World Society Theory Research Articles

Prolegomena to a genealogy of “society”

The article reconstructs the evolution of the semantics of one of the social sciences’ most important concepts, that of society. It follows two main systematizations, those of the societas and the societas civilis, respectively, through a millennia-long history rooted in Graeco-Roman civilization. This history exhibits remarkable continuity across time. Its modern adaptations survive to the present day. But the social sciences appear to know only the latter which, in the form of the nation-state, they adopted as their default model under the intellectual leadership of Parsons. Recent developments in the social world have rendered that model obsolete. This leaves the social sciences in dire straits, as they have failed, with one exception, to develop a persuasive alternative. The exception is Niklas Luhmann's systems theory of world society, a theory barely known outside small niche circles. The article ends on a brief speculative note about what might account for the odd tenacity of a theoretically untenable concept.

Cross‐national governmental treatment toward atheists since 1816

AbstractAs the atheist population grows globally, understanding how governments treat the growing population is vital. Two theories, group threat theory (GTT) and world society theory (WST), offer differing predictions. GTT suggests increasing atheists may face unfavorable treatment because religious groups perceive them as a threat. Conversely, WST proposes that a more interconnected world culture advances secularism, which promotes positive treatment for atheists. This study explores the interplay between these theories and sheds light on how governments treat atheists across countries. Utilizing a comprehensive panel dataset spanning nearly 200 years, we investigate governmental treatment toward atheists, analyzing data from diverse countries and tracking changes over time. Our results reveal that as the proportion of atheists increases, their treatment by governments becomes more favorable, challenging the tenets of GTT. We also find that embeddedness in political or economic networks is related to more favorable treatment of atheists.

State Sovereignty and the Protection of Human Rights. How Military Humanitarian Intervention is Supported by Citizens Around the World

According to international law, the sovereignty of nation-states and the rights of individuals constitute two equally important principles. However, in instances when a state massively violates human rights, then priority is given to the protection of individuals over the self-determination of the state, thereby justifying humanitarian military intervention. This paper presents findings from a survey across 26 countries, analyzing citizen support for such intervention. We find that the majority of respondents supports military intervention to protect human rights. To explain the differences in support, we draw on world society theory and modernization theory. At first sight, world society theory offers a better framework for understanding citizens' attitudes towards military intervention. However, charcateristics derived from modernization theory are affected by a “suppression effect:” individuals living in more modernized countries and holding postmaterialist values endorse enforcing human rights but concurrently reject the use of military force.

The distinctive incorporation of sociological neoinstitutionalism into Japanese sociology and its theoretical insights for the discipline

AbstractAlthough sociological neoinstitutionalist thought has made indelible imprints across the social sciences in Japan, its incorporation into Japanese sociology at large has been relatively limited, and its broader applications to analyses of global social phenomena using World Society Theory are even less prominent. To empirically gauge the emergence, growth, content evolution, and production/consumption patterns of this scholarship, sociological neoinstitutionalist works published across the 1977–2021 period by authors affiliated with Japanese institutions were manually coded for content, marquee publications/authors cited, primary author's final degree discipline, and publication's outlet field. The article briefly introduces core ideas in sociological neoinstitutionalism and World Society Theory before delving into the survey details and results, an explanation for the literature's distinctive pattern of incorporation into Japanese sociology, and concluding thoughts on its theoretical implications for Japanese sociology and beyond. The study finds that this scholarship has been produced and consumed primarily throughout—in declining order—business‐related fields, education, and sociology. As its incorporation diversified in the mid‐1990s, bifurcation occurred between a growing share of “middle‐of‐the‐road” sociological neoinstitutionalist scholarship that embraced the range of ideas that broke from the “old” institutionalisms, and a small and declining share that pushed the phenomenological and social constructionist thrust of the theory to its limits and/or acknowledged the perspective's global‐comparative applicability. These patterns seem to track the concomitant theoretical, substantive, and methodological inclinations within the discipline in Japan. Sociological neoinstitutionalist thought holds promise for a range of research areas interested in exploring domestic and global determinants of social change.

