What do sociologists bring to international political economy

Abstract

International political economy (IPE) is a field that has been dominated by political scientists and economists. But sociologists have also been interested in IPE. Some of their work has managed to percolate into the mainstream literature. Some of it has not. This chapter takes stock of all this. It shows where the work of sociologists is most obviously related to the study of IPE. But it also shows that there are other areas of sociology to which conventional IPE scholars might pay attention with considerable benefit. This is particularly true insofar as IPE scholars and political and economic sociologists have turned their attention to economic globalization, by which I mean the increase since the mid-1970s in transnational trade, capital flows, and economic activity in general. However, as some IPE scholars have recognized (e.g. Finnemore 1996b), many sociolo-gists approach these things differently than do conventional IPE scholars. Sociologists often emphasize that norms and ideas of various sorts-as opposed to the pursuit of material interests-shape the behavior of actors. Of course, some sociologists take intellectual positions that are quite close to the materialist (or realist) view, which is common in conventional IPE scholarship. But one of sociology’s most original contributions to the IPE literature is to offer normative and ideational rather than realist explanations. I begin by discussing areas where the normative approach of sociology is most obvious. This includes research on the international diffusion of norms and ideas and the rise of neoliberalism. I then move on to areas where sociologists are less inclined to favor normative explanations, but still have insights that diverge from mainstream IPE scholarship. There I discuss research on the international division of labor in the world system, socioeconomic performance as it is influenced by political-economic institutions and international networks, and welfare reform, particularly insofar as social class and family figure prominently in sociological accounts of reform. Two caveats are in order. First, IPE emerged from the traditional literature on international relations, which assumed that international relations was largely about states making war or peace (e.g. Hoffman 1965; Waltz 1959). That is, international relations was about states, security issues, and the politics that linked them (Holsti 2004: 3). IPE argued that international relations was to an increasing extent not just about states, diplomacy, security, and military power, but also about building national economies that could compete internationally-and therebyprovide an economic base for state power in the diplomatic, security, and military domains (e.g. Gilpin 1987; Keohane 1984). As this is a volume on IPE, not international relations in this sense, I will not deal with the sociological literature that is of obvious importance for traditional international relations. This would include, for example, the work of Charles Tilly (1990), Anthony Giddens (1985), Gianfranco Poggi (1978), and Michael Mann (1993) on the relationship between war-making and state-building. Proper treatment of this literature would require a separate chapter. Second, there has been a disciplinary separation between the fields of IPE and com-parative political economy (CPE). On the one hand, traditional IPE scholars emphasize how international pressures operate on states and other international actors to constrain or drive their behavior. They view the structure and functioning of national political economies as being very much embedded in international processes, particularly as state power in the international arena has come to depend increasingly on economic power (e.g. Gilpin 1987). On the other hand, CPE scholars emphasize the study of national institutional differences in political economies. They recognize that international pressures impinge on national political economies, but their focus has been more on the different national responses to these pressures than on the pressures per se (e.g. Gourevitch 1986; Katzenstein 1978). To a degree, then, IPE and CPE study flip sides of the same coin. But especially since the oil crises and stagflation of the 1970s, and then the rise of economic globalization and concerns about how it affects national political economies, these two fields have moved much closer together and blurred (Weber 2001: 7). Indeed, there are now a fair number of people who do work that overlaps CPE and IPE (e.g. Garrett 1998; Keohane and Milner 1996; Kitschelt et al. 1999). Hence, this chapter does not draw a sharp distinction between IPE and CPE.