In Chapter 22, we saw that modelling was an important mechanism with all the regimes that we have found to have globalized. Indeed, without modelling it is hard to make sense of many of the globalizations in our data. Global diplomacy itself is a product of modelling of the fourteenth-century Venetian innovation of a systematized diplomatic service (Craig & George 1990: 11). We do not need modelling to explain why many countries simultaneously recognize that there is a hole in the ozone layer and simultaneously adopt similar countermeasures against ozone-depleting substances. We do not need modelling to explain why almost every country has established an environment ministry. But we do need modelling to explain why most of the world's developed nations and many developing ones established national environmental agencies between 1971 and 1972 (Janicke 1991: 19), even though they were experiencing very different levels of environmental collapse. In the same way, it is hard to explain without modelling why all the communist societies except North Korea and Cuba experienced mass public outpourings against communism in 1989, even though these nations were experiencing dramatically different structural conditions, such as economic growth in 1989 (Braithwaite 1994: 445-6). The contention of this chapter is that there is a worldwide patterning of regulatory institutions and a recurrent dynamic of institutional change that can be understood by modelling the process of modelling. What we will find interesting about modelling is its connection to emancipatory politics, a theme we will take a step further in the next chapter. The sociology of modelling shows that structural explanation will often be wrong because the world can also be understood through the dynamics of modelling. But the important thing is that it shows how strategic use of processes of modelling can be an important source of hope for the structurally weak to defeat the strong.

Marx had an explanation of the world that motivated an emancipatory politics. Unfortunately, the historical explanation turned out to be flawed and the emancipatory politics enslaved citizens with a new set of structures. This disaster motivates an attempt to forge an explanation-emancipation interface that starts with micro-process rather than macro-structure. Along the way, using the tools of modelling to effect change from below comes to grips with the brute force of structures of power. Yet in the end, there is no new set of structures to be got right.