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Much modern social theory depicts society as made up of autonomous and purposive individual and organized actors. In reaction, the new institutional theories build arguments about the wider social conditions supporting stable systems of such agentic actors. Phenomenological versions, which are especially relevant to analyses of modern integrating but stateless world society, treat actor identities as themselves constructed in the wider and now global cultural context. These ideas call attention to the modern collective construction of expansive models of actors, the rapid diffusion and adoption of elaborated models of actor agency and rights, the consequently decoupled character of actor identities and activities in the modern system, and the extraordinary mobilizing potential built into the elaborated models of individual and organizational actors in world society and into the inconsistencies between these models and activity.

Faculty members, scholars, and researchers often ask where they should publish their work; which outlets are most suitable to showcase their research? Which journals should they publish in to ensure their work is read and cited? How can the impact of their scholarly output be maximized? The answers to these and related questions affect not only individual scholars, but also academic and research institution stakeholders who are under constant pressure to create and implement organizational policies, evaluation measures and reward systems that encourage quality, high impact research from their members. The explosion of academic research in recent years, along with advances in information technology, has given rise to omnipresent and increasingly important scholarly metrics. These measures need to be assessed and used carefully, however, as their widespread availability often tempts users to jump to improper conclusions without considering several caveats. While various quantitative tools enable the ranking, evaluating, categorizing, and comparing of journals and articles, metrics such as author or article citation counts, journal impact factors, and related measures of institutional research output are somewhat inconsistent with traditional goals and objectives of higher education research and scholarly academic endeavors.

The authors analyze the rapid worldwide expansion of higher educational enrollments over the twentieth century using pooled panel regressions. Expansion is higher in economically developed countries (in some but not all analyses) as classic theories would have it. Growth is greater where secondary enrollments are high and where state control over education is low, consistent with conflict and competition theories. Institutional theories get strong support: growth patterns are similar in all types of countries, are especially high in countries more linked to world society, and sharply accelerate in virtually all countries after 1960. The authors theorize and operationalize the institutional processes involved, which include scientization, democratization and the expansion of human rights, the rise of development planning, and the structuration of the world polity. With these changes, a new model of society became institutionalized globally-one in which schooled knowledge and personnel were seen as appropriate for a wide variety of social positions, and in which many more young people were seen as appropriate candidates for higher education. An older vision of education as contributing to a more closed society and occupational system-with associated fears of \"over-education\"-was replaced by an open-system picture of education as useful \"human capital\" for unlimited progress. The global trends are so strong that developing countries now have higher enrollment rates than European countries did only a few decades ago, and currently about one-fifth of the world cohort is now enrolled in higher education.

