The presentation will combine two lines of argument which are located at different levels. At the level of meta-theoretical consideration, the presentation will focus on the distinction between different styles of the comparative relational thinking, viz comparison as a universal mental operation and as a social scientific method. The contention is that these styles have far-reaching consequences for the construction of different kinds of knowledge – i.e. policy-relevant legitimising knowledge and critical social scientific analysis, respectively – which, for their part, entail manifest consequences at the level of trans-national policy borrowing and attendant isomorphism in social and educational organisation, on  the one hand, and of the de-construction of ideologies, “rationalized myths” or universalising explanations, on the other hand. A second line of argument is meant, then, to address substantive research on the intricate processes of growing world-level interconnection or “globalisation”. Insight from an increasing number of comparative and international studies in education and the social sciences points to the fact, indeed, that those processes ever anew give rise to what has been qualified as contrary currents of “trans-nationalisation” and “indigenisation”, of global diffusion and context-specific adoption, or of the emergence of one single “world culture” and the persistence of a multitude of “culture-specific worlds of meaning” (Schriewer 2007). The sociology-of-knowledge concept of “externalisation”, finally, and the focus on selective interpretations it embodies is meant to interlink both lines of argument.