Jürgen Schriewer:“World Culture” and Culture-Specific Worlds of Meaning

　　he lecture is meant to address a central theoretical problematique that is under discussion not only in Comparative Education but in Sociology and Global History as well. This problematique is focused on the simultaneity of contrary currents: of the increasing world-level interconnection of communication and exchange relations into one single world-society, on the one hand, and, on the other, the ongoing persistence of “culture-specific” adoptions, interpretations and re-formulations of world-level forces and challenges. While the former current has convincingly been conceptualized, e.g., in terms of the neo-institutionalist ？world culture“ or ？world polity“ approach, the latter has found expression, among others, in the “multiple modernities” model. The paper will therefore briefly recall some of the central theses developed along the lines of the neo-institutionalist “world-culture” model before confronting these theses with counter-evidence resulting from a large body of recent comparative social and educational research. By emphasizing the significance of phenomena such as “collective experience”, “symbolic structures”, “social meanings” and “representations”, “collective memory” and “historical semantics”, the paper will outline, then, a foil of interpretation meant to be complementary to the “world culture” model. The concluding section, finally, is going to highlight some of the arguments differentiating, and the difficulties of re-combining into an overarching conceptualization, so-called “theories of convergence” (such as world-system theories) and “theories of divergence” (such as the “multiple modernities” paradigm).    

　　于根.施瑞尔(Jurgen Schriewer)：现任德国柏林洪堡大学教授，比较教育中心主任，Comparative education编委。1992-1996年任欧洲比较教育学会主席。于根？施瑞尔的研究兴趣包括教育社会史的比较视角、全球化与世界体系理论、比较教育研究方法论。主要著作（包括主编）Theories and Methods in Comparative Education （1992）、Discourse formation in comparative education（1998）、Problems and prospects in European education（2000）、Transnational intellectual networks（2004）。