Individual Empowerment, Institutional Confidence, and Vaccination Rates in Cross-National Perspective, 1995 to 2018

In the past decade, before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, rates of childhood vaccination against diseases such as measles, diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus declined worldwide. An extensive literature examines the correlates and motives of vaccine hesitancy—the reluctance or refusal to vaccinate despite the availability of vaccines—among individuals, but little macrosociological theory or research seeks to explain changes in country-level vaccine uptake in global and comparative perspective. Drawing on existing research on vaccine hesitancy and recent developments in world society theory, we link cross-national variation in vaccination rates to two global cultural processes: the dramatic empowerment of individuals and declining confidence in liberal institutions. Both processes, we argue, emerged endogenously in liberal world culture, instigated by the neoliberal turn of the 1980s and 1990s. Fixed- and random-effects panel regression analyses of data for 80 countries between 1995 and 2018 support our claim that individualism and lack of institutional confidence contributed to the global decline in vaccination rates. We also find that individualism is itself partly responsible for declining institutional confidence. Our framework of world-cultural change might be extended to help make sense of recent post-liberal challenges in other domains.

World society and the convergence of consumer values: Buying patterns of eco‐certification in theUAE

AbstractEco‐certifications offer consumers the opportunity to vote with their money for more sustainable methods of production. While consumer‐facing eco‐labels are mostly recognized and consumed in western countries little is known about their performance in expat societies. This study applies world society theory to a sample of Arab, Western, and South Asian United Arab Emirates (UAE) residents to test whether globalization causes assimilation of familiarity, attitudes, and buying frequencies for major eco‐labels. The results show that respondents with Western ethnicities are more familiar with eco‐certifications. However, Arab, and South‐Asian citizens report similar or higher levels of importance for the purported benefits of eco‐certifications. Among respondents familiar with eco‐certification, we found no differences in buying frequency by ethnic group. Findings related to ethnicity support world society theory because social, environmental, and quality ideals converge among different ethnic groups in the UAE.

Global out-of-home childcare and world culture

The focus of this article is the link between the modern world culture and national public policy commitments. Drawing on world society theory and using data for 193 countries between 1990 and 2020—1411 documents in total—we analyze the global pattern of policy commitments to out-of-home childcare deinstitutionalization. Deinstitutionalization refers to the policy of moving children from institutional residential care (e.g. orphanages) to family-based and family-like care in the community. Using the reports by state parties of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, we find that 85 percent of countries make at least some commitment to deinstitutionalization. At the same time, the data reveal significant variation in the interpretation of deinstitutionalization. We also find that similar policy commitments are underpinned by diverse motives that reflect different normative frames within the dominant world culture—human rights, scientization, and cost efficiency. This diversity does not fit the standard world society concepts of convergence, resistance, or decoupling. We argue that countries can selectively adopt specific aspects of world culture, with important policy implications.

Policymaking to the test? How international large-scale assessments (ILSAs) influence repetition rates

ABSTRACT Do international large-scale assessments influence education policy? How? Through scripts, lessons, or incentives? For some, they all produce similar outcomes. For others, different assessment data, shaped by different designs, and mediated by international organizations’ (IOs) policy directives, prompt different policy decisions. For some, participation in these assessments may be linked to lower repetition rates, as per the policy scripts hypothesis inspired by world society theory. For others, assessments’ comparison strategies (age vs. grade) influence repetition in participating countries, according to policy lessons or incentives hypotheses, respectively inspired by educational effectiveness research and the sociology of quantification, and particularly the notion of retroaction. Fixed-effects panel regression models of eighteen Latin American countries (1992–2017) show that participation in assessments is associated with changing repetition rates in primary and secondary, while controlling for other factors. The findings show statistically significant differences between some assessment types. The conclusions spur new questions, delineating a future agenda.

