...Schooling: Anthropology and World Culture Theory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 1 Is there one global culture of schooling, or many? Are school systems around the world diverging from their original European sources, or are they converging toward a single model?i This book opens a dialogue between two very different perspectives on schooling around the world. On the one hand, anthropologists and many scholars in comparative education emphasize national variation, not to mention variation from district to district and from classroom to classroom. From their point of view, the nearly 200 national school systems in the world today represent some 200 different and diverging cultures of schooling. On the other hand, sociology’s “institutionalists” or world culture theorists argue that not only has the model of modern mass education spread from a common source, but that schools around the world are becoming more similar over time.ii According to world culture theory, rather than diverging, schools are converging toward a single global model. This question matters to anthropologists because when we look at globalization— the movement of people, money and ideas across the entire world in unprecedented volume—we wonder whether it really means that the world is becoming more homogeneous. Are we creating a global culture (a “McWorld” for the cynical), or do people create new local cultures as rapidly as global imports hit them (Watson 1997)? Are we seeing increasing uniformity, or simply...
Words: 10440 - Pages: 42
...Social Change and Modernity Edited By Hans Haferkamp and Neil J. Smelser UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles Oxford © 1992 The Regents of the University of California INTRODUCTION Hans Haferkamp and Neil J. Smelser Haferkamp is grateful to Angelika Schade for her fruitful comments and her helpful assistance in editing this volume and to Geoff Hunter for translating the first German version of parts of the Introduction; Smelser has profited from the research assistance and critical analyses given by Joppke. 1. Social Change and Modernity Those who organized the conference on which this volume is based—including the editors— decided to use the terms "social change" and "modernity" as the organizing concepts for this project. Because these terms enjoy wide usage in contemporary sociology and are general and inclusive, they seem preferable to more specific terms such as "evolution" "progress," "differentiation," or even "development," many of which evoke more specific mechanisms, processes, and directions of change. Likewise, we have excluded historically specific terms such as "late capitalism" and "industrial society" even though these concepts figure prominently in many of the contributions to this volume. The conference strategy called for a general statement of a metaframework for the study of social change within which a variety of more specific theories could be identified. 2. Theories of Social Change Change is such an evident feature of...
Words: 171529 - Pages: 687
