human sociability. So instead of asking whether processes of globalization will takeus from an international system of states into a boundless global society, we mightrather ask why this global society was territorially differentiated into a system ofstates in the first place, how this particular differentiation has been legitimized bymodern international relations theory and modern sociology to the point of beingtaken for granted by both, as well as under what conditions human intercourse ona planetary scale is likely to replace the compartmentalization of mankind withnew forms of political community. Indeed, questions of differentiation becomehard to pose at the global level in the absence of prior assumptions about theessential unity of mankind, and about the basic homogeneity of a global space.Otherwise, theories of differentiation will always beg the questions: what is beingdifferentiated, and where does this differentiation take place? So to conclude inanswer to Mathias Albert’s question, I would like to suggest that we indeed canspeak coherently of a global society, but only to the extent that we are willing toventure beyond modern theories of society, the latter which I take to be part of theproblem rather than of the solution.

References

Albert, Mathias. (2007) ‘‘Globalization Theory’’: Yesterday’s Fad or More Lively than Ever? Interna-tional Political Sociology 1(2): 171.

Beck, Ulrich. (2006) Cosmopolitical Realism: On the Distinction Between Cosmopolitanism in Phi-losophy and the Social Sciences. Global Networks 4(2): 148.

Headley, John M. (2002) The Universalizing Principle and Process: On the West’s Intrinsic Commit-ment to a Global Context. Journal of World History 13(2): 291–321.

Inglis, David, and Roland Robertson. (2008) The Elementary Forms of Globality. Durkheim andthe Emergence and Nature of Global Life. Journal of Classical Sociology 8(1): 5–25.

Muthu, Sankar. (2003) Enlightenment Against Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Rosenberg, Justin. (2005) Globalization Theory: A Post Mortem. International Politic 42(1): 2–74.Rosenberg, Justin. (2006) Why Is There No International Historical Sociology? European Journal of

International Relations 12(3): 307–340.Ruggie, John Gerard. (2004) Reconstituting the Global Public Domain—Issues, Actors and Prac-

tices. European Journal of International Relations 10(4): 499–531.Sassen, Saskia. (2006) Territory, Authority, Rights. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Shaw, Martin. (2000) Theory of the Global State. Globality as an Unfinished Revolution. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.Urry, John. (2000) Sociology Beyond Societies. Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century. London: Routledge.Wagner, Peter. (2000) An Entirely New Object of Consciousness, of Volition, of Thought: The

Coming Into Being and (Almost) Passing Away of ‘Society’ as a Scientific Object. In Biographiesof Scientific Objects, edited by Lorraine Daston. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

World Polity, World Culture, World Society1

George M. Thomas

Arizona State University

Expressing reservations about conceptualizing a world society, the question isposed: Can we use sociological theory and in particular a concept of society andstill avoid ‘‘conceptualizing the question of globalization as one of homogeneity,

1George M. Thomas, School of Global Studies, Arizona State University. Direct correspondence to gmthomas@asu.edu. These remarks reflect long-term collaboration and conversations with John Meyer, John Boli, Ron Jepper-son, and Francisco Ramirez.

115George M. Thomas

cohesion, a whole,’’ or should we instead find ways to focus on ‘‘multiple andchanging connections?’’ Framing the issues this way unfortunately nearly guaran-tees that our conversation will remain rooted in the very frame we want to avoid.Still, it is not unreasonable to guard against repeating what many of us considermistakes: reifying the nation-state through a putatively scientific concept withconnotations of homogeneous closed organism-like systems; or using a domestic,societal metaphor to depict the international as a container within which every-thing is homogeneous and integrated.

Is then the concept of world society useful to understand what is going on inthe world? I agree with Albert (2007) that sociological theories of world societyare important, but the world is much more cultural than functional, political-eco-nomic, systems, and actor-centered theories acknowledge. Thus, rather thanengaging old conversations and sociological issues raised by these theories, abouthomogeneity, social integration, and difference, I would like to address afreshinferentially, ‘‘Why would we want to use concepts such as world polity, worldculture, and world society?’’ I conclude these remarks by suggesting that reserva-tions about such concepts in part arise from commitments to the sovereignty ofrational actors.

