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Abstract
This is a case study of Vlisco, a Dutch textile printing company since 1846 that produces batik cloth for the West African consumer market. We focus on the changing status of batik cloth in West Africa and related shifts in the relations of Vlisco with its consumers and local trade partners over a period of almost two centuries. We conclude that in the long run, globalisation does not necessarily result in the transformation of authentic and locally conceived products into empty mass products, and even if it does, in time the process can change direction.
Notes
1. The company was formally established under the name Vlisco in 1965 after a series of mergers (Ingenbleek, Citation1997). For reasons of clarity, the predecessors, Katoendrukkerij P.F. van Vlissingen & Co. and Texoprint, are referred to in this article as Vlisco.
2. In the original text, in brackets it reads ‘generally centrally conceived, controlled, and’ and ‘generally indigenously conceived, controlled, and’ (Ritzer, Citation2007, pp. 36, 38). This is left out of the definitions in the text, since in the remainder of the article Ritzer explains, as we do above, that some forms of nothing are glocally conceived and/or controlled, and some forms of something are centrally conceived and/or controlled (see also Ritzer, Citation2003a, p. 195, nn. 12 and 13).
3. Other companies active on the twentieth-century wax print, wax block print and fancy print market include two Dutch companies (Haarlemse Katoen Maatschappij until 1922 and Ankersmit Textielfabrieken N.V. until 1964, when it merged with Vlisco), at least one British company (A. Brunnschweiler & Co. Ltd. [ABC], still active, see text), a French company (CFAO), a Swiss company (Hohlenstein Textile Printing Works until 1973), and an unknown number of Japanese companies (Ingenbleek, Citation1997; Nielsen, Citation1979). As of the late 1980s, a number of Chinese manufacturers entered the market as well (see text).
4. After a takeover by the personnel in the revolutionary 1980s, in 1993 the Ghanaian government withdrew from GTP altogether and sold its share to Vlisco (Nugent, Citation1995).
5. Vlisco simultaneously introduced a number of new products to the market to cater to the altered fancy print consumer preferences, i.e. the new Wodin brand of ready-made, relatively cheap clothes with fancy prints (‘Wodin’) and a line of less expensive clothes with wax block prints (‘Nu-style’).
6. Ironically, the Chinese competitors would also be seriously harmed by Vlisco's bankruptcy, since the Chinese companies were and are almost entirely dependent on the Vlisco collection for the design of new motifs. In this respect, the whole branch would decline if Vlisco disappeared.
7. It is similarly unclear how a product or service can be an instant ‘glocal something’, e.g. Ritzer's example of indigenous pottery, without ever being touched by the global (cf. Kellner, Citation2005; Rumford, Citation2005).
