Global Technology Diffusion. My interest in the global diffusion of technology leads me onto several research paths. First, I focus on the relationship between technology diffusion and social inequality. While the Internet came to symbolize the great hope of development that comes from this latest technological revolution, such hopes of progress are interwoven with the despair of perpetuated inequality. And, in the age of globalization, this concern has been re-oriented to focus on global inequality and world-scale disparities. While the Internet revolution has meant that within its short duration more people around the world have access to more information and at a lower cost, plenty of people are still left behind. And, the criteria defining those who are left behind is rather obvious: they are further away from the global core. In this work I outline the stratifying dimensions of the process of technological diffusion on a global scale. I pay particular attention to developing countries, to the urban/rural divide, as well as to gender, ethnicity, and race as barriers for technology diffusion. It is clear that global marginality is strong related to parameters of education, wealth, and professional skills, but also to health standards and political participation, as well as to access to new technology. Second, I investigate the global cutlure of technological innovation and entreprenurship. By compiling a unique data base of business incubators and technoparks worldwide, I study what conditions encourage their establishment in various countries and their unique impact on economic development. Specifically, I assess the relative impact of national or local conditions (such as strength of local support, legacy of local business and industry, and existence of a local consultancy sector) and of international or global conditions (such as the ties with the global business community or immersion in entrepreneurial networks) on the founding rates and on the performance of such site of technological innovation and entreprenurship.

Institutionalization and Globalization of Governance. I investigate the history of the discourse and action on governance, as well as study the factors – economic, political, and cultural; national and international – that contribute to the worldwide change towards modern and western forms of governance. First, I “map” the discursive and organizational history of governance. I find that the field of governance, discursive and organizational, exploded in volume since the mid-1990s. The term “governance” serves as a canopy for multiple meanings and is thus multi-dimensional: it folds within it the conceptual pillars of progress and justice, and thus it is translated into the concrete measures of anti-corruption initiatives, institutionalization of the rule of law, Weberian notions of bureaucratic regime, as well as to democracy and the expansion of liberties. Organizations propagating this agenda are as diverse as the terms associated with governance. Second, in studying the antecedents for diffusion of rationalized governance, findings indicate that main effects are related to embeddedness in world society: trade relations, membership in international organizations, and expanded scientization are the main factors encouraging national-level changes in rationalized governance. Thus, whereas the common expectation is that social complexity is the core factor in such changes in the national administrative culture, the main exogenous to the nation-state. In the future, I intend to expand this study of governance to explore the effects of such a change in governance practices on economic development.

The Global Professional Service Sector. Following the globalization of production and commerce, professional service firms have globalized.  Recently, law firms, particularly in the UK and US, have been actively establishing branch offices abroad, and, to a lesser extent, engaging in mergers with foreign firms. This follows on the heels of globalizing firms in banking and accounting; and, this trend has also swept through the sectors of advertising and public relations, engineering and architecture, and “head hunting.” While there is considerable business literature on the global extension of industrial firms, little exists on the globalization of professional service firms.  And while most of the studies focus on the corporate strategy of such globalizing firms, my intension is to add a sociological component. For example, seeing that the path and form of globalization differ greatly between the professional fields of law and management consultancy, I intend to investigate the role of the profession’s ethos in charting distinct paths for global service firms. Also, seeing that some professions are rooted more directly in national institutions (evident in the fact that most of the international M&A activity among law firms has been between London and New York, both set in common law countries), I intend to study the relations between the professional contingency on national (particular, localized) versus global (universalized) arrangements and principles. In both of these examples, the social meaning attributed to professional knowledge explains much of the direction and extent of the firms’ choices to globalize. Based on a “mapping expedition” of the histories of professional service firms in several fields, the guiding questions concern the rates of globalization (when and into which countries) and the form of the global extension (opening local offices, M&A with existing local firms, or contracting with local firms).

The Social State: Worldwide Expansion of the Social Responsibilities of Governments. Governments have expanded the range of their domains over time: whereas state administration since the 18th century focused mainly on defense and finance, today governments worldwide address a wide range of social concerns, from education to the environment to women and minorities. In this research I follow this trend of the expansion of governments and focus on the new themes that are currently addressed by governments at the ministerial level. Previous studies show that the founding of ministries of science, of education, of the environment, and of planning (all post-World war II events) is tightly linked with developmentalist agenda (identifying development as the core goal, and prism, of nation-states). Preliminary findings of newly compiled data show that the emergence of new ministerial-level social concerns (such as minorities, children, welfare, healthcare) is tightly linked to the new international agenda of justice and rights (identifying the rights of groups as the core goal, and prism, for national governance). This research joins a tradition of investigations – comparative and case-based – into changes in governance, particularly the governance of newly-emerging social concerns, and adds to my long interest in (and work on) the cultural features of globalization.