I argue that the concepts of world polity, world culture, and world society arein fact helpful for observers of the world. Working inferentially from what is‘‘beyond the nation-state,’’ the following question is key: Is the world character-ized solely by greater interconnectedness and acceleration of flows, or is theresomething, some ‘‘stuff,’’ beyond the nation-state?

Let’s first take a minimalist line of argument. Consider the greater intercon-nectedness and interdependence and the denser and more rapid flows presentedby globalization. People, commodities, and information flow across boundariesfrom one place to another. There is communication with the flow of informationthrough media. There are exchanges of commodities through contracts and themedium of currency. Flows of information and people involve content, language,interactions, and the human social infrastructure (selves, identities, interactionrituals, scripts of motivations and intentions, and attitudes toward everyday life).Similarly for commodities: their existence assumes a natural world with littleagency that can be parcelled and bought and sold, the legitimacy of rationalindividual action and self-interest, and sovereignty located in rational actors. Inother words, boundary crossings and interconnections carry content and areembedded in a cultural context.

At minimum then, these boundary crossings and interconnections involve con-sciousness equal in scope. Apprehending them involves a consciousness of thecategories and webs of meaning, the cultural context, in which they are embed-ded. The people who have this consciousness are themselves in particular locales,but the consciousness is not parochial to those locales. As Roland Robertson(1992) argued: globalization involves a consciousness of the world as one place.We thus need a conceptual framework that moves beyond the interconnectionsof actors and addresses the consciousness, cultural context, and social forms thatencompass them.

To restrict ourselves to a minimalist line of argument misses too much. Thecultural contexts of interconnections and flows have substance and content, andin a stateless world they have profound effects on actors and their actions. Actorsof all sorts are oriented to ontological assumptions about identities, legitimatebases of authority, and nature. There are institutionalized global models of typesof actors with accompanying menus of interests, intentions, and scripts. They arebolstered by elaborate theories, some abstract scientific (psychology, social sci-ences, economics, and biology) others pragmatic, that depict adherence to thesemodels as necessary to attain a panoply of desired outcomes: freedom, equality,justice, security, development to name just a few general categories of valued

116 World Polity, World Culture, World Society

outcomes. These models and theories are characteristically ‘‘rationalistic’’ orwhat Max Weber referred to as practical or instrumental rationality. Here, theWeberian corpus on the sociology of religion, legitimacy, and attitudes towardeveryday life are more relevant than his analysis of the administrative state. Ratio-nality in this view is myth and ritual; action is ritualized rationality (Meyer andRowan 1977) or ritual enactment (Goffman 1967).

Science’s authority, formal organizations, development policies, professionali-zation, and rationalistic discourse occur at rates and in locations not correlatedwith levels of social complexity or interconnectedness. The most idealistic inter-national nongovernmental organizations and those narrowly concerned with pro-viding humanitarian aid develop technical, scientific practices and offices. This isnot a natural diffusion of modernization. None of this is easily explained by the-ories that interpret rationalistic culture as attempts to coordinate and controland expect it to be tightly linked to increasingly complex interconnections ofactors.