News coverage of social protests in global society

This article links media and social movement studies with world society theory to explain cross-national variations in media attention to domestic social protests. We compile a novel large-scale dataset with over 1.2 million protest-related news articles from 12,644 web news sites across 140 countries/areas in 2015–2020. Our cross-national analysis shows that both media- and country-level characteristics explain news coverage of domestic social protests. Our findings show that web news outlets with high web traffic and a propensity to report conflictual events tend to cover more protests. In addition, web news sites in nations with vibrant civil society organizations report more protest events. We also find that there is a positive relationship between online censorship and news coverage in general. But this is driven by news media in democratic countries, and news sites in authoritarian regimes experiencing strong censorship cover fewer protest events. Finally, news media in authoritarian nations with more organizational ties to the international community cover more domestic protests.

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.

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.

Worlds apart? On Niklas Luhmann and the sociology of education

In an effort to address the relationship between globalisation, education and Niklas Luhmann’s branch of systems theory, we present his essay, published here for the first time in English translation, ‘Education: Forming the life course’, next to the nine contributions that compose this special issue and build on this and his other writings to take up the theme of education in world society. To conclude, we underline that systems theory’s emphasis on functional differentiation helps to address two lacunae in the today prevailing sociological practice. By positing the development of self-referential domains as modernity’s central mode of differentiation, it provides sociology with a comprehensive theory of world society. By the same token, it also allows one to observe education as a global affair with, so to speak, a life of its own.

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.

Distinguishing “Religion”. Variants of Differentiation and the Emergence of “Religion” as a Global Category in Modern Asia

AbstractThe existence of religious diversity is mostly taken for granted in today’s world society. Despite all apparent differences, however, world society theory proposes the hypothesis of a single function system of religion. At the same time, in the case of religion a process of semantic unification is highly disputed. Until recently, such debates had not paid much attention to the “translingual practice” (Liu) that has produced “religion” as a global category over the last two hundred years. Drawing on recent studies, this article traces some semantic transformations in regard to “religion” in 19thand early 20thcentury Asia and highlights the importance of three contested distinctions connected with “religion”. It also relates these semantic changes to recent debates about the differentiation of religion in theories of secularization. Any visibility of regional differences in the religious system of modern world society should be understood as the result of the emergence of this global category. Such a focus on semantics highlights the way in which speaking of “religion” as a specific instance of “culture” in world society becomes possible and “religion” becomes observable to itself and from the outside only as a result of these transformations.

International Organisations and the Proliferation of Scientised Global Reporting, 1947–2019

ABSTRACT As novel instruments in global governance, international organisations’ (IOs) global reports have emerged in all policy sectors in the more recent period. Drawing on an original dataset of N = 363 editions from N = 95 explicitly global reports from the period 1947–2019, this study documents the rise of reporting and uses citation and content analyses to examine the changing role of science. Reporting based on scientific research and quantitative indicators increases over time and across all sectors, yet particularly striking since the late 1980s and most in sectors dealing with human development and the environment. Drawing on arguments from world society theory, the sociology of quantification and post-truth approaches, this work argues that while reports provide IOs with new legitimacy in science-based governance, their scientised and quantified nature is likely to make IO activities the target of antiscientific populist rhetoric and critical arguments about a reductionist interpretation of science.

Global diffusion of laws: The case of minimum age of marriage legislation, 1965–2015

ABSTRACT The majority of countries in the world have laws setting the minimum age of marriage at 18 years old. This is a global legislative trend that intensified greatly in the 1990s. What explains this trend? To answer this question, I conduct quantitative analyses of factors influencing legislation setting the minimum age of marriage at 18. I analyse time-series data for 167 countries from 1965 to 2015 to examine which countries were early adopters of legislation. Drawing on world society theory, I theorise that global level institutionalisation of norms concerning women and children is the key to understand the passing of minimum age of marriage laws. Findings indicate that world cultural scripts and the presence of women legislators are the main impetus behind the fight against child marriage. Countries with a Muslim majority are less likely to pass laws setting the minimum age of marriage at 18.

