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Via a cross-national and longitudinal analysis, this study seeks to understand whether and to what extent school textbooks portray children as entities with status and agency. Our core argument is that in a world in which individuals are imagined as central to national progress, the extension of individual personhood and citizenship to children is associated with their increased status and enhanced agency. Using 495 textbooks from 76 countries, we analyse trends from 1970 to 2012 as well as textbook-, country-, and global-level characteristics that explain changes in mentions of children's status and agency. Trends indicate higher average levels of mentions of children's status and agency over time. Findings from multivariate analyses suggest that children are more likely to be portrayed as rights bearers and capable actors in more democratic regimes and in countries more linked to world society. A rights affirming global environment also positively relates to mentions of children.

Existing scholarship documents large worldwide increases in women’s participation in the public sphere over recent decades, for example, in education, politics, and the labor force. Some scholars have argued that these changes follow broader trends in world society, especially its growing liberalism, which increasingly has reconfigured social life around the choices of empowered and rights-bearing individuals, regardless of gender. Very recently, however, a variety of populisms and nationalisms have emerged to present alternatives to liberalism, including in the international arena. We explore here their implications for women’s participation in public life. We use cross-national data to analyze changes in women’s participation in higher education, the polity, and the economy 1970–2017. We find that women’s participation on average continues to expand over this period, but there is evidence of a growing cross-national divergence. In most domains, women’s participation tends to be lower in countries linked to illiberal international organizations, especially in the recent-most period.

The International Association of Universities (IAU) is the only inclusive global university association, its membership barriers are low, yet few universities are members despite considerable benefits. What determines membership in this long-standing international university alliance? Reviewing recent trends toward a more networked, stratified and internationalized global higher education field, we argue that universities with a greater need for legitimation and those 'born' into a global era are more likely to become members of an inclusive international network like the IAU. Thus, we expect lower status and younger universities to be more likely to join. We apply regression models to test hypotheses implied by these arguments. Our findings are consistent with these hypotheses, even after controlling for other factors. We discuss these findings using neo-institutional arguments about legitimacy and imprinted logics and suggest potential analytical avenues for further research.

The advent of mass schooling played a pivotal role in European societies of the later nineteenth century, transforming rural peasants into national citizens. The late-twentieth-century global expansion of higher education ushered in new transformations, propelling societal rationalization and organizing, and knitting the world into a more integrated society and economy. We address four key dynamics: (1) Higher education sustains the modern professions and contributes to the rationalization of society and state. (2) The supranational and universalistic orientation of higher education provides elites with shared global cultural frames and identities, facilitating globalization. (3) Consequently, tertiary education provides a foundation for major global movements and sociopolitical change around diverse issues, such as human rights and environmental protection as well as potentially contentious religious and cultural solidarities. (4) Higher education contributes to the reorganization of the economy, creating new monetarized activities and facilitating the reconceptualization of activities distant from material production as economic. In short, many features of the contemporary world arise from the growing legions of people steeped in common forms of higher education. Panel regression models of contemporary cross-national longitudinal data examine these relationships. We find higher-education enrollments are associated with key dimensions of rationalization, globalization, societal mobilization, and expansion of the service economy. Central features of modern society, often seen as natural, in fact hinge on the distinctive form of higher education that has become institutionalized worldwide.

National higher education systems are undergoing profound changes, discussed in many but unrelated studies as outcomes of internationalisation dynamics and institutional isomorphism pressures. We propose to link these studies by emphasising the influence of both internationalisation and isomorphism on the formation of a global educational regime. Through a broad range of indicators, we describe the growth of the discursive, normative, and regulatory dimensions of such a global higher education regime. We find evidence of the following developments: (1) a rapidly growing network of international organisations focused on conferences, initiatives, and programmes supporting a global higher education agenda; (2) a striking increase in the number of international and national accreditation agencies, their mutual cross-national recognition as well as the number of universities that are nationally and internationally accredited; and lastly, (3) parallel increases in regional qualification frameworks and in the implementation of national qualification frameworks. These developments create integration pressures manifest in the mutual recognition of higher education degrees, for which a new generation of regional conventions has emerged worldwide in the past two decades. We discuss these processes and their implications for understanding 'national' higher education as well as the threats and limits to the burgeoning higher education regime.

Recent decades have seen rapid growth of national participation in international tests as well as expanded national assessment testing. This article addresses the relationship between these forms of testing and educational developments: educational enrollments, women's participation in schooling, repetition rates, student centrism in the curriculum, and the breadth of the curriculum. From a critical perspective, the obsession with international and national assessment testing might be linked to lower enrollments, higher repetition rates, and a narrowing of curricula. We use panel regression models with country fixed effects to examine these relationships. Our findings do not support these dire predictions. We offer an alternative interpretation that situates the global testing regime within a broader world educational culture that favors both a technocratic approach to assessing learning and such progressive educational outcomes as expanded access and broader curricula.

