UCLA

Though often considered a homogenizing force, global media has been undergoing a process of re-examination as findings reveal the ways in which transplanted media, such as transnational television programs, are recontextualized or transformed through local interpretations, thereby assuming more interstitial forms. This study furthers such re-evaluations, and contributes to broader investigations into the nature of globalization as concurrently homogenizing and differentiating, through its examination of culturally-specific and cross-culturally shared representations of workplace power struggles and tensions over hierarchical standing in transnational adaptations of the television program The Office. A cross-cultural analysis of the televisual texts of the original British Office and its American remake was conducted, comparing their portrayals of the struggles for control and status or rank (the latter two acting, at times, as indicators of broader class discord) that arise among the five social categories of personnel depicted in both versions. To determine whether these representations of disputes over authority and position reveal underlying anxieties about the contemporary office workspace that are transnationally shared, locally specific, or a combination of these, I examined the types of conflicts that were portrayed and the manner in which these were depicted in the American version as compared to the original series. Identifying which features related to power disputes and tensions over standing were the same or different in the two versions of The Office revealed that while such workplace strife may be depicted slightly differently based on the programs' specific contexts, they nevertheless express mutual anxieties regarding the ability to attain, preserve, and protect one's place in the hierarchical corporate environment. The expression of such transnationally-shared concerns in locally-distinct ways supports the idea that global media flows, and by extension globalization, are simultaneously processes of homogenization and heterogenization, although they generally exhibit a greater emphasis on one tendency or the other.