World culture theory

Central to world culture theory (sometimes called world polity theory, world systems theory or world system analysis) is the claim that the development and emergence of education systems, policies and practices within nation-states is isomorphic and can be explained by wider systemic changes occurring at the international and global level where ‘rationalised myths’ (Silova and Brehm, 2015, p 12) perpetuated by world culture scripts/models come to bear upon and influence national and subnational policy contexts. In this sense, world culture theorists are less concerned with the role of unique path tendencies, organisational logics and value systems to the formation of education systems, nor do they take seriously the context-sensitive, micro-political strategies through which national policy frameworks are adapted in the context of regional and local developments and the contradictions and tensions flowing from these untidy convergences and problematic alignments. Instead, world culture theorists adopt the lens of methodological globalism (or ‘regionalisation’ and ‘Europeanisation’) to locate and explain the development of education systems according to trends considered to be generalisable and evidence of policy borrowing and policy transfer.

However, in order for a country to be amenable to statistical capture within this model of generalisation, it must have ‘already committed itself to the modern nation-state institutional apparatus’ (Rappleye, 2015, p 59) and therefore modelled itself according to a meta-policy or globally circulating discourse shared by other countries, that is, ‘world models [that] are a derivative of the dominant global position of the West’ (Rappleye, 2015, p 66). One implication of this is that world culture theory is often accused of normative commitments to epistemic communities and organisations originating in the Global North, giving rise to postcolonial critiques of the Eurocentrism of world culture theory (see Takayama, 2015). This might include a narrow technical focus on using metrics, performance indicators and output measurements to calculate teaching quality, school management, inputs and infrastructure, and learner preparation. In turn, the adoption of these policy instruments makes it possible for schools and school systems to be located within relations of equivalence where they are made to appear to be comparable and commensurate with each other.