ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on scholarship from globalization in the narrow sense of increased interconnectivity and from conceptualizing global processes along single dimensions such as the political or the economic to understanding global dynamics of the world as a whole, as a society. Both neo-institutionalism and systems theory take culture and discourse as central aspects of the global process, and they focus on two dynamics that arguably are two sides of the same coin: rationalism and functional differentiation. Sociological neo-institutionalism is skeptical of the natural effectiveness of rationalism or of functional differentiation or of modernity in general, and thereby builds in a critical tone that can appear as the stylistic irony noted by Rudolf Stichweh. Measurements and rankings are thus highly symbolic, and, as Tobias Werron argues, they constitute achievement and create achievement prestige orderings. The use of the conceptual frameworks of sociological neo-institutionalism and modern systems theory provide a dynamic tension that invigorates the conversation.
