World Society The Writings of John W. Meyer [Hardcover]

John W. Meyer's work broke new grounds in institutional thought in sociology and made him a central thinker for the emerging interdisciplinary field ofneoinstitutionalism, while at the same time establishing institutional thought's comparative variant, world society theory. His scholarship plays a prominent role in contemporary social theory, and has shaped research areas such as international relations and globalization, organization theory, and management studies.

One of the results of Meyer's wide-ranging and interdisciplinary influence is that his work has appeared in a diverse range of outlets. This book brings together some of John W. Meyer's widely-scattered work, reviewing four decades of scholarship, and adding several original pieces from Meyer's current work. It gathers substantive commentary on social processes, from stratification to globalization to socialization, as well as on key social institutions, from science to religion to law to education. In its expansive review, this book is both about neoinstitutional thought in general and world society theory in particular.

This book is both by John W. Meyer and about John W. Meyer: to the compilation of Meyer's canonized and current work, Georg Kr?cken and Gili S. Drori add an essay on the theoretical and empirical contribution of Meyer's institutional theory, placing it within the broader context of contemporary social theory, globalization research, and organizational studies in both in the United States and Europe.

Georg Kr?cken is professor for Science Organization; Higher Education and Science Management at the German University of Administrative Sciences in Speyer. After undergraduate und graduate studies in sociology, philosophy, and political sciences at Bielefeld University and the University of Bologna, he received his Ph.D. in sociology from Bielefeld University in 1996, where he worked as an associate professor until 2006. From 1999 to 2001 he was a visiting scholã-