Ph.D. Stanford University 1979
Curriculum Vitae

In my research and teaching, I argue that to adequately understand global processes, we need to understand how an emerging world culture constitutes authority and identity. Substantively, global rationalism constitutes individuals, transnational organizations, corporations, and states as rational actors pursuing and organizing for progress, including contesting official or established practices and programs.

My research programs are driven by the proposition that we are witnessing the emergence of global institutions by which I mean the creation and practice of rules, standards, programs, and principles of authority, organization, and participation. These worldwide institutions often are oriented to identifying social problems associated with global interconnectedness and developing policies to solve them. These are contentious processes, and I study how people organize to contest global policies and programs and to identify and solve global problems. Much of my work is on how religious groups engage globalization and contend over the emergent institutions and policies. Religious contentions are especially revealing because they contest the underlying assumptions – the ontology and epistemology – of global rationalism.

I have two research programs. In the first, I study international nongovernmental organizations and their interactions with states and international governmental organizations. Based on these analyses, I make inferences about world culture and how it frames identities, authority, and action. Currently I am working on how international organizations play a role in conflict over religious rights in the United Nations system. The strategies and interactions surrounding the conflicts, I argue, resulting in a global civil society. Throughout this work, I explore the usefulness of conceptualizing an emerging global civil society.

The second research program is on how religions engage global political processes. In one project, I study the conflict between religions and states over issues of mass schooling and religious rights. I place these conflicts in the context of global conceptions of religion and the human person. I have completed historical work on the United States and am carrying out contemporary comparative studies. In a second project I am working with Carolyn Warner, in Political Science and the School of Global Studies, and with other colleagues, on Muslim organizations in Europe. We are studying the interactions between national states and Muslim immigrant groups, assessing the impact of different policies and organizing strategies on boundaries between the sacred and secular and the organization of Muslim interests in Europe.

My publications include Constructing World Culture: International Nongovernmental Organizations Since 1875 (with John Boli, Stanford University Press 1999), Revivalism and Cultural Change (University of Chicago Press 1989), Institutional Structures (with J. Meyer, F. Ramirez, and J. Boli, Sage 1987), and articles in the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review,Sociology of Religion, and Journal of Human Rights.