Excerpt from Introduction
Structure of the Book
 Unlike
most edited volumes, all of the chapters in this book work from a
common theoretical perspective and are closely related to one another.
Some chapters explicitly evaluate empirical evidence that bears on
the competing predictions of world-polity institutionalism in
comparison with the other global perspectives (Boli et al., Chapter
2, on membership in global organizations; Frank et al., Chapter 3, on
environmental INGOs; Finnemore, Chapter 6, on the Red Cross; Loya and
Boli, Chapter 7, on standardization). Other chapters concentrate
mainly on world-polity theory, treating other perspectives more
implicitly or in less detail. All chapters elaborate and empirically
assess the distinctive reasoning and implications of the world-polity perspective.
Part
I provides an overview of the INGO population. Chapter 1 is of
central importance, for much of its content is assumed but not
explicated in other chapters. It provides an overview of the origins,
development, and operations of the entire INGO population for the
period 1875-1973, interpreted through the framework of world-polity
institutionalism. We analyze INGOs as the primary organizational
field in which world culture takes structural form, showing how INGOS
help shape and define world culture as a distinct level of social
reality. We also explore the substance and structure of world culture
by a close analysis of the cultural principles by which INGOs are
constructed and an examination of the distribution of INGOs across
social sectors and over time.
Leaning
heavily on Chapter 1, John Boli, Tom Loya, and Teresa Loftin examine
participation in global organizations in Chapter 2, focusing mainly
on INGOs but also comparing INGO membership structures to those of
intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). Using several types of data
regarding the countries in which members of INGOs reside, the chapter
studies the distribution of memberships across types of countries
(distinguished in terms of economic development, geographic region,
dominant religion, degree of democratization, and other variables)
and charts trends in membership distribution between 1960 and 1988.
The analysis leads to reflections on the relative adequacy of
functional, neo-realist, neo-liberal institutionalist, world-system,
and world-polity institutionalist theories for understanding the
reach of INGOs in this period of rapid world development.
The
remainder of the book, with the exception of the concluding chapter,
presents historical studies of distinct INGO sectors, most of them
beginning with the origins of the sector in the nineteenth century
and following its growth and intensification to the present. The
chapters study both organizational expansion and substantive cultural
content in their respective sectors, considering above all the role
that INGOs play in developing and propagating world-cultural models,
standards, discourse, and principles. The main target of INGO
activity discussed in these chapters is the nation-state, which
emerges from these analyses as a less dominant and self-directed
actor than most scholars habitually assume. Another target is IGOs,
which become both sites of intense INGO engagement and important
factors affecting the INGO populations with which they interact.
These chapters reflect exhaustive research into primary sources to
identify the relevant INGO sub-populations and the key international
conferences attended by INGO members. Many also involved laborious
study of published documents about INGO operations and the voluminous
proceedings and publications produced by international conferences.
Some use advanced statistical analysis methods, particularly
event-history analysis, but they are written to minimize technical
details so they will be accessible to a general audience.
Part
II contains four studies of what we call "social movement"
sectors. These are arenas involving high visibility in the global
public realm and the mobilization of large numbers of people on
behalf of purposes and values that movement members believe to be
inadequately realized in existing institutions. In Chapter 3, David
Frank, Ann Hironaka, John Meyer, Evan Schofer, and Nancy Tuma
identify global institutional factors leading to the formation and
growth of INGOs concerned with humanity's relationship to the natural
world. They document changes in depictions of the humanity-nature
relationship over the past century and show how these changes are
reflected in the growth of environmental organizations, including
both organizations that seek to preserve or protect nature and
organizations that help drive the process of rationalizing the
humanity-nature nexus. Along the way they improve our understanding
of the significance of the United Nations Environment Programme and
the first UN Conference on the Environment in 1972 for the formation
of state environmental protection agencies.
In
Chapter 4, Nitza Berkovitch traces the growth, decline, and
resurgence of the international women's movement. She shows how the
goals of the women's movement changed as world-cultural conceptions
of women changed, moving from a conception of women as distinct from
men and requiring special protection and consideration to a fully
egalitarian conception after World War II. Women's groups' efforts
with respect to individual states, the International Labor
Organization (formed immediately after World War I), and UN
organizations are important elements of her analysis. Her chapter
offers some surprises to those who think they have a good grasp of
the history of women's movements over the past century.
Young
Kim's Chapter 5 follows the fortunes of Esperanto. The most
successful artificial language, Esperanto was developed to serve as a
universal medium of communication that would improve global and
international harmony. In this more purely cultural sector, Kim
develops an explanation for long-term patterns of Esperanto INGO
formation. His analysis fits especially nicely with arguments
developed in Chapters 1 and 2 on the importance of initially
universal and diffuse world-polity organizations and the later
relative decline of such organizations in favor of more specific,
differentiated, and limited transnational structures.
