{"title":"Economics as intervention: Expert struggles over quantitative easing at the Bank of England","authors":"Dylan Cassar","doi":"10.1093/ser/mwad060","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract How does a technocratic entity, such as a central bank, craft a key policy intervention when faced with limits to established frameworks of governance? This article explores the Bank of England’s turn to unconventional policy in 2009 drawing on a set of eighteen in-depth interviews with former members of the Monetary Policy Committee, Executive team, and staff economists, and a corpus of documents. Adopting Goffman’s ‘framing analysis’, it argues that the limits to established governance led to the temporary replacement of the New Keynesian frame with a Monetarist frame, as a result of expert struggles, with consequential outcomes on the policy intervention. As the backstage dissensus spilled over onto the frontstage, manifesting as limits to knowledge, the Bank’s ‘expert authority’ was threatened. The Bank engaged in ‘manufactured consensus’—a backstage compromise between competing frames forged into a frontstage consensus via a hybrid frame—which proved to be a fragile strategy. By throwing light on the backstage–frontstage relations of technocratic organizations, I claim that an intervention may be shaped both by internal processes as well as by the ways in which the organization seeks to handle the external demands to which those very same internal processes may give rise.","PeriodicalId":47947,"journal":{"name":"Socio-Economic Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.2000,"publicationDate":"2023-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Socio-Economic Review","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwad060","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract How does a technocratic entity, such as a central bank, craft a key policy intervention when faced with limits to established frameworks of governance? This article explores the Bank of England’s turn to unconventional policy in 2009 drawing on a set of eighteen in-depth interviews with former members of the Monetary Policy Committee, Executive team, and staff economists, and a corpus of documents. Adopting Goffman’s ‘framing analysis’, it argues that the limits to established governance led to the temporary replacement of the New Keynesian frame with a Monetarist frame, as a result of expert struggles, with consequential outcomes on the policy intervention. As the backstage dissensus spilled over onto the frontstage, manifesting as limits to knowledge, the Bank’s ‘expert authority’ was threatened. The Bank engaged in ‘manufactured consensus’—a backstage compromise between competing frames forged into a frontstage consensus via a hybrid frame—which proved to be a fragile strategy. By throwing light on the backstage–frontstage relations of technocratic organizations, I claim that an intervention may be shaped both by internal processes as well as by the ways in which the organization seeks to handle the external demands to which those very same internal processes may give rise.
期刊介绍:
Originating in the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE), Socio-Economic Review (SER) is part of a broader movement in the social sciences for the rediscovery of the socio-political foundations of the economy. Devoted to the advancement of socio-economics, it deals with the analytical, political and moral questions arising at the intersection between economy and society. Articles in SER explore how the economy is or should be governed by social relations, institutional rules, political decisions, and cultural values. They also consider how the economy in turn affects the society of which it is part, for example by breaking up old institutional forms and giving rise to new ones. The domain of the journal is deliberately broadly conceived, so new variations to its general theme may be discovered and editors can learn from the papers that readers submit. To enhance international dialogue, Socio-Economic Review accepts the submission of translated articles that are simultaneously published in a language other than English. In pursuit of its program, SER is eager to promote interdisciplinary dialogue between sociology, economics, political science and moral philosophy, through both empirical and theoretical work. Empirical papers may be qualitative as well as quantitative, and theoretical papers will not be confined to deductive model-building. Papers suggestive of more generalizable insights into the economy as a domain of social action will be preferred over narrowly specialized work. While firmly committed to the highest standards of scholarly excellence, Socio-Economic Review encourages discussion of the practical and ethical dimensions of economic action, with the intention to contribute to both the advancement of social science and the building of a good economy in a good society.