A more comprehensive line of inference further would include the presenceof global social problems—social problems about which something must be doneby someone: ‘‘Someone must do something!’’ Consciousness of an injustice ortragedy that demands the action of people and states and even corporationsthroughout the world means that there is a global cognitive schema by whichsuch judgments are made, a moral order by which obligations are felt and claimsare made. This is a global schema in the dual sense that everyone in the worldcan in principle be a victim of injustice that compels remedy and everyone inthe world falls under a moral obligation to do something. One cannot theorizeaway the reality of the 2008 Olympics that some claimed that the world is morallyobligated to speak out against China’s human rights record and that someclaimed that individual rights is a discourse that Western states and associationsare wrongly, even imperially imposing on Chinese civilization. Contentions areglobal and they are moralistic and they rhetorically construct legitimacy byappealing to categories (for example, human rights, the individual, and culturaldiversity) presumed by the actors to be worldwide. Activists, in particular, defineproblems as global and identify rational goals of peace, justice, and participationas properties of a global good society. While many resist global forces and worldcultural elements, they through their contentions are building a world polity andcultural reality.

Whether we take a minimalist or comprehensive line of reasoning, we thus seea consciousness of a world characterized by moral, cultural schema that encom-passes boundaries. How best to conceptualize this world? Nominalism is attrac-tive: it does not much matter what we call it as long as what we call it points tosomething more than just interconnections of strong actors. I think, neverthe-less, that concepts of world polity, world culture, and world society are importantand powerful. To be clear from the outset, these are not three systems, levels, orspheres; rather, they are concepts each of which points to or foregrounds certainaspects of the world.

World polity (Meyer 1980) as a concept carries a modest set of assumptions.Conceptualizing the world as a polity shifts from a state-centered approach andfocuses on the rules-of-the-game which are global in scope. It captures somethingthat the ‘‘interstate system’’ and ‘‘international norms’’ do not: within a statelessworld, nation-states interact within a context that constitutes authority, sover-eignty, interests, and modes of action. This is a substantial theoretical innovationbecause it traces actor identities, authority, actions, and boundaries to a politicalcontext external to nation-states.

World culture is a crucial concept. The theorizing about culture has becomequite sophisticated over the last decades through the work of post-structuralists and phenomenologists alike. Theorists from Mary Douglas through

117George M. Thomas

Michel Foucault conceptualize cultural categories that define similarities by dis-tinguishing categorical identities from others. For example, two quite differentcolors, blue-green and deep blue, are both referred to as blue in common con-versation: the category ‘‘blue’’ defines the similarity even though we easily recog-nize the differences, and even though within a different set of institutionalizedpractices such as a wedding, more precise categorical identities are used. Con-ceptualizing this cultural process is necessary to understand the pattern of simi-larities and differences across national societies. Nation-states are similar becausethey adopt the same identity (of being a nation-state) and they thereby adoptsimilar practices, not because of prior common characteristics. Similarly, themoral sense of something needing to be done does not arise from actors’ inter-ests in coordination and control but follows from orientations to cultural schemaof what ought to be.

This world culture ⁄ world society theorizing thus concurs with Albert’s turn tosociological theory and critique of actor-centered theories, but it differs substan-tially from Luhmann’s modern systems theory. In Luhmann’s theory, functionaldifferentiation is a technical adaptation of closed-systems to complexity and is amaster trend that drives change. The world cultural interpretation, in contrast, isthat functional differentiation is culturally prescribed as rational action. Expand-ing formal organization, increasing specialization, and delineating system bound-aries are enactments of rationalistic models. Such practices diffuse to all sorts oflocal settings as actors take on identities of rational actorhood and orient to theconstitutive, moralistic cultural models. This requires that we theorize globalrationalistic culture, not as a master trend but as the context of identities andpractices.

It is true that the word ‘‘culture’’ for many still carries the connotations ofclassical theories and ethnographies of either a set of values that integrate societythrough internalization or of a container within which all members are homoge-neous. Yet, the concept has developed in diametric opposition to those concep-tions. It thus simultaneously avoids these issues and enables us to analyze thecognitive and moral categories beyond the nation-state.

