John W. Meyer's work broke new grounds in institutional thought in sociology and made him a central thinker for the emerging interdisciplinary field of neoinstitutionalism, while at the same time establishing institutional thought's comparative variant, world society theory. His scholarship plays a prominent role in contemporary social theory, and has shaped research areas such as international relations and globalization, organization theory, and management studies. One of the results of Meyer's wide-ranging and interdisciplinary influence is that his work has appeared in a diverse range of outlets. This book brings together some of John W. Meyer's widely-scattered work, reviewing four decades of scholarship, and adding several original pieces from Meyer's current work. It gathers substantive commentary on social processes, from stratification to globalization to socialization, as well as on key social institutions, from science to religion to law to education. In its expansive review, this book is both about neoinstitutional thought in general and world society theory in particular. This book is both by John W. Meyer and about John W. Meyer: to the compilation of Meyer's canonized and current work, Georg Krucken and Gili S. Drori add an essay on the theoretical and empirical contribution of Meyer's institutional theory, placing it within the broader context of contemporary social theory, globalization research, and organizational studies in both in the United States and Europe.

Georg Krucken is professor for Science Organization; Higher Education and Science Management at the German University of Administrative Sciences in Speyer. After undergraduate und graduate studies in sociology, philosophy, and political sciences at Bielefeld University and the University of Bologna, he received his Ph.D. in sociology from Bielefeld University in 1996, where he worked as an associate professor until 2006. From 1999 to 2001 he was a visiting scholar at the Department of Sociology at Stanford University. He taught as a guest professor at the Institute for Science Studies, University of Vienna, and at the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations, Sciences Po, Paris. His research interests include neo-institutional theory, science studies, organizational studies, and the management of higher education. Gili S. Drori (Ph.D., Sociology; Stanford University 1997) is a lecturer in Stanford University's International Relations Program and the Director of the International Relations Honors Program. Her research interests include the comparative study of science, social progress and rationalization, globalization, and governance. She also wrote on world culture, global health, technology entrepreneurship, and higher education. These interests inform her recent books: Science in the Modern World Polity: Institutionalization and Globalization (Stanford, 2003; co-authored with John W. Meyer, Francisco O. Ramirez and Evan Schofer), Global E-litism: Digital Technology, Social Inequality, and Transnationality (Worth, 2005), and Globalization and Organization: World Society and the Expansion of Formal Organization (OUP, 2006; co-edited with John W. Meyer and Hokyu Hwang).