GLOBAL CONVERGENCE AND DIVERGENCE

Schools Of Global Convergence And Global Divergence

Schools Of Global Convergence And Global Divergence

Introduction

International organisations advocate global convergence in intellectual property as a prerequisite for successful innovation strategies. The difficulties of achieving such harmonisation are, however, evident from the attempts of several nations to develop divergent intellectual property systems. This paper explores the causes of institutional divergence and uses intellectual property for seed markets in India as a case study. The Indian seed market case demonstrates that convergence and divergence may go hand in hand. The 'domestication' of global protection models for seed and biotechnology may require divergence in order to be accepted by domestic stakeholders.

Discussion

The global diffusion of knowledge and practice concerning children's development, early education, and welfare is today among the more remarkable phenomena that can be linked to the emergence of global information networks. Much of this knowledge has come to constitute a normative discourse about early childhood with firm roots in the development of child psychology in Western Europe, Russia, and the United States during the first part of the 20th century. Even a cursory glance at early childhood education and development programmes in universities and educational training institutes around the world reveals a startling emphasis on a few major theorists such as Piaget, Dewey, and Vygotsky, whose theories fill relatively standardized courses in child development in which the true nature and characteristics of a universal child are disseminated.

Best practices in early childhood care and education are increasingly represented in popular media as converging around models of developmentally appropriate practice. Indigenous views of children and appropriate early education are being increasingly challenged by what is represented by childhood experts around the world as more current, progressive notions of childhood. The diffusion of theories and ideologies about child-rearing across cultural borders is normal and natural in a global age. Despite the apparent homogeneity of thinking about raising children, local knowledge often remains robust, forming an integrative base for incorporation of new ideas. Yet, childhood ideologies may be particularly susceptible to the uncontested and implicit normativity inherent in both scholarly and popularized views of child needs emanating from media-powerful countries such as the United States.

Education and training systems are subject to all the forces shaping the global economy. This has led some experts to predict that national systems will give way to a global education and training market. The most obvious support for the theory comes in the area of management education, where top business schools compete fiercely for the best students on an international level.

Convergence and Divergence in European Education and Training Systems, however, shows that convergence is not generally happening in education and training in Europe. Despite the existence of such EU initiatives as the Socrates education programme and the Leonardo vocational-training programme, which may have helped to bring about some convergence in broad policy aims across the continent, specific policy and actual structures and processes remain national.

Even where systems are going in the same broad direction, they are starting ...