Via a cross-national and longitudinal analysis, this study seeks to understand whether and to what extent school textbooks portray children as entities with status and agency. Our core argument is that in a world in which individuals are imagined as central to national progress, the extension of individual personhood and citizenship to children is associated with their increased status and enhanced agency. Using 495 textbooks from 76 countries, we analyse trends from 1970 to 2012 as well as textbook-, country-, and global-level characteristics that explain changes in mentions of children's status and agency. Trends indicate higher average levels of mentions of children's status and agency over time. Findings from multivariate analyses suggest that children are more likely to be portrayed as rights bearers and capable actors in more democratic regimes and in countries more linked to world society. A rights affirming global environment also positively relates to mentions of children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European higher education is awash with educational reform initiatives that purport to transform universities into better-managed higher quality organizations that more directly contribute to national development. This exploratory study examines patterns of research discourse in higher education in Europe. We argue that these patterns are changing in the direction of greater isomorphism with globally favored models of the university. First, we show some global trends that reveal the rise of "world class universities" and "higher education and development" discourse. Next, we analyze discursive shifts in European higher education research publications in the period between 1990 and 2009. Our initial analysis of these publications shows changes in the expected direction: we find a growing emphasis on management, organization, and quality and less emphasis on student access to higher education, an earlier equity concern. We propose further research to see whether higher education has become a more consolidated research field over time, perhaps suggesting an erosion of the historical legacies that often informed higher education systems and universities in Europe. Lastly, we briefly reflect on the implications of influential world models on comparative studies of higher education.

This article examines changes in the formal organization of two universities and two schools within these universities, the University of Oslo and Stanford University. We focus on role differentiation, rule formation, and resource seeking structures and describe organizational developments along these dimensions. We find that both these universities travel similar routes involving greater role differentiation, rule formation, and resource seeking activities. Both universities more explicitly function as organizational actors influenced by a global environment that favors the more socially embedded and the more managed university. However, we also find persistent differences in how these universities respond to the global environment, differences that reflect the different historical roots of different universities. A tradition of professorial self-governance at the University of Oslo, for example, fosters greater resistance to the managed university ideal. The latter emerges earlier and develops to a greater degree at Stanford University. We conclude that university routes are influenced both by common (now globalized) rules of the game and by their different organizational roots. We use ideas from the neo-institutional and path dependency perspectives to make sense of both growing commonalities and persistent differences.

For decades the world society perspective has influenced comparative research on a broad range of issues across the social sciences. The perspective emerged to make sense of an empirical puzzle: why did nation-state after nation-state expand mass schooling after World War II? The perspective evolved to address broader issues such as the authority of science and its influence on the environmental movement, the expansion of the scope of citizenship and its impact on women's rights and, more recently, the rise of an international human rights regime on the one hand and the celebration of universities of excellence on the other hand. The world society perspective has motivated research that examines worldwide and regional trends and generates hypotheses to explain these cross-national developments and variations. This paper first clarifies some of the world society perspective's key assumptions and core arguments as applied to comparative education. Next, the paper situates the world society perspective within a broader neo-institutional theoretical framework. Neo-institutionalists assume that the actors are highly embedded in their larger environment. Following this assumption, we distinguish between levels of analysis (macro or societal, meso or organisational, and micro or individual levels) and the extent to which the relevant actors are conceptualised as embedded in environments. The paper then turns to consider the character of the influential environment and to discuss the role of models of reality as rationalising and legitimating myths. From a neo-institutional perspective, the actors are often imagined as enacting scripts that make sense given the triumph of some models of reality. The fourth section of this paper focuses on the concepts of institutional isomorphism and loose coupling and their uses in comparative research guided by the world society perspective. Lastly, the paper clarifies the kinds of research strategies associated with the world society perspective, from trend identification to more explicit efforts to model the diffusion of discourse, policies, structures, and practices. These strategies have varied over time. A common thread though is to empirically ascertain as to whether there is evidence supporting the dynamics emphasised within the world society perspective, net of other influences that impinge on the outcomes of interest.

In reaction to the disasters of the first half the 20th century and World War II, a dramatic world movement arose emphasizing the human rights of persons in global society. The contrast--celebrated in international treaties, intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations, and much cultural discourse--was with narrower world emphases on the rights of citizens of national states. Since the 1970s, this movement has increasingly emphasized the importance of human rights education as central to sustaining human rights principles. This article examines the rise of human rights themes in secondary school social science textbooks around the world since 1970, coding data on 465 textbooks from 69 countries. The authors find a general increase in human rights discussions, especially since 1995. Human rights receive less emphasis in history texts than in civics or social studies ones, and there is less human rights emphasis in books that discuss national, rather than international, society. Human rights emphases are associated with the pedagogical student-centrism of textbooks: The proactive student is a rights-bearing student. Finally, a number of indicators of national development and especially political culture show positive effects on human rights emphases. These findings broadly support the arguments of institutional theories that the contemporary "globalized" world is one in which the standing of the participatory and empowered individual person has very great legitimacy. (Contains 4 tables, 1 figure, and 5 notes.)

The UNESCO Associated Schools Project emphasizes world community, human rights, and international understanding. This article investigates the emergence and global diffusion of the project from 1953 to 2001, estimating the influence of national, regional, and world characteristics on the likelihood of a country adopting a UNESCO school. It also addresses the effects of national linkages to the international human rights regime. The results reveal that adoption rates are positively influenced by stronger national links to the human rights regime throughout the period and that various measures of the density of global society influence adoption, particularly "after" the institutionalization of human rights. Finally, the results demonstrate that democratic countries and nations with more expanded educational systems tend to adopt a UNESCO school "before" the period of human rights institutionalization. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to the literature on the global environment and the diffusion of innovations in education. (Contains 1 figure, 4 tables and 11 notes.)