Introduction: The Currents of Sociology Internationally - Preponderance, Diversity and Division of Labour.

This article deals with the issue of preponderance in the study of sociology. Preponderance, whether of thought, language, culture, economics, politics, region or gender, is seldom innocent or of no consequence. Yet, in sociology internationally, the study of preponderance by the discipline has far exceeded the study of sociology's own tendencies towards predominance. The article begins to redress that by examining contesting currents in internationalizing sociology in relation to existing and emerging international divisions of sociological labor. There are two broad contexts for themes brought forward here. First, there is the rapidly shifting context of globalization and emergent relations of ruling globalization entails, to borrow the evocative and widely applied construct of Canadian social theorist, Dorothy Smith. Both entail interrogations of power, of dominance, of justice, of the relations of region to center, and of agency to structures in varying forms. Contradictions abound as do reconfigurations of power and dominance. Second, there is the probing of knowledge and discourse in the context of global change and the rapidly shifting relations of ruling. The ways in which relations of ruling shape sociological discourses are as diverse as the discourses themselves and as conforming to the norms and mores that emanate from the sociological ruling centres. Capacity for deep international comparisons that range beyond empirical indicators into discovering different paths of social development, has been lost. Understanding of globalization need not mean homogenization has been lost.