International Organizations & International Law (IO/IL)

WORKSHOP THEME

Culture matters. There is a deep well of research that demonstrates the myriad ways in which national cultures shape outcomes in world politics. Culture has come to the study of International Organizations, as well. Most of this work focuses on how International Organizations are important shapers of national and international cultures.

A new and exciting literature has sprung up around the question of how the cultural life of international organizations helps us understand a variety of puzzling outcomes: uneven patterns of norm adoption within IOs, the disappointing or even pathological performance of IOs in important cases, biases in how IOs treat member states, adjustment to changing demands and constraints in their external environments – each has been linked in some way to organizational culture.

The new insights are of obvious importance. Clearly, organizational culture matters to the leaders of IOs. James Wolfensohn, after all, put “re-engineering” the World Bank’s culture at the center of his agenda as head of the institution. The arrival of Christine Lagarde at the IMF prompted Alan Beattie of the Financial Times to devote a column to speculating about whether her reputed management style would be incongruous in an institution “which was heavily shaped by European civil servants, [and which] features more hierarchical traditions.”

This workshop is organized around the issue of IOs’ organizational cultures. The
workshop has two broad purposes:

(1) By bringing leading scholars from different disciplines together, we hope to enrich and refine our theoretical, conceptual, and methodological toolkit that we bring to the study of the cultural lives of IOs. Scholars from a variety of backgrounds (political science, sociology, anthropology, and law) have placed culture at the center of their attempts to the behavior of IOs. Rarely do members of these different communities have the chance to sit around a table together. There is tremendous value in the exchange between disciplinary perspectives.

(2) The invited participants have conducted research on different international organizations, including the IMF, World Bank, WHO, WTO, and UN. Focused comparison of different IOs offers the chance to sharpen our assessments of the effect of organizational cultures on a range of outcomes.

There are a number of important questions that are unexplored and under-explored in the existing work on the cultural life of IOs. Another goal of the workshop is to tackle three classes of questions:

(1) Conceptual: What is organizational culture? We can distinguish between operational and ideational cultures of IOs (for example, the IMF has been described as both as a hierarchical and a neoliberal institution). Are there other important dimensions of organizational culture?

(2) Empirical: Organizational culture is sometimes regarded by political scientists as less important than the formal institutional architectures of IOs or the material incentives of key players. How important is organizational culture is a cause of variation in the behavior and outcomes produced by IOs? What are the mechanisms by which organizational culture is linked to different outcomes? How do organizational cultures cohere in different IOs? How do subcultures within IOs develop?

(3) Methodological: scholars have used evidence generated from several different research methods – surveys, interviews, participation and observation of decision making processes, biographical information on the training and experiences of staff and management – to assess the cultures of IOs. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the different research methods that have been applied to the study of organizational cultures?