Introduction: through an iron cage, darkly

Since its beginnings in 1970s education and organisation studies, and especially since the seminal article by Meyer, Boli, Thomas, and Ramirez (1997), World Society Theory (WST) has become established as a major framework by which to understand global social change. It has been branded as a sociological variation of neoinstitutionalism – in contrast to economic, historical, or discursive neoinstitutionalisms (Hall & Taylor, 1996; Schmidt, 2008). This means that while it considers institutions to be central, these are not necessarily formal organisations, do not cause historically determined effects, and are not ‘mere’ talk. Rather, the sociological variant of neoinstitutionalism has drawn attention to the cultural ‘scripts’ and ‘models’ that shape social action and, even, define the individual as a social actor in the first place (Schofer, Hironaka, John, & Longhofer, 2012).

WST thus emphasises the importance of what Weber termed the iron cage of rationality; indeed that is an important term for the first wave of World Society theorists (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). It counter-balances the view of virtually limitless play of individual action that has dominated post-WWII social theory (Meyer, 2010). However, WST takes critical distance from the perceived reality of the iron cage of rationality. Instead of taking it at face value, WST sees rationality as a script that is used by social actors to act legitimately and authoritatively, often on behalf of others. In particular, the ideas of modernisation, progress, and evolution are so deeply rooted in modern world society that any action laying claim to these scripts can almost write a blank cheque. Scripts such as progress, justice, individualism are presented as universally applicable and are to be found globally (albeit of course not to the same extent or in the same way in all places and contexts).

Modern institutions such as intergovernmental organisations, international NGOs, professional associations, universities, hospitals, and the like all are based on such scripts and carry them around the world, constituting actors, events, and situations. Just like organisations (Meyer & Rowan, 1977), nation-states too are involved in legitimating ceremonies and rituals to substantiate their bi-axial myths centred on progress and justice. Much WST scholarship concentrated on the constitution of the nation-state as a legitimated actor in world society and the consequent similarities in policy trends around the world. That emphasis was expanded into other institutions such as non-profit organisations (Boli & Thomas, 1999; Frank, Longhofer, & Schofer, 2007), universities (Meyer, Ramirez, Frank, & Schofer, 2007; Ramirez, 2006; Schofer & Meyer, 2005), and corporations (Meyer, Pope, & Isaacson, 2015; Shanahan & Khagram, 2006) among others. What was central in all cases was that social actors acted on behalf of legitimate ‘Others’ such as their faceless employees or citizens, children, the dispossessed, future generations, even ancient monuments or the entire ecosystem.

So not only does it posit nation-states and other organisation forms as imagined communities (Anderson, 1991), WST also posits ideals such as justice, equality, and progress – which we moderns hold most natural – as being socially constructed. In fact, WST goes even further to argue that individualism, the notion that the individual is the basic unit of social action, is a ‘cult’ with very specific historical roots (Jepperson & Meyer, 2011; Meyer, 2010; Meyer & Jepperson, 2000). The outcomes are staggering. Cherished ideals such as human rights (Elliott, 2007; Thomas, 2004), environmentalism (Frank, Hironaka, & Schofer, 2000; Hironaka, 2014; Longhofer & Schofer, 2010), cultural diversity and heritage (Boli & Elliott, 2008; Elliott & Schmutz, 2012), education (Meyer, Ramirez, & Soysal, 1992), citizenship (Soysal, 1994), and practices from female genital mutilation (Boyle, McMorris, & Gómez, 2002) to the spread of Sudoku (Mathias, Gallo-Cruz, & Boli, 2010) seem constructed on worldwide scripts. All of these and a host of other studies support the driving observation for WST: isomorphism, the fact that ‘the world is structurally similar in many unexpected dimensions and changes in unexpectedly similar ways’ (Meyer et al., 1997, p. 145). This remarkable isomorphism cannot be explained by the dominant theories of functionalism or simple power imbalances. The reason for isomorphism, for WST, is that the world’s structure – indeed its very conception as a society – is legitimated by circulating cultural scripts.

This takes some getting around. Taken in full, WST is deep social construction, at its very deepest. Yet, despite our celebrating this year the 50^th anniversary of the publication of Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) now-classic text on social construction of reality, this depth is often difficult to grasp (Vera, 2016). WST sneaks up on generations of social thought that relied on the ‘hard reality’ of individual actors making rational decisions, on taking the nation-state for granted as the natural social entity, on accepting historical cause and effect on determined lines, and on seeing the world as divided between those who have ‘power’ and those who don’t. In contrast to such naturalised ways of thinking about society, WST takes critical distance from at least four methodological assumptions: individualism, nationalism, evolutionary determinism, and structuralism.

It’s been a tough sell. The first wave of WST right through the end of the twentieth century concentrated on expanding its critical scope as well as amassing a remarkable set of empirical evidence to back its claims. Early WST scholars showed how standard accounts of functionalism and power imbalance could not explain actual trends in an uncountable range of cases and sectors. They made short-term predictions, for instance about the spread of education (Meyer et al., 1992) or the formal rationalisation of organisational change (Meyer & Rowan, 1977), that have since proved accurate. They formalised the initial conception of worldwide spread of trends into a stratified theory of world polity, world society, and world culture (Thomas, 2009). They established mechanisms of diffusion (Strang & Meyer, 1993) that explained the driving observation of isomorphism. In short, since its emergence in the 1970s, WST has become a robust, empirically well-grounded theory.

For some, this has become self-evident since the 2000s: the mass of empirical evidence and the theoretical consistency are difficult to deny even though the depth of social construction might seem counter-intuitive at first. While further empirical development is still needed into unexplored sectors, a new generation of WST has already begun to take shape. This next wave of emerging scholarship has expanded beyond the loosely defined ‘Stanford School’ centred around John Meyer into other universities in USA but also into Europe. Along with this expansion have come new questions, new insights, and new layers of analyses into the same sectors and beyond. This special issue is dedicated to mapping some dimensions of this new wave of scholarship building on WST.

It still remains important to define and introduce WST in juxtaposition with other frameworks, since it is not a part of the sociological teaching canon in many places. (That, too, is beginning to change: from doctoral workshops in Irvine to Bachelor plus courses in Duisburg to an entire master’s degree programme in Tampere.) This introductory work has become part of the style of WST scholarship and is evident in the articles in this issue. However, the new wave of WST takes the theory as a starting point and, rather than trying only to establish its empirical legitimacy, this wave tries to elaborate it, to push it into new theoretical arenas. Over the past decade or so, we have seen in particular an emphasis on subtleties to the agenda of seeing through the iron cage of rationality. New directions have focused on variations in WST that strengthen the main argument but add nuance to it.

An important overall question for the new generation of WST is: where is the local? Earlier WST scholarship insisted on underlining the macro-institutional construction of trends that we take for granted, as well as their worldwide spread, to counter micro-realist arguments relying on pre-assumed and unproblematised ‘real’ actors making ‘real’ decisions in line with ‘real’ interests. But that often led to overlooking what happened at the local level. There was much evidence that local leaders were not Babbitts (Meyer, 2004), just hypocritically conforming to international fashions. And yet, policy isomorphism cannot be denied: local leaders everywhere in the world often end up structuring their polities similarly and making remarkably similar policy moves locally. So, the question remains of how precisely the global is entangled with the local. The papers submitted to this special issue all engage with this question in one way or another.

In some ways this goes back to the inspiration for much of WST: Roland Robertson’s idea of ‘glocalisation’ (Robertson, 1992, 1995). Robertson’s idea to replace the catchphrase ‘globalisation’ with ‘glocalisation’ was already a complex one, going beyond notions of adapting, translating, creolising, or hybridising global trends into local manifestations. Robertson’s focus was on showing how local particularities – such as expressions of cultural, culinary, or clothing diversity – are already constituted on global grounds – the universalised demand that all individuals and groups must have a local culture, food, and dress, for instance. Naturally, different expressions of diversity would conflict with each other, and this leads to glocalisation involving an inherent tension. On the one hand, for example, ‘human rights’ are deemed universally applicable by virtually everyone; on the other hand, universal respect for diversity means that locals can define those rights differently (although only to a degree).

What is deemed universal is, of course, already developed from a particularity (such as the nation-state from a seventeenth-century Western European pact), and what is defended as particular is already constituted on universalist grounds (for example, the right of Muslim women to wear a hijab in a Western university is, after all, a human right, a woman’s right, a right to diversity, or a right to practise a religion, all of which are seen as universal rights). Consider the worldwide spread of mass primary education: around the world there is virtually no question that all children should be in school, and that they should be afforded every opportunity to improve their individual lives. In different countries there may be different ways this right is implemented, and the content and pedagogy might vary (although only to a degree), yet few dare question that a child should be in school in the first place and, where they do, they find it difficult to legitimately defend that position even in their own societies. However, this universal idea of massified individual schooling that is implemented everywhere comes from a particular, modern Western European model that has been generalised (even into contexts where the educational content has nothing to do with children’s daily lives) (Meyer, 2004; Meyer et al., 1992).

