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The paper examines the role of PISA in the globalisation of education policies. It approaches the question by assessing the effects of PISA on the ways in which new legislation was debated in national contexts in the period 1994–2013. The study asks: Has there been an increase in the number of references to the international community in debates on education policy due to PISA, and, if so, is this change confined to debates on education policy? Our analysis shows that education policy debates feature an increasingly global discourse in which organisations such as the OECD have an authoritative role. Yet, our findings do not support the claim that PISA is the cause of a change in this respect. Debating national policies in a global context and utilising the same transnational discourses regardless of the policy issue area in question has long been with us, yet there is a global trend in which national policies are increasingly often debated through appeals to models and policy advice promulgated by international organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Since previous research has shown that nation-states take the acts of other states in consideration when making decisions about their policies, this article focuses on analyzing national decision-making in actual practice by studying the justifications used in debating new legislation. The data comprises second readings of bills from Canada and the UK and House debates of US bills from 2001 to 2011. The total amount of bills analyzed is 208. The results show that the acts of governments and other agents in the global system are an essential part of the factors to which actors refer in their argumentation. The analysis also shows that the US political culture is less receptive to considering cross-national differences or policies adopted in other states as justification for domestic reforms than the other two countries, whereas Canadians are most sensitive to the international community and their position and reputation among the nations. From these differences in national political cultures we cannot deduce, however, that the United States is immune to external factors or the center of a unilateral system. Although decisions are less often justified by policies adopted in other countries, the global community and economic competition are an essential part of the environment to which US politicians place themselves as decision makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While media studies have focused on journalist roles in framing foreign news events for local readers to render them suitable for national audiences, there has been less attention to similar roles played by other social actors in bringing ‘home’ new models about existing realities. Therefore, this paper addresses the question of how a global catchphrase, ‘war on terror,’ acquired a national paradigm status by virtue of its use by multiple actors in the media sphere in Pakistan. We analyse all the articles mentioning the catchphrase in a leading national English daily over two years to unpack how the war on terror turned from being ‘their’ war in America to becoming ‘our’ war in Pakistan. Drawing on media studies of localization, we discuss the rhetorical modes by which the term was embedded in the Pakistani political field to give it a distinct national flavour. We refer to this process as ‘domestication’, by which the catchphrase was adopted in Pakistan by local, interested actors including media professionals. We draw particular attention to the way in which this complex process naturalizes the term by nationalizing it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper addresses the question of how cosmopolitan consciousness coexists with persistent banal nationalism or localism. The argument put forward is that these two phenomena are reinvigorated by a single process, here called the domestication of transnational models. The newspaper media coverage of an R&D project aimed at developing local government cultural activities in Finnish towns and cities is the object of a case analysis. The results show that although the project contributed to standardizing local government cultural activities and spreading the idea of cities as strategic actors, through the way in which the project was covered in the local media, it strengthened a local viewpoint on the whole process. It drew on and constituted residents’ identification with their local domicile and the idea that local government citizens are members of a team that has to do well in global competition. Second, the comparative data made available was capitalized in local politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author suggests ways on how globalization should be conceived as a process. He approached globalization from a constructionist point of view and claims that global trends and developments do not form a single dynamics of global social change. He calls on globalization researchers to be aware of their participant role in a continuous public, political discourse on social change, and on the political uses of the terms they use as analytical concepts.