Institutionalism and Globalization Studies

Institutionalism and Globalization Studies

Predating any discussions of globalization, institutional presuppositions regarding embeddedness and diffusion were applied on the world level in what was then called comparative studies. As early as the 1970s, when comparative studies were caught in an impasse between dependency and modernization theories, a group of Stanford University scholars challenged the prevailing realist comparative traditions and made initial empirical studies that set the foundation for almost four decades of prolific institutional and comparative research. Today, in the era of hyperglobalization and countless commentaries on globalization, institutional theory of globalization - commonly referred to as world society theory - has carved a substantial niche in globalization studies.

The main theme of the institutionalist tradition in globalization studies is that the world is the environment and that nation-states, as well as multinational corporations and international organizations, are the organizations embedded in it. The related themes - of interconnectedness, universal-ism, and embedding - invoke Donne's imagery: with the phrase ‘no nation-state is an island’ (Meyer, Boli, Thomas and Ramirez, 1997): nation-states are embedded in world society, rather than disconnected from their global context, and thus political units, once defined as nation-states, they are subject to the global cultural process, such as the discourses of developmentalism or actor-hood. Derived from this logic are several other institutional emphases, for example on the diffuse state of authority of the global system, on the role of institutional mechanisms in the cross-national diffusion of ideas and practices, and on the rationalizing and standardizing impact of international organizations, the professions, and the universalized models they carry. These issues serve as the axes for world society theory's voluminous research tradition, offering abstract yet richly empirical work.

From its initial steps (Meyer, Boli-Bennet and Chase-Dunn, 1975; Meyer and Hannan, 1979) through its mature statements (Meyer, Boli and Thomas, 1987; Meyer et al., 1997; Boli and Thomas, 1997), world society theory formulated a new and institutionalist globalization theory while also adding to the richness of institutional thinking. In discussions of globalization, world society theory challenged the then-reigning perspectives in comparative sociology - dependency and modernization theories - by adding institutionalist and cultural tones to the highly instrumentalist discourse of the times and highlighting the constitution of the global as [Page 450]an additional ‘level’ to the international and transnational. In its way, it also disputed the common vision of nation-states as autonomous and calculating rational actors by drawing attention to the consolidating supralevel of globalization and to the diffusion of ideas and practices from this common core. To institutional thinking, world society theory added macro-level discussions situating even nation-states within a broader environment, elaborated the phenomenological tradition within institutional thinking, and enhanced the empirical grounding of institutional work with highly quantitative research.

The goals of this chapter are to describe the tenets of world society theory and to place these institutional insights in the context of current debates about globalization, its definition, and its trajectory. Following a review of the emergence of globalization studies and the breakthrough of world society theory in this field, I lay out the tenets of this theory, define its central concepts, and describe its empirical corpus. This review - empirical and conceptual -emphasizes world society theory in particular, while situating this tradition within the context of other comparative institutional work and of other globalization studies in the broad field of International Relations. To clarify this distinction, two terms are used to refer to the institutionalist comparative traditions: world society theory refers to the post-1980s studies, mostly by John W. Meyer and his colleagues who mark the phenomenological side of institutional thinking, while the term comparative institutionalism refers to pre-1980s studies by this Stanford University group (before the self-recognition of this work as a theoretical tradition) and to the studies by other institutionalists whose comparative work highlights operations and networks more than the role of culture. To conclude I open a discussion of the trajectory of this line of thought and research work.

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