In
Chapter 6, Martha Finnemore studies one of the earliest and most
successful of the global human rights movements, the International
Committee of the Red Cross. Her concern is limited to the first phase
of ICRC work, when its few but highly energetic members overcame
tremendous odds to induce states to adopt humanitarian rules of war
in the first of the Geneva Conventions. Finnemore shows that
functional and interest-related explanations have trouble explaining
this development, while a world-cultural argument accords quite well
with the way events unfolded.
The
chapters in Part III deal with sectors that involve technical,
socio-economic, and scientific organization of the world polity. The
sectors discussed in this portion of the book lie close to the core
of world culture and involve much less controversy than those in Part
I. They therefore are not well known and rarely receive much notice
in the public realm. Chapter 7, by Tom Loya and John Boli, studies
technical standardization, tracing the origins and growth of the two
central INGOs in this sector, the International Organization for
Standardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission.
Through an analysis of the structure, operations, and memberships of
these bodies, the authors show that standardization is a realm of
essentially pure rationalization in which, contrary to state-centric
and world-system theories, the power differentials of states and
corporations have rather limited opportunity to influence outcomes.
Their portrait of this extraordinarily comprehensive sector indicates
that the technical homogenization process is already thoroughly
global and highly institutionalized, even though it depends primarily
on voluntary compliance with technical standards.
In
their study of population policy, Debbie Barrett and David Frank
(Chapter 8) study the shift from the nineteenth-century view of
population growth as a vital component of national power to the
strong post-war consensus that population control is necessary for
economic development. The chapter shows that INGO conferences and
discourse were crucial to this conceptual shift and eventually helped
lead states to make population-control policy a standard part of
their approach to societal management. Of particular importance here
was the conceptual linkage that emerged between population control
and national well-being, for earlier exhortations favoring population
control for the general improvement of human welfare had been
ineffective in evoking state action.
Chapter
9, by Colette Chabbott, surveys the field of development
organizations in the post-war era. Chabbott describes the processes
whereby development aid and advising became a transnational
enterprise conducted by a burgeoning industry of INGOs closely tied
to states and intergovernmental bodies. She identifies several phase
shifts in the prevailing approach to development, from comprehensive
planning and industrialization in the 1950s to sustainable
development in the 1990s, and documents the expanding role of
international and national non-governmental organizations with each
successive phase. In the process, she also shows how world-cultural
images of the nature and role of the state in less developed
countries have changed as part of the evolution of development
discourse and organization.
Chapter
10, by Evan Schofer, studies the organization of science in
professonal associations. Schofer works with two sub-populations in
this sector, strictly science-oriented INGOs and socially-oriented
science INGOs. Science-oriented bodies arose first, as science became
a rationalized and professionalized arena, but socially-oriented
bodies have expanded rapidly in recent decades as science has been
integrated into modern models of national development. Schofer then
shows that scientific INGOs are especially important to scientists in
peripheral countries and have helped motivate states to engage in
science policy in many countries.
Finally,
in the Conclusion, John Boli reviews the detailed investigations in
Parts II and III as part of his analysis of a central theoretical
problem raised by the sectoral studies: How can INGOs exercise any
sort of influence or authority in the world polity, given that they
are resource-poor and lack coercive enforcement capabilities? Boli
expands arguments in the first two chapters about the cultural
properties and assumptions, deeply and widely embedded in world
culture, that account for INGO authority and effectiveness. Building
from the cultural foundation of the collectively-defined sovereign
individual, INGOs draw on a wide range of legitimations for their
authority: the legitimated structures and procedures by which they
operate, the leigitmated purposes they pursue, and the cultural
authority embodied in their members in terms of educational
credentials, professional standing, moral charisma, and so on. With
respect to IGOs, Boli shows that a somewhat different logic accounts
for their authority because they have sovereign states as members,
though there is a good deal of overlap with INGO authority
legitimations because IGOs, too, operate in a world in which
legal-rational authority remains decentralized. In his analysis of
three forms of INGO authority -- autonomous, collateral, and
penetrative -- he argues that INGOs, IGOs, and states are engaged in
complex processes of global governance involving a good deal of
collaboration and mutual legitimation, though in many domains INGOs
operate largely outside the formal authority structures overseen by states.
All
of these chapters develop theoretical reasoning about world
political and cultural processes that operate through global and
international organizations. Their theoretical claims are supported
by detailed empirical studies that bring wide-ranging systematic
evidence to bear on issues of world-polity organization,
world-cultural content, the dialectical relationships between global
structures and national and local actors, and specific processes
linking the global with the local. We offer the book as a decided
advance in world-polity institutional analysis and look forward to
lively debate about its claims and findings. |