3
development has not entailed a significant renovation of the fundamental assumptions that
undergird the theories and policies of the WTO and the World Bank. What may seem to be
prima facie evidence of a progressive institutional and regime change, may actually be a
discursive structure that serves—in practice—to narrow debate, squelch dissent, and significantly
limit change.
This project is propelled by our conviction that discourses are of central importance to the
study and practice of international relations. We find that rationalist studies, in so far as they fail
to theorize a constitutive link between textual and social practices, are unable to help us fully
understand the nature and implications of discursive change as it is manifested in the ideologies
and practices of the WTO and World Bank. The project to be developed here embarks on a
theoretical and methodological trajectory—critical and interpretive—that relies heavily on a
growing body of constructivist scholarship in IR and IPE.
2
Given the relative newness of
constructivist and discourse analyses to the subfield of IPE, we briefly sketch the theoretical
contours of this project before proceeding. We pay particular attention to three key concepts:
discourse, ideology, and hegemony, and draw out the relationships between these concepts.
In proceeding, we make an ontological commitment to a very particular conception of the
nature and power of discourses.
3
We understand discourses to be “structures of signification
which construct social realities.”
4
Signification—or customary meaning—may be assigned to
any number of aural or visual objects, including the spoken and written word.
Systems of
interlocking meanings contribute to the production of reality to the extent that they shape actors’
self-understandings in relationship to other actors and to the material environment.
Like
Kenneth Waltz’s international anarchic system, discursive structures constrain and dispose actor
behavior.
We emphasize, however, that social agents are both products and producers of
discourses. Discourses “requir[e] work [by dominant and subordinate actors] to ‘articulate’ and
‘rearticulate’ their knowledges and identities (to fix the ‘regime of truth’).”
5
To accept the
working of this “play of practice” is to acknowledge that discourses are mutable—the “laws,
2
Peter Katzenstein, Robert Keohane, and Stephen Krasner usefully highlight a number of notable contributions to
the growing body of critical literature in IPE (1998). See also the proposal for a constructivist political economy in
the forthcoming volume by Abdelal, Blythe and Parson (2005).
3
This ontological commitment encompasses the “three analytically distinguishable bundles of theoretical claims”
described by Jennifer Milliken as being common to studies employing discourse analysis (1999, 228).
4
Milliken 1999, 229.
5
Ibid, 230.
Convention