A rational agenda: A Weberian concept of International Organisations’ power in IR

The Article sheds light on the question of how power exercised by international organisations (IO) in international relations (IR) can be conceptualized. Spurred on by the poverty of rationalists’ instrumental view of IOs to capture the agenda-setting authority of these organisations, I draw instead on key insights from Max Weber’s insights on bureaucracy. Specifically, I apply Weber’s emphasis on historic context and his notion of ‘rationality’ as bureaucracy’s ‘modes of calculation’ to this study on the authority of IOs. Their power to set the agenda for international affairs is thus understood in constructivist terms as a strategic social construction of IOs’ broader political environment. Analogous to Weber’s historic notion of bureaucratization, expanding power of IOs can then be conceptualized as demand for rational authority, resulting from growing complexity in IR. IOs then adapt, entrench and expand their authority through a ‘rationalization’ of political spaces. To provide operational specificity and examples to this notion of ‘rationalization’ by IOs, the article draws on recent political science research on ideas and policy norms in IO to suggest how, conversely, select ideas and policy norms advocated by IOs are determined by their instrumentality to IOs’ exercise of their expansive structural power in IR.