The Middle East in global modernity: Analytic polycentrism, historic entanglements and a rejuvenated area studies debate

ABSTRACT I argue that theories of global modernity/world society offer a promising inter-disciplinary approach for theorizing the Middle East. They provide a conceptual umbrella for a rejuvenated Area Studies debate. I turn first to earlier (inter-disciplinary) debates of that kind and then discuss how a rejuvenated debate can reach for new shores: I address the Middle East Area Studies Controversy, and then Fred Halliday’s distinction between ‘analytic universalism’ and ‘historic particularism’. Focusing on the interstices between Area Studies and International Relations (IR), I suggest that scholarship on the Arab uprisings offers insights on how to transcend this distinction by shifting to ‘analytic polycentrism’ and ‘historic entanglements’. I identify the unpredictability of power relations and local/global horizons as central, and often marginalized perspectives brought to the fore in post-Arab uprising scholarship. I then discuss how these insights can be linked to innovative (inter-disciplinary) debates in IR that draw from historical-sociological theories of global modernity and world society, especially how the concepts of emergence and evolution as well as differentiation and subjectivity – central pillars of world society theories – can be made of use for the study of the Middle East’s place in global modernity and global IR generally speaking.

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.

The Promise of John W. Meyer’s World Society Theory: “Otherhood” through the Prism of Pitirim A. Sorokin’s Integralism

Times of societal turbulence are painful for social theories tending towards optimistic accounts of the world. In the current sociological mainstream, so-called World Society Theory (WST), proposed by John W. Meyer and his colleagues, is one of the most contested examples. We discuss WST core conceptual assumptions with special emphasis on the concept of “Otherhood”, which receives limited attention in literature but is central for the “promise” of World Society Theory in times of multiple crises, associated with ongoing global pandemic and its expected consequences. Analyzing recent debates, we outline directions for World Society Theory further development. We argue that important contributions to WST scholarship may come from another “grand theory”, Integralism, elaborated by Pitirim Sorokin in middle twentieth century, which remains ignored in discussions about WST. Integralism, including its central concept of “Altruism”, may be helpful in comprehending ontological grounds of “Otherhood”, which may go beyond pure social construction. Integralism also allows expanding the analysis of causes, content, mechanisms and global macro-historical dynamics of “Otherhood”, stimulating its more nuanced comprehension, including theoretical and empirical distinction between its various types. Integration of Pitirim Sorokin ideas in debates about WST is important for its further elaboration, including its optimistic and, thus, highly valuable “promise” for the global world and related implications for the practical role that social science can play in global development.

Conceiving of Contraception: World Society, Cultural Resistance, and Contraceptive Use, 1970–2012

AbstractTaking world society theory as our point of departure, we examine the effect of world culture on contraceptive use rates around the world. World-cultural rhetoric frames contraception as a necessity for economic development, a human rights issue, and a women’s health matter. Using data on contraceptive use among married women for a sample of 159 countries over the period from 1970 to 2012, we find that linkages to all three sets of discourses are associated with increased use of modern contraceptive methods, over and above countries’ sociocultural and economic characteristics. Nevertheless, we also find that world society influences vary across major cultural zones, defined in terms of predominant religions and geographic regions. World cultural effects are strongest in Orthodox Christian, Hindu, non-Western Protestant, and sub-Saharan African countries. There is no effect in Western and East Asian countries, where contraceptive use is comparatively high, or in zones such as non-Western Catholic nations, where the unmet need for contraception is often greatest. Compared to development and women’s rights rhetoric, health-based frames appear to have the broadest and most effective reach across cultural divides. Overall, however, we find that world society processes tend to produce cross-cultural convergence in contraceptive use rates.