Suchergebnisse

1. Introduction -- 2. Synchronization through epistemic governance -- 3. The formation, spread, and use of world models -- 4. The construction of parallel domestic realities -- 5. Cross-national discourses and American unilateralism -- 6. The epistemic capital of organizations -- 7. The transnational circulation of catchwords -- 8. The global incorporation of uniqueness -- 9. Conclusion.

The Synchronization of National Policies shows how it is possible that there is remarkable uniformity in the policies that the nation-states adopt, although there is no world government. Mainstream research attributes such global governance to the influence of leading countries, to functional requirements created by capitalism and technological development, or to international organizations. This book argues that to understand how national policies are synchronized we need to realize that the global population forms a single global tribe of moderns, divided into some 200 clans called nations. While previous research on the world culture of moderns has focused on the diffusion of ideas, this book concentrates on the active role of local actors, who introduce global models and domesticate them to nation-states. In national policymaking, actors justify new policies by international comparisons, by the successes and failures of models adopted in other countries, and by building and appealing to the authority of international organizations. Consequently, national policies are synchronized with each other. Yet, because of the way such domestication of global trends takes place, citizens retain and reproduce the understanding that they follow a sovereign national trajectory. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, world culture theory, globalization, international relations, and political science.

This article introduces various strands of neoinstitutionalism, with the focus on sociological institutionalism, particularly 'Stanford School' sociological institutionalism and discursive institutionalism. The article points out that in opposing individualist rational choice theory, sociological institutionalism takes a strong structuralist stance in which actors are depicted as agents constituted by the scripts of rationalist world culture, mindlessly enacting worldwide models. In contrast, discursive institutionalist scholarship focuses on research about the actual practices through which global ideas are incorporated in local contexts, as well as on the discourses that motivate actors in the modern world to behave so uniformly in several ways, even though the culture of modernity specifically celebrates individualism and sovereignty and denounces mindless compliance. These studies have highlighted the key role of local actors in the local-global interaction. Yet these orientations must not be seen as separate schools of thought, but rather as developments within neoinstitutionalist sociology. In other words, recent years have witnessed an increased interest in the forms of local-global interaction. Case analyses have shown that synchronization of national policies seems to be a side effect of local actors utilizing broadly shared ideas and values in justifying their political objectives.