Glocalised homestay hosts: The relationship of the "global" and the "local" in the context of internationalised education

Abstract

In the debate about the impacts of globalisation the question arises about the importance of locality and how the “global” and the “local” are related (Hannerz, 1996; Robertson, 1995; True, 2006). Robertson (1995) suggests the simultaneity and interdependence of these two spheres, describing their relationship as glocalisation. One way to further investigate this relationship is to explore how globalising processes impact on the local level of home and family life. This research studied the New Zealand homestay home, an under-researched phenomenon (Richardson, 2003a; Ward, 2006) and a suitable setting where the “global” and the “local” intersect. In this study the “global” is represented in this study by international students who sought homestay accommodation while the home manifests the “local” spheres. Hosting an unknown “other” can be considered as one of the most direct impacts of globalisation. Twenty-six semi-structured qualitative interviews with homestay hosts and homestay agents were conducted to explore how homestay hosts’ interpretation of home and family was affected by sharing their home with an international homestay student, to determine the place of homestay hosts in the New Zealand international education industry as perceived by hosts and to determine whether or not homestay hosting could be understood as a form of glocalisation. Three major themes emerged from the analysis of the interview data: homestay hosts’ experiences of family life, culture and working from home. The results indicated that homestay hosting reinforced the notion of home as a site of family life, enhanced family relationships, and presented home as a site of cultural (re)production, challenging and renegotiating homestay hosts’ cultural identity. Globalising processes, in the form of hosting an international student, initiated the transformation of home into a business site which commodified home and family life by paying homestay hosts to provide international students with feelings of being at home and part of the family. This led to ethical dilemmas for homestay hosts having to make decisions that were placed around generating profit through hosting and making the student part of the family at the same time. In regards to their place within the international education industry, homestay hosts represent one element contributing to its viability, not only in its economic sense but also by emphasising the social and cultural aspects of international education. The extension of globalising processes, reaching to the very specific setting of “home” confirms Robertson’s (1995) suggestion that globalising processes are not solely macro scale processes but also penetrate the micro scale and that the local has an impact on the global and vice versa. Homestay hosting can therefore be described as a form of glocalisation: while sharing local culture and family life with international students, homestay hosts experience the global “other”. Although the discourse of those studied indicates that the emphasis of these encounters lie on localising the international students, locals also are shaped by the global influence.