| Humanitarian organizations play an important, but under-analyzed role in the processes of contemporary globalization. Organizations such as Amnesty International, CARE, World Vision, Save the Children, Oxfam, and the International Rescue Committee enact world-level cultural principles that increasingly constitute and direct an array of institutional actors---from states to firms to social movements. This fact challenges both conventional macro-Sociological and International Relations accounts that typically trade in highly reductionistic understandings of culture.;Building from the theoretical contributions of World Polity Institutionalism, this dissertation contends that culture is reducible neither to the functional component of political economy, nor to the conscious value-choices of rational actors, nor still to the ideology of ruling elites. Culture is conceived, rather, as a dynamic set of institutionalized rules infusing actors and their actions with meaning and value. Only in the case world culture, such meaning and value become increasingly institutionalized in similar ways around the planet.;Through content analysis of key documents and source material of 65 prominent humanitarian organizations and through semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 32 humanitarian practitioners, this research analyzes the enactment of world cultural principles as accounts of reality (or ontologies), as accounts of value (or axiologies), and as accounts of obligation (or ethics). Attention to this tripartite accounting reveals the particularistic origins of world-culture and illustrates how world culture comes not only to be redacted and contested among humanitarians, but how it leads to disputes over the very meaning and practice of humanitarianism in the contemporary world.;At the broadest levels, this dissertation considers in what sense we can talk meaningfully about the existence of a "world culture." More narrowly, it examines how humanitarian organizations enact world-cultural principles in both the most central and peripheral social spaces on the planet---how they frame problems and implement solutions---how, in other words, they decide what is worth their (and our) moral energy in a globalizing world. Humanitarian organizations, it is argued, are the principal moral arbiters of the "good" international society and bearers of the tacit mythic structure from which the present world order derives much of its shape and plausibility. |
