After completing the course the student is familiar with the core ideas of neoinstitutional global sociology. Student will be able to identify the role of the world culture in world society, understand how world society is managed increasingly by epistemic governance, and 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 neoinstitutional global sociology coupled with perspectives from studies on epistemic governance.