Recent decades have seen rapid growth of national participation in international tests as well as expanded national assessment testing. This article addresses the relationship between these forms of testing and educational developments: educational enrollments, women’s participation in schooling, repetition rates, student centrism in the curriculum, and the breadth of the curriculum. From a critical perspective, the obsession with international and national assessment testing might be linked to lower enrollments, higher repetition rates, and a narrowing of curricula. We use panel regression models with country fixed effects to examine these relationships. Our findings do not support these dire predictions. We offer an alternative interpretation that situates the global testing regime within a broader world educational culture that favors both a technocratic approach to assessing learning and such progressive educational outcomes as expanded access and broader curricula. En las últimas décadas se ha observado un rápido crecimiento de la participación nacional en pruebas internacionales, así como también una ampliación de las pruebas de evaluación a nivel nacional. Este artículo trata sobre la relación entre estas formas de pruebas y los acontecimientos educativos: las inscripciones educativas, la participación femenina en la enseñanza, los índices de repetición, el centrismo estudiantil en el plan de estudios y la amplitud del plan de estudios. Desde una perspectiva crítica, la obsesión con las pruebas de evaluación internacionales y nacionales podría estar vinculada con una disminución en las inscripciones, un aumento de los índices de repetición y un estrechamiento de los planes de estudio. Para analizar estas relaciones usamos modelos de regresión para los datos de panel con efectos fijos por país. Nuestros hallazgos no apoyan estas alarmantes predicciones. Ofrecemos una interpretación alternativa que sitúa el régimen de pruebas global dentro de una cultura educativa mundial más amplia, que favorece tanto el enfoque tecnocrático para evaluar el aprendizaje y dichos resultados educativos progresivos como un mayor acceso y planes de estudio más amplios. Au cours des dernières décennies, on a assisté à une croissance rapide de la participation nationale aux tests internationaux ainsi qu’à l’expansion des tests d’évaluation nationaux. Cet article traite de la relation entre ces formes d’évaluation et l’évolution de l’éducation, c’est-à-dire les inscriptions scolaires, la participation des femmes à la scolarité, les taux de redoublement, le centrage des élèves dans le programme et la portée du programme. D’un point de vue critique, l’obsession pour les tests d’évaluation internationaux et nationaux pourrait être liée à une baisse des inscriptions, à des taux de redoublement plus élevés et à un rétrécissement des programmes. Nous utilisons des modèles de régression par panel avec des effets par pays pour examiner ces relations. Nos résultats n’appuient pas ces prédictions désastreuses. Nous offrons une interprétation alternative situant le régime mondial de tests dans une culture éducative mondiale plus large qui favorise à la fois une approche technocratique de l’évaluation de l’apprentissage et des résultats éducatifs progressifs comme un accès élargi et des programmes plus vastes. 近几十年来，各国参加国际考试的人数迅速增加，国家评估考试也有所扩大。本文探讨了这些形式的考试与教育发展之 间的关系，如教育入学率、女性参与学校教育、留级率、课程中的学生中心主义以及课程的广度。从批评的角度来看，对国际和国家评估考试的痴迷可能与入学率降低、留级率升高和课程缩减有关。我们使用具有国家固定效应的面板回归模型来检验这些关系。我们的研究结果不支持这些可怕的预测。 我们提供了另一种解释，将全球考试制度置于更广泛的世界教育文化中，这种文化既有利于以技术官僚的方式评估学习，也有利于扩大入学机会和扩大课程范围等进步的教育成果。 شهدت العقود الأخيرة نموًا هائلاً في المشاركة المحلية في الاختبارات الدولية وكذلك توسع نطاق اختبارات التقييم المحلية. يتناول هذا المقال العلاقة ما بين أشكال تلك الاختبارات والتطور التعليمي: المشاركات التعليمية، ومشاركة المرأة في التعليم، ومعدلات التكرار، وتمركز الطلاب في المنهج وعرض المناهج. من منظور نقدي، قد يرتبط الهوس باختبارات التقييم الدولية والمحلية بمعدلات الالتحاق الأقل، ومعدلات التكرار العالية وضيق المناهج. ونستعين هنا بنماذج انحدار البيانات الطولي في ظل آثار معينة خاصة بالبلد وذلك للتحقيق في تلك العلاقات. إلا أن نتائجنا لا تدعم تلك التوقعات الحثيثة. نقدم هنا تفسيرًا بديلاً يضع نظام الاختبار العالمي في إطار الثقافة التعليمية العالمية الأشمل والتي تحابي المدخل التكنوقراطي على تقييم التعليم وينتج عن ذلك التعليم التقدمي دخول واسع ومناهج أوسع في نطاقها. За последние десятилетия у государств резко возрос интерес как к участию в международных рейтингах, так и к развитию собственных. В статье рассматривается взаимосвязь между ними и показателями развития образования: динамикой поступающих, количеством женщин в системе образования, числом второгодников, учетом предпочтений студентов в учебном плане и его содержанием. С точки зрения критиков одержимость этими рейтингами может приводить к недонабору студентов, избытку второгодников и сокращению учебных дисциплин. Авторы использовали регрессионный анализ панельных данных с разбивкой по странам, чтобы отследить взаимосвязь и не обнаружили подтверждений этим устрашающим прогнозам. Авторы предлагают посмотреть на проблему под другим углом, при котором глобальные системы рейтингов на более широкой арене международного образования будут способствовать как более технологичному подходу к оценке качества образования, так и к более удобной системе образования (доступность информации, разнообразие учебных дисциплин).

The advent of mass schooling played a pivotal role in European societies of the later nineteenth century, transforming rural peasants into national citizens. The late-twentieth-century global expansion of higher education ushered in new transformations, propelling societal rationalization and organizing, and knitting the world into a more integrated society and economy. We address four key dynamics: (1) Higher education sustains the modern professions and contributes to the rationalization of society and state. (2) The supranational and universalistic orientation of higher education provides elites with shared global cultural frames and identities, facilitating globalization. (3) Consequently, tertiary education provides a foundation for major global movements and sociopolitical change around diverse issues, such as human rights and environmental protection as well as potentially contentious religious and cultural solidarities. (4) Higher education contributes to the reorganization of the economy, creating new monetarized activities and facilitating the reconceptualization of activities distant from material production as economic. In short, many features of the contemporary world arise from the growing legions of people steeped in common forms of higher education. Panel regression models of contemporary cross-national longitudinal data examine these relationships. We find higher-education enrollments are associated with key dimensions of rationalization, globalization, societal mobilization, and expansion of the service economy. Central features of modern society, often seen as natural, in fact hinge on the distinctive form of higher education that has become institutionalized worldwide.

We offer an institutional explanation for the contemporary expansion of formal organization—in numbers, internal complexity, social domains, and national contexts. Much expansion lies in areas far beyond the traditional foci on technical production or political power, such as protecting the environment, promoting marginalized groups, or behaving with transparency. We argue that expansion is supported by widespread cultural rationalization in a stateless and liberal global society, characterized by scientism, rights and empowerment discourses, and an explosion of education. These cultural changes are transmitted through legal, accounting, and professionalization principles, driving the creation of new organizations and the elaboration of existing ones. The resulting organizations are constructed to be proper social actors as much as functionally effective entities. They are painted as autonomous and integrated but depend heavily on external definitions to sustain this depiction. So expansion creates organizations that are, whatever their actual effectiveness, structurally nonrational. We advance institutional theories of social organization in three main ways. First, we give an account of the expansive rise of \"organization\" rooted in rapid worldwide cultural rationalization. Second, we explain the construction of contemporary organizations as purposive actors, rather than passive bureaucracies. Third, we show how the expanded actorhood of the contemporary organization, and the associated interpnetration with the environment, dialectically generate structures far removed from instrumental rationality.

The world environmental movement has gained much strength in recent decades and has led many nations to focus on environmental education. We examine the extent to which this global movement has helped change national textbooks. We also consider the effects of national development, national policy on environmentalism, and the general expansion of postnational curricular emphases on human rights, student empowerment, internationalization, and social scientific perspectives. We analyze the content of 484 secondary school social studies textbooks from 65 countries, finding increased attention to the environment that parallels both world environmental crises and the closely related rise of world environmentalism. Our analyses suggest that the increasing prevalence of environmental topics in textbooks is influenced by broad global cultural and environmental change more than by national conditions.

This article discusses relations among the multiple levels of analysis present in macro-sociological explanation—i.e., relations of individual, structural, and institutional processes. It also criticizes the doctrinal insistence upon single-level individualistic explanation found in some prominent contemporary sociological theory. For illustrative material the article returns to intellectual uses of Weber's \"Protestant Ethic thesis,\" showing how an artificial version has been employed as a kind of proof text for the alleged scientific necessity of individualist explanation. Our alternative exposition renders the discussion of Protestantism and capitalism in an explicitly multilevel way, distinguishing possible individual-level, social-organizational, and institutional linkages. The causal processes involved are distinct ones, with the more structural and institutional forms neither captured nor attainable by individual-level thinking. We argue more generally that \"methodological individualisms\" confuse issues of explanation with issues about microfoundations. This persistent intellectual conflation may be rooted in the broader folk models of liberal individualism.

Much social theory takes for granted the core conceit of modern culture, that modern actors-individuals, organizations, nation states-are autochthonous and natural entities, no longer really embedded in culture. Accordingly, while there is much abstract metatheory about \"actors\" and their \"agency,\" there is arguably little theory about the topic. This article offers direct arguments about how the modern (European, now global) cultural system constructs the modern actor as an authorized agent for various interests via an ongoing relocation into society of agency originally located in transcendental authority or in natural forces environing the social system. We see this authorized agentic capability as an essential feature of what modern theory and culture call an \"actor,\" and one that, when analyzed, helps greatly in explaining a number of otherwise anomalous or little analyzed features of modern individuals, organizations, and states. These features include their isomorphism and standardization, their internal decoupling, their extraordinarily complex structuration, and their capacity for prolific collective action.