Nations, as the hitherto highest level of human groupings, have their varied internal organizational structures featuring functionally differentiated yet interactive arrangements among three leading human institutions: economy, polity, and social life. An internal organizational structure affects the different members of a human grouping in different ways due to institutional exclusion that is inevitably the prerequisite for any human organization. With that in mind, this paper moves beyond ethnocentric confines to suggest an institutionalist understanding of the concepts of modernity and modernization, (...) and discusses the issue of institutional exclusion and its four leading patterns in the era of globalization. (shrink)