Neutral Places in Struggle. Inter-field Consolidation, Multisectoral International Organization
Résumé
Filling a blind spot of studies focused on international organizations (IO), this article examines the controversies that governmental knowledge produced in IO could generate or reinforce in academic fields. This perspective thereby brings to light competitive processes and cross-sectoral or inter-field consolidation that link some academic sectors to certain sectors of international organizations. At the same time as these processes organize disciplinary internationalization, they also revitalize supposedly universal economic and social expertise bearing the stamp of IO. The debates on the OECD’s McCracken Report (1977) highlight the asymmetrical competition between areas of governmental knowledge in interpreting the stagflationary crisis and the multisectoral nature of the OECD: political science and institutional economics linked to the OECD’s Social Affairs Department were faced with changing macroeconomic orthodoxy influenced by the Chicago School in the economics field in the U.S. as well as within the OECD’s Economic Department. This descriptive and prescriptive battle aims to provide information on how the international economic reality (and “realism”) is perceived and how some international processes of neoliberal disembeddedness emerge.