Abstract:

The paper sets out the broad processes involved in globalisation, especially in the communications and media domains. While there are global changes happening, there remain massive disparities in uptake and availability between markets. Equally, large-scale differences exist within each market. The futura.com study based in the United Kingdom is designed to look at the impact of change, using a panel-based design and multiple measures of different forms of change - technological, personal, social, national. This approach has allowed a complex segmentation analysis based around people’s attitudes to change to be undertaken. The results of this social segmentation show that this is an efficient and meaningful means of discriminating between different groups of people in terms of their attitudes, behaviour and beliefs. This approach to researching changing markets is ideally suited to multi-country studies.