University expansion and the knowledge society

For centuries, the processes of social differentiation associated with Modernity have often been thought to intensify the need for site-specific forms of role training and knowledge production, threatening the university’s survival either through fragmentation or through failure to adapt. Other lines of argument emphasize the extent to which the Modern system creates and relies on an integrated knowledge system, but most of the literature stresses functional differentiation and putative threats to the university. And yet over this period the university has flourished. In our view, this seeming paradox is explained by the fact that modern society rests as much on universalistic cosmological bases as it does on differentiation. The university expands over recent centuries because – as it has from its religious origins – it casts cultural and human materials in universalistic terms. Our view helps explain empirical phenomena that confound standard accounts: the university’s extraordinary expansion and global diffusion, its curricular and structural isomorphism, and its relatively unified structure. All of this holds increasingly true after World War II, as national state societies made up of citizens are increasingly embedded in a world society constituted of empowered individuals. The redefinition of society in global and individual terms reduces nationally bounded models of nature and culture, extends the pool of university beneficiaries and investigators, and empowers the human persons who are understood to root it all. The changes intensify universalization and the university’s rate of worldwide growth. For the university’s knowledge and “knowers,” and for the pedagogy that joins them together, the implications are many. The emerging societal context intensifies longstanding processes of cultural rationalization and ontological elaboration, yielding great expansions in what can and should be known, and in who can and should know. These changes in turn alter the menu of approved techniques for joining knowledge and knower as one. The “knowledge society” that results is distinguished by the extraordinary degree to which the university is linked to society. But it is also distinguished by the degree to which society is organized around the university’s abstracted and universalized understandings of the world and its degree-certified graduates.

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David John Frank (Corresponding author)Email:

John W. MeyerEmail:

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David John Frank   is Associate Professor of Sociology and, by courtesy, Education at the University of California, Irvine. His interests center on world society and global institutions, especially in the realms of environmental protection, higher education, criminalized sex, and expanded personhood. His most recent work includes a 2006 book from Stanford University Press, entitled Reconstructing the University: Worldwide Shifts in Academia in the 20th Century (with Jay Gabler), and an article on “World Society, NGOs, and Environmental Policy Reform in Asia,” forthcoming in the International Journal of Comparative Sociology (with Wesley Longhofer and Evan Schofer). John W. Meyer   is Professor of Sociology, emeritus, at Stanford University. He has contributed to organizational theory, comparative education, and the sociology of education, developing lines of thought now called sociological institutional theory. Since the late 1970s, he has done empirical research, and published many papers, on the impact of global society on national states and societies (some papers are collected in Weltkultur: Wie die westlichen Prinzipien die Welt durchdringen, Suhrkamp, 2005). Recently, he completed a collaborative study of worldwide science and its impact on national societies (Drori, et al., Science in the Modern World Polity, Stanford, 2003). Another collaborative project, on the impact of globalization on organizational structures, has just been published (Drori et al., eds., Globalization and Organization, Oxford 2006). He now studies the rise and impact of the world human rights regime, world curricula of mass and higher education, and the global expansion of higher education.