The more countries are integrated into world society, the greater their acceptance of common beliefs (like the Convention on the Rights of the Child) and yet the more diversity is evident in how those beliefs are implemented in practice. Seemingly paradoxically, more intense institutional integration and worldwide presence doesn’t homogenise the world in obvious respects, but rather enhances ‘façade’ diversity:

More inclusive and far-reaching globalization thus implies greater diversity and contention in world society, not less; and this diversity is not just locally asserted … This process bumps up diversity everywhere as the world cultural environment becomes denser and more complex (Boli & Elliott, 2008, p. 545).

A uniting feature of the new wave of WST studies in this volume and elsewhere is to recognise the constructed nature of the ‘global’ itself. After all, there is no place called ‘global’: I can’t point to it on a map the way I can point to a ‘local’ place. The global is always invoked locally and only makes sense in juxtaposition with ‘local’. At the same time, though, as Robertson pointed out, the present phase of globalisation is marked by a general consciousness that a local place is readily fitted into the whole world (Robertson, 1992).

Both the local and the global, thus, are invoked in social processes. But, how does this happen, what does it mean in different cases, what similarities and differences are there in the global–local interface around the world? Unpacking the subtleties of how the global is entangled with the local, and how both are constructed with ‘real-world’ consequences, is a theme running through this volume. Many of the articles involve extensive empirical work, but all have major theoretical consequences for the development of further nuance in WST’s conception of local–global entanglement. The articles submitted to this volume highlight three such areas: glocalisation, diffusion and decoupling, and individualism.

The first theme is that of glocalisation. The article by Mizrahi-Shtelman and Drori specifically engages with the burgeoning literature on glocalisation to analyse how both global and local are constructed by school principals in Israel. They see these middle-managers – negotiating between classroom teaching and national plus international educational trends – as agents of glocalisation, and map their perceptions of their glocal roles. This empirical examination of the consciousness of construction results in a new typology of glocalisation relevant for understanding the modern school in Israel. Testing the validity of this typology of hybrid and strategic glocality in schools elsewhere or in other institutions is a major new area of research.

Gallo-Cruz’s article on the domestication of Peace Brigade International and the global nonviolence movement in Guatemala is another engagement with the entanglement of the local and the global. Gallo-Cruz begins with the framework of ‘domestication’ of global trends (Alasuutari & Qadir, 2014b), which suggests that global trends don’t simply diffuse, but rather local policy-makers develop what is ‘best for themselves’; the way they do that is to look across national borders through cross-national comparisons to gain ideas about problems and solutions, engage in domestic field battles, and naturalise a ‘national’ way of doing things. Gallo-Cruz describes how a global–local field in Guatemala grew a local movement of nonviolent resistance, yet one thoroughly imbibed with international and cross-national impetus. Again, Gallo-Cruz focuses on the role of border agents: actors at the interface of the local and global. The study has implications for understanding the varied spread of grassroots democracy around the world, and what role international agents have in that.

Rounding off the studies into glocalisation is the review by Gobo on Victor Roudometoff’s book on glocalisation. The review brings out Roudometoff’s comprehensive examination of the idea of glocalisation and its evolution into a robust theoretical approach to understanding contemporary global trends in local contexts.

The next set of studies moves beyond simple ideas of diffusion of world cultural models, which was often how early WST was operationalised in empirical studies. Yet, diffusion is nowhere simple adoption or even adaptation. A new wave of WST scholarship is according the idea of diffusion greater complexity and nuance. The article by Pope and Meyer takes this head-on to propose a sixfold structure of diffusion with an emphasis on local variations. Using the example of the worldwide spread of corporate social responsibility, they argue that the field is dominated by a gap between stated aims and actual local practices. Their analysis posits six aspects of diffusion: diffusion into any locality tends to be partial, decoupled from global generics, domesticated to local contexts, contingent on the fit of global models with local structures, multi-dimensional, and multi-levelled. This theoretical argument opens up a substantial area of empirical research beyond simple diffusion.

