Fields of Global Governance: How Transnational Power Elites Can Make Global Governance Intelligible

Abstract

To make global governance intelligible, we need to study a neglected but crucial phenomenon, namely the development of the social division of labor, both in transnational society and more specifically with regard to the fields of politics, law and economics. This notion of a social division of labor has to be distinguished from the mere technical division of labor. The process in question is not merely one of differentiation in an ever more complex world, nor does it take place in a relative power vacuum. Instead, it involves unequal distributions of resources and the use of influence and power. In other words, we need to examine, far more carefully than in the existing literature, the operators of globalization: those individuals and social and professional groups, rooted in evolving national and transnational societies, who govern global governance. Going behind the facade of global institutions and instead focusing on the arguably deeper structures of global governance, we can also start to explain the emergence of new forms of power as they develop around new transnational power elites operating in, around, and beyond a growing number of international institutions (Kauppi and Madsen 2013). This forum brings together scholars from different but related social scientific disciplines, all of whom are engaged in empirical work which focuses on new forms of global power brokers. We all share a basic skepticism towards the tendency to grand theorizing, both in International Relations (IR) and in the sociology of globalization. We argue that a better way ahead for understanding global political phenomena is to devise tangible objects of empirical inquiry. One such object of inquiry is what we generally refer to as transnational power elites: transnational professionals defined not by their institutional affiliation—for example as international civil servants—but as transnational social groupings. To undertake this more empirically …