ABSTRACT
Inspired by neo-institutionalist theory, the world society perspective has begun to turn its attention to the question of how global trends yield local patterns of adaptation. Rather than focusing exclusively on uniform developments that generate similarities across geographically bounded entities, the recent literature appears to show a greater awareness of the interconnectedness of convergent and divergent trends in the world society, or what Jürgen Schriewer has called the “global/local problematique” (Schriewer 2012, 414). The obvious starting point for any approach anchored within the world society perspective is to understand the behaviour of states or collective actors as a reaction to a common, external source. This perspective emphasizes the compelling force of universalist movements, the “rationalizing myths” of certain models of reality that prompt convergent dynamics through diffusion as well as other forms of norm and knowledge dissemination (Ramirez 2012). Acknowledging the importance of convergence in the world society, therefore, requires to critically re-consider the methodological nationalism that still inherently permeates our analytical repertoire in the social sciences (Wimmer and Schiller 2002; Jeffrey and Wincott 2010). Yet social and territorial boundaries still matter. While autopoetic systems theory, for example, clearly disregards the importance of physical boundaries, assuming an ongoing evolution of the world society driven by functional
differentiation and auto-referential communication, a world society approach inspired by neo-institutionalism does not outright deny the significance of regional context. Yet in essence, it seeks to emphasize the all-encompassing impact of an emerging world cultural order through uncovering how general trends translate into isomorphic patterns of adjustment across spatial units.
