Synchronization of National Policies

Pertti Alasuutari, PhD, is Professor of Sociology at the University of Tampere, Finland. He has published widely in the areas of social theory, cultural and media studies, and social research methodology. His current research focuses on the role of knowledge production in global governance. His books include National Policy Making (Routledge 2014), Researching Culture: Qualitative Method and Cultural Studies (Sage 1995), An Invitation to Social Research (Sage 1998), Rethinking the Media Audience (Sage 1999), and Social Theory and Human Reality (Sage 2004). He is co-editor of the European Journal of Cultural Studies and he has published in numerous international scientific journals.

• 1. Introduction 2. Synchronization Through Epistemic Governance 3. The Formation, Spread and Use of World Models 4. The Construction of Parallel Domestic Realities 5. Cross-National Discourses and American Unilateralism 6. The Epistemic Capital of Organizations 7. The Transnational Circulation of Catchwords 8. The Global Incorporation of Uniqueness 9. Conclusion

"In recent decades, policies and rationales for them have spread around the world to an extraordinary extent. The diffusion is amplified by international organizations of all stripes, and by the common world cultures of the rapidly-expanding professions. Pertti Alasuutari has written a most impressive review and analysis of the processes involved, integrating ideas and adding many new ones. His book will be of great interest to anyone interested in contemporary globalization." John W. Meyer, Professor of Sociology, emeritus, Stanford University"The book establishes a paradigmatic research strategy for examining situated discourse that opens up the interplaybetween global and local, resulting in an original understanding of global similarities and differences. The comprehensive theorising and well-crafted empirical work do much to explain, but they also stimulate new questions. The result will be energising for the next generation of scholarship."George M. Thomas, Arizona State University, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology