After completing the course students are expected to be able to
- identify the role of the world culture in world society
- understand how world society is managed increasingly by epistemic governance
- recognize the role of local actors in the processes in which global policy ideas spread and in which national policies become synchronized with each other

The course deepens the students’ understanding of the functioning of world society and the role of epistemic governance in it. In addition to showing how world culture is seen in the global spread of world models, the course approaches the circulation of global ideas from the perspective of national actors, especially policymakers. In the national political fields, actors justify new policies by international comparisons and by the successes and failures of models adopted in other countries. Consequently, national policies are synchronized with each other. Yet, because of the way such domestication of global trends takes place, citizens retain and reproduce the understanding that they follow a sovereign national trajectory.
The lectures introduce the key ideas of the Stanford School of New Institutionalism coupled with Foucault-inspired governmentality approach and the advances made in discursive institutionalist research. Through required reading the students will get a holistic view on neoinstitutionalist global sociology.

In order to complete the course, students are required to participate both the lectures and the seminar.

Maximum 20 students are accepted to the course in the following order:

1. degree students of the MDP in Global and Transnational Studies

2. degree students of the other Global Society programmes (MDP in Peace, Mediation and Conflict Research, MDP in Quantitative Social Research, MDP in Comparative Social Policy and Welfare)

3. other degree students of UTA

4. exchange students