Boris Holzer & Fatima Kastner 
From Globalization to World Society [PDF ebook] 
Neo-Institutional and Systems-Theoretical Perspectives

Since the 1970s, various sociological approaches have tried to understand and conceptualize "the global, " yet few of them have systematically addressed the full spectrum of social relationships. Prominent exponents of the global approach – such as world systems analysis – instead have focused on particular domains such as politics or the economy. Under the label of "world society, " however, some authors have suggested alternatives to the predominant equivocation of society and the nation-state. The contributions to this volume share that objective and take their point of departure from the two most ambitious projects of a theory of world society: world polity research and systems theory, mapping out the common ground and assessing their potential to inform empirical analyses of globalization.