'Since the end of the global competition, characteristic of the era of the cold war, processes of international competition have played a lesser role as democratic institutions in the South are often weakly developed and elites tend to confront each other on ethnic grounds, which often occasion violent conflicts. Nevertheless, with the increase of global modernity during the last decade, the breakdown of most of the communist states and the spread of the neo-liberal credo, the notion of competition began to be discussed again in our field. The discussion has tackled the issue whether the economic ideology brought about by global modernity would have an impact on countries socially and culturally very different from the western core countries. As there seems to be no real alternative to the western economic competition ideal, economists and sociologists have asked whether the notion of competition could be integrated into the social, cultural and economic systems of Asia, Latin America and Africa. The answer has largely depended on the social structure of societies in different world regions. It seems now obvious that some cultures are better positioned to become active participants in the global modernity than others. Perhaps, such positioning would be better conceptualised by the notion of cultural life-worlds than mere socio-economic and political constellations. If so, then a reflection on the cultural construction of social life-worlds in global modernity seems to be a precondition for the analysis of discourses on economic globalisation in non-European civilizations. Global players exert pressures for adaptation and efficiency on local and regional cultures. The world market defined by competitive capitalism, the importance of private propriety and the virtue of individualism have become the dominant world system, introduced by colonial and postcolonial processes in non-western societies during the last centuries and in more recent years. Civilisations have become defined by their adaptability to global economic processes. The culture as a place for capital investment and capital use has become the criterion of selection. According to global players, a competition on social systems, which permit the highest profits, has become established around cultural values. Societies which are capable to learn receive higher scores than societies, which resist to changes required by the capitalist logic. This approach, which intends to reunite economic interests, cultural preferences and political institutions in one logical system permits to analyse why some societies are more able to confront world market conditions than others. Within this theoretical framework, we look for empirical case studies of different civilizations or cultures describing situations of intertwining of local life-worlds and global economic modernity. Papers may also address elites' tendencies to change or to avoid changes of local social institutions in order to render them more acceptable to global modernity. If you wish to present a paper in this session you should send an abstract of no more than 200 words in rich text format (rtf) to ulrike.schuerkens@caramail.com.