Remembering and forgetting IPE: disciplinary history as boundary work

Abstract

A full understanding of the development and re-production of IPE is only possible with an appreciation of its disciplinary politics. This institutionalises four aspects of academic inquiry: (a) what is considered admissible work in the field, (b) how work should be conducted and where it should be published (c) where the field’s legitimate boundaries are, and (d) ‘external relations’ with cognate disciplines. Academic gatekeepers in positions of disciplinary influence shape perceptions about appropriate conduct within the field, what constitutes its core, and what lies outside its realm. Disciplinary political definitions of the field’s nature and limits are manifest in the writing of texts introducing students to IPE. Particularly important are origin stories, which are always partly about directing and coordinating scholarly activity in the present and for the future. Disciplinary history entails forgetting certain events, scholars and works that do not fit the prevailing chronology, marginalising or excluding some topics, debates and questions from the core of the field. We evidence our claims about the boundary work done in narrating IPE’s origins through bibliometric mapping and network analysis of IPE citation patterns and practices. We find that IPE is a narrower, more blinkered field than it typically presents itself to be.

Keywords:

• Disciplinary politics
• international political economy
• boundary work
• textbooks
• bibliometrics
• disciplinary history

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We are most grateful for the highly engaged and constructive commentary on earlier versions of this article from the editors and three anonymous referees. We have also benefited from extensive feedback from colleagues when we have presented earlier drafts in seminars at the Universities of Copenhagen, Manchester, Warwick and the College of William and Mary. In particular we would like to thank David Blaney, Joelle Dumouchel, Muireann O’Dwyer, Matthew Paterson, Lena Rethel, Ben Richardson, Matthew Watson and Georgina Waylen for their comments and suggestions. We would like to thank Sophie Worrall, Daniela Dominguez and Ingrid Thuesen for excellent research assistance. Many of the ideas that feed into this piece have been worked through in classes with the excellent IPE students that we have been lucky to teach at Copenhagen and Warwick over the years. Needless to say, any remaining deficiencies are of our own making.  

2 An n-gram is a contiguous sequence of n items in a sample of text or speech. The Google n-gram tool used here maps the occurence of a search string using a yearly count of n-grams

3 We should be clear that the use of the word ‘myth’ does not imply falsehood, but is rather used to indicate the existence of a widely held or recurrent narrative.

4 Interestingly, aspects of these framings evolved over subsequent editions. For O’Brien and Williams, the range of disciplines evoked to locate the field increases, by the 3^rd edition in 2010 IPE is presented as working across the fields of economics, political science, political economy, IR and drawing upon geography, history, sociology, law and cultural studies (2010, p. 14). In the fourth edition, the 1970s origin myth is excised; ‘In its present form, the field of international political economy (IPE) or global political economy (GPE) is a relatively new undertaking at universities’ (2013, p. 7).

5 O’Brien and Williams (2003, 1^st ed.) identify ‘three major figures’ in the field – Strange, Keohane and Cox.

6 We are grateful to Georgina Waylen for sharing this insight with us.

7 Note that Keohane goes on to argue that ‘It would be misleading to give the impression that these new formulations were entirely original’ because there were also important works by Kindleberger, Waltz, Cooper, Vernon and Haas.

8 Related to the discussion of interdisciplinarity above: Gilpin’s textbook presented politics and the economy as two related but separate spheres (for a discussion see Hveem 2009), and as such presented a distinctive and perhaps rather limited account of political economy.

9 NPE is available only 2003-2017 in the Web of Science and we (and three research assistants) have therefore coded the remaining articles manually.

10 To be specific, NPE’s founding editorial policy statement characterized the journal’s aim as seeking to ‘bridge both the empirical and conceptual divides ‘in the field of political economy, to forge ‘a new political economy’ and ‘bring together four key literatures’, comparative political economy, the political economy of the environment, the political economy of development, and international political economy (Gamble et al., 1996).

11 There is a highly specalized debate among bibliometricians on which similarity measure is best for the normalization of co-occurences in author co‐citation analysis (Egghe and Leydesdorff 2009). We follow Loet Leydesdorff whose software we are using here.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ben Clift

Ben Clift is Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick. His research interests lie at the interface of comparative and international political economy. His books include The IMF and the Politics of Austerity in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis (OUP 2018) and Comparative Political Economy: States, Markets and Global Capitalism (Palgrave 2014; 2^nd Edition Macmillan 2021).

Peter Marcus Kristensen

Peter Marcus Kristensen is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen. His research lies at the intersection of the sociology of knowledge, International Relations theory, and emerging powers. His most recent project, States of Emergence, explored historical knowledge about power transitions and rising powers. He is co-editor of the Bristol University Press book series East Asian International Relations.

Ben Rosamond

Ben Rosamond is Professor of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen where his teaching and research operate at the intersection of political economy and European Union studies. Recent work has focussed on the political economy of Brexit and the politics of economic ideas. He is co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Critical European Studies (Routledge 2021).