Public Key-note Speech: Prof. Dr. Sigrid Quack

  “Transnationalizing professional power?

- Uncertainty and contested knowledge in cross-border institution building”

 By Prof. Dr. Sigrid Quack, Max Planck Institute

While there is increasing recognition of the role of professionals and the influence of professional expertise in cross-border institution building in the international political economy literature, we still lack a comprehensive theoretical framework which could explain why there has been a rise of transnational professional power and how it has become effective in shaping rule-setting.

In so far as the international political economy literature has engaged with these questions, it has largely drawn on sociological neo-institutionalism which sees professionals as key drivers of normative diffusion under scope conditions of uncertainty and complexity. This explanation, though offering useful insights, however, remains at odds with widely observable inter- and intra-professional conflicts about truth claims and inferred regulatory policies as well as struggles over legitimacy between professionals and other groups.

The aim of this talk is, drawing on the sociology of knowledge and professions, to critically discuss the underlying assumptions of neo-institutionalism and, drawing on the sociology of knowledge and professions, to develop building blocks for conceptual framework which gives more emphasis to professional agency in constantly renegotiating and rearticulating their regulatory powers with other actors on various scales ranging from the local to the international.

The usefulness of these conceptual suggestions will be illustrated drawing on comparative evidence from different governance fields (financial reporting, copyright, forest and labor standard-setting) and global-local interactions within these fields. 

 PROGRAM

18:00-18:05     Welcome and Introduction by Professor Leonard Seabrooke, Department of Business and Politics, CBS

18:05-18:45     Transnationalizing professional power? Uncertainty and contested knowledge in cross-border institution building' by Prof. Dr. Sigrid Quack, Max Planck Institute

18:45-19:00    Questions and Discussion