Pushing the global–local question further, the article by Hedin problematises the natural view that diffusion of world cultural norms universally flows from the West to the rest. Although WST never explicitly argued that only Western-origin models are universalised, these were in fact the only ones thoroughly analysed. This readily gave the impression that diffusion was a one-way street. Hedin’s article challenges that at the very core of world culture: the International Labor Organization (ILO). The empirical analysis of official documents suggests that during the Cold War, the ILO in fact took in ideas almost wholesale from a key Eastern-bloc player, Yugoslavia, to incorporate them into its model of worker protection policies. These policies were subsequently formalised, rationalised, and spread around the world as a ‘universal’ model of worker rights along the lines already developed by WST but in a process of domesticated naturalising: by obscuring its Eastern-bloc origins. This pushes WST to a more complex understanding of where policy models are actually coming from.

Related to this nuance of diffusion is a development of the idea of decoupling. Already from the start in organisational studies, WST had posited ‘decoupling’ between formal commitments and informal practices. WST scholars had argued that such decoupling was not incidental but rather endemic to modern world society. Yet, this remained a sort of magic wand that could explain away local differences from presumed universal models. New studies problematise decoupling and try to capture the range of what can and can’t be explained by this concept. Elliott and Schmutz’s article explains decoupling as a necessary disjuncture that must occur because the world cultural principles that circulate are – virtually ipso facto – so abstract that they can never be applied in a concrete situation. Any local application is always a new creation, a point also recognised by the domestication framework. Elliott and Schmutz illustrate this with an extensive analysis of how World Heritage Sites are listed and the discrepancies that creep in when assigning a site ‘universal value’. Certain parts of the world, notably Africa, are almost systematically excluded, or rather pushed into listing only certain types of sites. They develop a twofold typology of decoupling based on technical capacity and cultural mismatch, which can readily be extended into empirical testing in a host of other cases.

A third area of extension of WST is individualism. A core tenet of WST has always been the recognition of the sacred status modern society accords to the individual, leading to all kinds of protections of rights as well as contests. Yet, it has always remained unclear how precisely the theory sees world cultural scripts filtering through to individuals. This problem is common to all forms of institutionalism, leaving them at the edge a structural trap of determinism: are individuals always at the mercy of impersonal institutions and scripts? Innovative WST scholarship has started tackling this with an engaging motif: if it’s culture all the way up (common scripts guiding the organisation and reform of corporations and states) then it’s culture all the way down (common scripts shaping the possibilities of individual political actions and facilitating the worldwide spread of cultural forms such as variations of pop-rock). WST has paid much attention to how worldwide cultural principles shape national state reforms or new corporate manoeuvres, but there has been less attention to how local cultural trends also spread around the world, and with what variations. To be sure, WST has been and remains a critical view on how responsible actorhood is constructed – that is, how individual and collective action on behalf of Others is legitimated. But this wave of scholarship asks: What types of actorhood are created? What do global constructs and local enactments have in common? And how does self-interest balance with responsibility for others?

Bromley’s article on the construction of agentic actorhood through schooling in Canadian British Columbia tackles this very question. By analysing secondary school social science textbooks in the province from 1871 to 2006, Bromley traces how agentic actorhood can be seen in the process of construction. Her analysis further shows that the agency gradually being defined for school children is not a black box, but that it is demonstrably an amalgamation of the ideas of equality and empowerment. Children schooled in the 2000s are more prone to engage in social action on behalf of others and more sensitive to equal access among diverse groups than their predecessors ever were. Schooling – always a key sector for WST – thus remains a critical arena in which to glimpse how individuals are constructed as actors in modern world society. Bromley’s findings can be tested across not just Canada but also elsewhere, and if validated in other contexts will greatly enhance our understanding of how the rubber of world culture meets the road of individual lives.

Hadler’s article systematises this further: it pushes WST into a hard empirical analysis of how the ideal of worldwide environmental protection influences public and private behaviours of individuals. Examining three waves of the International Social Survey, Hadler develops a multi-level model to examine individual behaviour. Surprisingly for many WST scholars, Hadler finds that world society effects – such as how embedded a national society is globally, and how many international organisations are present in a country – do not affect individual environmental behaviour as much as institutionalisation of environmentalism at the national level. In fact, when it comes down to individual behaviour (in this case, environmentalism), the effects of world society are more indirect: through national structures, or correlated with access to global environmental movements. This new frontier of understanding how world society interacts with the most local of local, the individual, is reminiscent of some earlier work on female genital mutilation practices and attitudes in developing countries (Boyle et al., 2002), but takes it further to an understanding of individualisation processes.

