Globalizing Social Security: How International Organizations Contribute to the Creation of Global Fields of Policy

The paper investigates the formation of the global field of social policy as the outcome of an epistemic infrastructure. Following up on the idea in world society theory to focus on ‘rationalized others’ who, rather than acting themselves, observe and describe actors in seemingly disinterested fashion, the paper postulates that international organizations (IOs) are crucial contributors to the emergence of global fields of policy. It focuses on the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the World Bank and scrutinizes how these have over the long historical period from 1919 to 2015 through the production of knowledge enabled and shaped the field of global social policy; specifically in relation to social security. The wide variety in social ideas and socio-economic conditions worldwide function as challenges to postulate global epistemic objects. The paper argues that the IOs’ knowledge technologies are responsible for achieving universal knowledge objects, through comparison and quantification. It specifies hindrances of comparability and how these problems have been solved. Empirically, the paper relies on a qualitative analysis of IO documents over the period of 1919-2015.