World society as a concept enables us to refer to world political and culturalprocesses as more than just a network of interconnections. The key here is thatthe world is stateless and thus can be analyzed as a stateless society. Tribal unitsand settlements, presumed to be bounded societies, are in fact related within abroader context, marked not by bureaucratic organization or tight integrationbut by political and cultural narratives embodied in ceremonial practices. Thesepractices revolve around exchanges and religious ceremonies. The concept ofsociety thus does not denote an integrated, bounded entity. Another example ismedieval China, in which civilization was understood to emanate from a centeroutward without a clearly demarcated border. ‘‘Modern’’ societies are marked byglobal cultural imperatives to be tightly bounded and functionally integrated.These global models have profound effects on nation-states. Thus, any analysis ofsociety as a bounded, integrated entity is inaccurate even for national societieswhich in actuality are not very well bounded or integrated, but rather are enact-ments of global models (Meyer et al. 1997).

Reservations about the discredited baggage of the concepts of society and cul-ture are not unreasonable; nevertheless, I think there is another source of reser-vation: there is a preference for minimizing the causal and constitutive powers ofcontexts and preserving the sovereignty of actors. The preference across disci-plines and theoretical approaches is to explain things in terms of actors. Eventheorists following Foucault tend to reduce institutions to the practices of situ-ated actors, as if institutionalized practices are solely at the level of the actorsthemselves and are reducible to the interests of strong actors. Similarly, a widerange of theorists opt for Bourdieu’s concept of field depicting the contexts of

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actors as passive arenas. As Meyer and Jepperson (2000:101) point out, there is acommitment to ‘‘the core conceit of modern culture, that modern actors—indi-viduals, organizations, nation-states—are autochthonous and natural entities, nolonger really embedded in culture.’’

What is at stake is sovereignty: if constitutive and causal forces are found inthe external global context, then the sovereignty of actors is relativized. Concep-tualizing the world as a network of interconnected and interdependent actorsreifies the actors. Arguing that there is nothing beyond actors except intercon-nections is rooted in what I term the ‘‘immanence imperative’’: all reality mustcome from within. In contrast, by conceptualizing a greater depth to the socialreality external to the nation-state and other strong actors such as corporationsand individuals, we analyze actors as embedded in constitutive contexts and takethe sources of their sovereignty and rationality as something to be explained.

Concepts such as world polity, world culture, and world society are useful foranalyzing empirical patterns while critiquing both actor-centered and functionaltheorizing. Each concept has important foci for what is going on globally: pat-terns and sources of authority and political action, ontological and moralschema, and properties of a stateless society. I suggest that they do have substan-tial analytic potential for better understanding what is going on in the world.

References

Albert, Mathias. (2007) ‘‘Globalization Theory’’: Yesterday’s Fad or More Lively than Ever? Interna-tional Political Sociology 1(2): 165–182.

Goffman, Erving. (1967) Interaction Rituals. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.Meyer, John W. (1980) The World Polity and the Authority of the Nation-State. In Studies of the

Modern World-System, edited by A. J. Bergesen. New York: Academic Press.Meyer, John W., and Ronald L. Jepperson. (2000) The ‘Actors’ of Modern Society: The Cultural

Construction of Social Agency. Sociological Theory 18(1): 100–120.Meyer, John W., and Brian Rowan. (1977) Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as

Myth and Ceremony. American Journal of Sociology 83(2): 340–363.Meyer, John W., John Boli, George M. Thomas, and Francisco O. Ramirez. (1997) World Society

and the Nation-State. American Journal of Sociology 103(1): 144–181.Robertson, Roland. (1992) Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Differentiational Reductionism and theMissing Link in Albert’s Approach to

Globalization Theory

Roland Robertson

University of Aberdeen

In his article ‘‘‘Globalization Theory’: Yesterday’s Fad or More Lively than Ever?’’Mathias Albert raises significant issues with respect to the progress of globaliza-tion theory. He pays particular attention to four strands of the latter: varied glob-alization; global governance; global history; and global ⁄ world society; althoughhe provides no rationale for the choice of these. Albert is eager to mergethese strands with ‘‘the key themes of social theory, most notably functional

119Roland Robertson