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Cross-national analyses of university curricula are rare, particularly with a focus on internationalization, commonly studied as impacting higher education through the mobility of people, programs, and campuses. By contrast, we argue that university knowledge shapes globalization by producing various sociopolitical conceptions beyond the nation-state. We examine variants of such a globalized society in 442,283 study programs from 17,129 universities in 183 countries. Three variants stand out, which vary across disciplines: an interstate model (prevalent in business and political science), a regional model (in political science and law), and a global model (in development studies and natural sciences). Regression models carried out on a subset of these data indicate that internationalized curricula are more likely in business schools, in universities with international offices, in those with a large number of social science offerings, and in those with membership in international university associations. We discuss these findings and their links to changes in universities’ environment, stressing the recursive relationship between globalization and higher education.

This article reviews the state of research and data on relevant content, broadly understood as sustainable development, in social science textbooks worldwide. Specifically, it examines the extent to which these textbooks could help learners to acquire the knowledge, skills and values that are needed to meet goal 4.7 of the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals: ‘By 2030, ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including, among others, through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non‐violence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture's contribution to sustainable development’. It reviews relevant literature and analyses three cross‐national, longitudinal databases containing information that is coded from textbook content to assess the current state of knowledge. In addition to analysing measures concerning the environment and sustainable development, this article also focuses on areas of human rights, global citizenship, gender equality, and multiculturalism/social diversity. We find that textbook discussions of these variables have, in general, steadily increased since the middle of the 20th century. The article concludes by indicating where future research efforts are most needed, identifying geographic and substantive needs, and considering monitoring mechanisms that could encourage on‐going evaluation and monitoring of textbook content.

A broadly recognized sociological insight is that rising levels of individualism increasingly characterize a growing number of countries. This article examines the extent to which schooling is altered by, and transmits, this core cultural shift. It analyzes 476 secondary school social science textbooks from 78 countries from 1950 to 2011 to see whether they increasingly portray society as made up of agentic individual actors of all sorts (e.g., children, women, minorities). It is found that emphases on older social institutions remain stable, but there are striking worldwide increases in emphases on people, especially ones empowered with rights. This global peopling of social science instruction, especially strong in the recent neoliberal decades, characterizes every type of country and textbook analyzed, and occurs over and above other features of the sample.

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