World Culture is not - especially in the title of an essay - a concept of modest scope, nor does it require elaborate theoretical content. Therefore, it requires some previous explanation. In this direction, I will begin this article with an outline of the concept of "world culture", as well as of the theoretical horizon it has been a part of. It is a theoretical framework that seeks to understand and explain the processes of growing, interweaving relations of communication and exchange that are happening worldwide in almost all spheres - social, economic, scientific and technological. In the second part, I will present and compare a few lines of investigation in Sociology and Education, the results pointing in an opposite direction than the thesis developed by theorists of "world culture". Following that, I will utilize the third part for the alternative concept of "culturally specific worlds of meaning", and in the fourth and final part, I will briefly discuss the current debate between the "convergence" and "divergence" theories in raising some expectations of a conceptualization that, from its explanatory power, has the potential to overcome these opposite points of view.
World Culture; culturally specific worlds of meaning; modern society