Border

Impressive strands of research have convincingly shown, over the last decades, the emergent reality of increasing world-level interconnection in almost every field of social action. Corresponding theories, models and research designs, however, while conceptualizing this new reality in terms of incessant processes of the diffusion of specifically “modern” (i.e. mainly “Western”) models, policies and organizational patterns, and of the growing harmonization and standardization of fields of social action along “world-cultural” lines, have not gone unchallenged. Rather, cross-cultural studies and alternative social theorizing have pointed to much more complex developments of regional fragmentation, regionalization, and (re-) diversification; of multiple forms of adoption, transformation and hybridization of world-level models and ideas; and of the impact of specifically cultural – i.e. mental, semantic, religious etc. – cleavage or “border” lines. Thus, “multiple modernities”, “entangled histories”, social-cultural hybridization, and “culture-specific world of meaning” repeatedly raise the issue of identifying theories that allow one to systematically analyze, and explain, the intricate interaction of global processes with local agency, or of world-level forces with the self-evolutionary patterns of culture-specific meaning.