the dimension that relevant to Western life style compared to other dimensions, was low. This may support the idea that for studying the expansion of global culture there should be a distinction between its universal and human aspects (such as market economy and human rights) and its particular and Western aspects.