The Glocalization of Professional Knowledge and Practice

Current debates about migration and high skilled labor markets are characterized by an ambiguity: On the one hand knowledge, especially in the natural and health sciences, appears to be globally versatile. On the other hand, the application of this knowledge in professional practice is inhibited by many factors, including national systems of higher education and licensing as well as migration regulation claiming that the knowledge of migrant professionals may be “different” or less reliable. Put shortly: professional knowledge is viewed as basically globalized while professional practice is not.

In an attempt to overcome prevailing universal/local and theory/practice dichotomies in globalization research the paper suggests a diversity of ways in which professional knowledge and practice can universalize and/or remain bound to specific locations and in which the mobility of people and the spatial extension of bodies of knowledge co-constitute each other.

A review of newer theories in global studies (neo-institutionalism, migratory transnationalism, field theory, cosmopolitanism and social studies of science) firstly shows that their concepts of knowledge diverge: Knowledge is seen as (a) codified and explicit or as (b) comprising tacit and incorporated components. The latter perspective implies that knowledge (c) must be recognized in order to function. Also, knowledge should be able to solve socio-material problems (d) embedded in situations (e). The review secondly identifies a diversity of ways in which knowledge may glocalize, namely: the setting and emulation of standards, the migration of professionals, transnational homologies in habitus, the formation of transnational communities, field specific struggle, and the “local universality” (Timmermans/Berg) of solving socio-material problems embedded in specific situations. By reviewing diverse but mutually complimentary theories the paper expands on Robertson’s notion that cultural forms can be part of universalizing and localizing processes simultaneously.