Barnett and Finnemore: Rules for the World

Barnett, MN, and M Finnemore. 2004. Rules for the world: international organizations in global politics. Cornell Univ Pr.

"Our goal in writing this book is to understand better why IOs behave as they do. Most international relations theory provides surprisingly little help in this regard" (2).

"Scholarship on organizations generally (not just IOs) has made it abundantly clear that organizations routinely behave in ways unanticipated by their creators and not formally sanctioned by their members. Organizations that start with one mission routinely acquire others" (2).

"In this book we develop a constructivist approach to understanding IO behavior that provides a theoretical basis for treating IOs as autonomous actors and helps explain the power they exercise in world politics, their propensity toward dysfunctional, even pathological, behavior, and the way they change over time. We ground our analysis on the fact that IOs are bureaucracies. Bureaucracy is a distinctive social form of authority with its own internal logic and behavioral proclivities" (3).

As they are looking at IOs specifically through the lenses of bureaucracies, they focus on four areas: autonomy, power, dysfunction and change. Autonomy: how separate are the activities of IOs from the institutions that created them, states? They are autonomous to a degree, but not absolutely. Power: they us a constructivist approach, so IOs help to create social reality, thus conferring upon them power of at least a certain kind. Dysfunction: yes. It is not entirely the fault of state directives misaligning IOs mandates, but is also the result of internal bureaucratic institutional tendencies. Change: standard IR would say that change happens in IOs when states mandate that change. This is partially true, and misses a good deal of the point of understanding IOs as separate institutions with their own path dependencies and internal momentum.

"In sum, we can better understand what IOs do if we better understand what IOs are" (9).

There are four characteristics of bureaucracies (the combination of the French word for table and the Greek word for rule): hierarchy, continuity, impersonality and expertise (17-8).

Autonomy/Authority of IOs: delegated authority, moral authority, expert authority

Power of IOs: organizational, meaning making, norm diffusion

Disease of IOs: "irrational rationalization", overreliance on bureaucracy, insulation, internal cultures/norms coupled with path dependency

Change within IOs: Can understand through a concept of change being internal/external or material/cultural. The same set of variables can help understand IO dysfunction as well.