In addition to fresh empirical content and theoretical directions, the articles in this special issue also push the methodological frontier of WST. Earlier literature emphasised quantitative analyses with linear regression or multivariate analyses to convince readers of the presence of isomorphism and importance of institutionalised environments. But now, a distinctly qualitative emphasis is obvious in this collection, although that was not demanded in the call for papers. This qualitative predominance captures the need to dig deep into the messy reality beyond the iron cage.

Many of these themes pushing WST into new frontiers are captured in the concept of ‘epistemic governance’, which adds a ‘processual layer’ to how world society works in practice (Alasuutari & Qadir, 2014a, in press). First published in the inaugural volume of this Journal, the idea of epistemic governance is to map the ways in which governance functions by working on people’s conceptions of what social reality is, whom they identify with, and what is good or desirable to do. These are three objects of epistemic work: epistemic, not purely epistemological. While legitimate knowledge-creation and its use are central, so too are group identities and interests, and so is morality, neither of which can be reduced to epistemology. This work builds on a poetics of sociology (Brown, 1989) to show how global social change takes place often unconsciously but in remarkably similar ways, since the epistemic assumptions by which we think of world society are so similar worldwide. Isomorphism, in this sense as for much of the new wave of WST, is not necessarily a top-down process of diffusion but rather can be seen as a bottom-up process.

The concept of epistemic governance is an active frontier in the new wave of WST research, with new empirical studies adding qualitative, descriptive colour to the theme of how the global and local are thoroughly entangled. It has been, and continues to be, applied to familiar themes of WST – national policies, global circulation of models, isomorphism, international organisations – to add a descriptive layer of process that helps make sense of messy global social change (e.g. Alasuutari & Qadir, in press; Alasuutari, Rautalin, & Syväterä, 2016; Qadir, in press; Syväterä & Qadir, 2015). It brings the actors back into social analysis in WST, not as mere hypocritical conformists but yet all too readily bound by shared epistemic assumptions about what the social world consists in, who we are, and what we should or have to do. The review of Alasuutari’s book by a leading proponent of WST, George Thomas, takes a peek into this concept and its application to national policy-making.

Work on epistemic governance, and on the theme of global–local entanglement captured in this special issue, has been led by Pertti Alasuutari, Sociology Professor at the University of Tampere, Finland. This special issue has been produced to recognise Pertti’s contributions to a new phase in WST research exploring the local–global interface. The issue coincides with his 60th birthday, celebrated earlier this year. On behalf of the editors and editorial board of the Journal, it is my honour and pleasure to dedicate this special issue to Pertti for his involvement in pushing the frontiers of WST. As Executive Committee member of the European Sociological Association and heading its publications committee in 2014, Pertti was also among the founders of this Journal, and so it is a distinct pleasure to recognise his research with this special issue.

Pertti has also long been a source-of-choice for qualitative research methods, from his Researching Culture (1995) to An Invitation to Social Research (1998) to the edited SAGE Handbook of Social Research Methods (2008). It is hence serendipitous that most of the articles in this special issue apply innovative, rigorous qualitative research methods to develop a new theme in WST that Pertti himself has been instrumental in underlining, captured in his new book on Synchronization of National Policies reviewed in this issue.

Here, I would like to express my profound gratitude to the Editors of the Journal, Eeva Luhtakallio, Ricca Edmondson, and Siobhan Kattago, as well as to the European Sociological Association, for encouraging and facilitating this special issue. While all the editors have actively contributed to our work, Eeva Luhtakallio deserves special thanks. I would also like to acknowledge our peer reviewers for their thorough engagement with all the articles and with their invariably insightful comments on the manuscripts. And, of course, my sincere thanks go to the authors whose works are presented here. They have responded to the call for papers for this special issue with an invaluable collection of empirically grounded and theoretically rich research that represents a new frontier in WST scholarship. This new phase of WST research brings greater nuance to our conceptualisation of modern world society and what it means for locality.

Since its inception, World Society Theory has added much detail to what Weber called an iron cage of rationality in modern society, giving us great insight into what exactly comprises that ‘rationality’. With the help of epistemic governance and other new waves of WST scholarship, we begin to conceive of this iron cage as a looking glass, reflecting social theory’s view of society in its image of rationality. For now we see through an iron cage darkly; but then face to face.