The dialectics of universalism and particularism: World society, religious traditions, and women’s political representation, 1960–2013

This study develops a model of macro-cultural identity inspired by the work of George Herbert Mead. The model puts world society theory, which emphasizes the homogenizing effects of ‘world culture,’ into conversation with civilization-analytic perspectives, which contend that religious and civilizational differences grow increasingly salient over time. The author regards these approaches as dialectically co-implicated. To test the model, the article analyzes cross-cultural heterogeneity in the effects of world society linkages on women’s share of parliamentary seats between 1960 and 2013. Countries are grouped into cultural zones based primarily on religious composition and secondarily on geographical region. The results generally support world society theory. Contrary to civilization-analytic perspectives, cultural resistance to women’s representation is most pronounced early but fades over time. Despite overall increases in women’s representation, there is little cross-cultural convergence, giving rise to improvement without isomorphism. The study concludes with a refined model of world society effects.

Social protection responses by states and international organisations to the COVID-19 crisis in the global South: Stopgap or new departure?

Macro events like the Great Depression in the 1930s and the Second World War have triggered new departures in social policy. What about the COVID-19 pandemic and the attendant socio-economic crisis? This article analyses the social protection measures taken by governments in the global South in response to the crisis, the social protection concepts developed by international organisations, and the overall strategies of the organisations in view of future shocks. The finding is that while the measures taken by governments expectedly have just been stopgap measures of a transitory nature, international organisations are aspiring to future-oriented policies and present a range of concepts for the time after the crisis. However, these are old concepts from pre-COVID-19 times, and the main strategy is to expand rather than reform the old models, even though the international organisations themselves identify new forms of poverty and structural inequalities. Moreover, the organisations do not provide conclusive evidence of their strategy’s viability; the strategy rather reflects a belief in social progress. All in all, the crisis has hardly been used as a window of opportunity for generating new ideas of social protection. Rather, the crisis has revealed the flimsy nature of widespread thinking about building social protection in the global South. Conceptually, the article draws on world society theory, conceiving of the pandemic as a global macro event.

Negotiations of Science and Religion in Nordic Institutions: An Ethnographic Approach

This article explores how two seemingly contradictory global trends—scientific rationality and religious expressiveness—intersect and are negotiated in people’s lives in Nordic countries. We focus on Finland and Sweden, both countries with reputations of being highly secular and modernized welfare states. The article draws on our multi-sited ethnography in Finland and Sweden, including interviews with health practitioners, academics, and students identifying as Lutheran, Orthodox, Muslim, or anthroposophic. Building on new institutionalist World Society Theory, the article asks whether individuals perceive any conflict at the intersection of “science” and “religion”, and how they negotiate such a relationship while working or studying in universities and health clinics, prime sites of global secularism and scientific rationality. Our findings attest to people’s creative artistry while managing their religious identifications in a secular, Nordic, organizational culture in which religion is often constructed as old-fashioned or irrelevant. We identify and discuss three widespread modes of negotiation by which people discursively manage and account for the relationship between science and religion in their working space: segregation, estrangement, and incorporation. Such surprising similarities point to the effects of global institutionalized secularism and scientific rationality that shape the negotiation of people’s religious and spiritual identities, while also illustrating how local context must be factored into future, empirical research on discourses of science and religion.

Toward Global Urban Climate Mitigation

Most research on global environmental change focuses on the national level, but the increasingly significant role of cities worldwide in climate change governance necessitates a global-scale understanding of urban environmental change. This study explains how greenhouse gas emissions reduction in 330 cities across 48 countries is affected by diffusion of normative expertise and political-economic forces. Specifically, polycentric systems comprised of environmental management consultancies and environmental transnational municipal networks facilitate expertise transmission to cities, facilitating urban emissions reduction. This expertise is diffused globally in a normative process explicable by world society theory, but these polycentric systems bypass national governments in a direct global-to-local transmission of expertise. These findings advance world society theory beyond its traditional nation-state-centric purview by showing that new polycentric systems can also affect subnational environmental policy outcomes, linking micro-level and macro-level processes in global environmental change.

Every Epoch, Time Frame or Date that Is Solid Melts into Air. Does It? The Entanglements of Global History and World Society

This chapter explores the possibilities of a fruitful exchange between world society theory and global history approaches. It uses turning points in analyzing the quality of the accounts of the exchange and confirms whether these accounts of significant change can be linked to one another. It also mentions the unification of global history and world society theory in rejecting any obvious 'telos' of history. The chapter explains that in global history, the rejection takes the form of a narrative in which history unfolds as nothing but a transformation of complexity, while in world society theory it takes the form of a theory of social evolution. It discusses possible substantive overlaps between global history and world society theory, which focuses on epochal change, the role of the long nineteenth century, and the role of single big events or turning points.

Globally Visible Environmental Protest: A Cross-national Analysis, 1970–2010

We examine the global rise of environmental protest events reported in major news outlets from 1970 to 2010, based on a new cross-national dataset. The paper addresses conventional arguments regarding resources and political opportunities, but focuses principally on the international dynamics that affect local protest and its visibility. World society theory as well as scholarship on transnational movements and advocacy networks suggests that international organizations and institutions play an important role in bringing resources, opportunities, and global media attention to local movements. We argue that international forces will be especially important in nondemocratic countries. Cross-national quantitative analyses suggest that nations with strong organizational ties to the international community have more protests that get covered in international media, and that the effects of international forces are stronger in less democratic societies.

Power, Hegemony, and World Society Theory: A Critical Evaluation

World society theory has been one of the better published theoretical paradigms of the past 30 to 40 years. But despite its publishing successes, world society theory and research are beset by a number of theoretical and empirical problems that call into question the theory’s ability to accurately describe and explain the global diffusion of government practices, policies, and structures. The authors summarize world society theory’s key claims, demonstrate that the theory has trouble explaining a set of diffusion outcomes that it needs to be able to explain, and show that a key reason for this is that the actors highlighted by the theory are embedded in hierarchical and power-laden organizations, networks, and fields that strongly limit the kinds of actions these actors can take and the kinds of cultural scripts they can follow.

Diaspora Engagement goes Global

Chapter 8 shows how diaspora engagement shifted from a regional model of migration management to a global best practice. In the late 1990s, engaging diasporas was openly advocated by a range of regional organizations, but by 2006, the Secretary General of the United Nations had become a cheerleader. Drawing on concepts from World Society theory and the literature on Epistemic Communities, this chapter argues that the global spread of diaspora institutions is a response to the growth of a new global institution: a global migration regime. ‘Engaging diasporas’ has become a central theme in efforts to link migration with the international development agenda and build a decentralized but coherent system of global migration governance. It has been enthusiastically promoted by migration policy experts and international organizations, as a way of sharing responsibility for migration management without the need for a world migration organization. Governments around the world have responded to these recommendations by establishing diaspora institutions.