Description
This paper takes it inspiration from Tim Sinclair’s analysis of rating agencies as “embedded knowledge networks” to analyze changes in the social foundations of higher education and and their implications for hegemonic knowledge production. The argument is simple: while the US continues to lead in production and distribution of mediated and/or academic knowledge, including knowledge about international affairs, its once unparalleled ability to control hegemonic narratives about itself and its role in international politics has been eroded. The loss of control over the global imaginary is less due to the rise of alternative centers of knowledge or image production (“counter-narratives”) and more to the contradictory influences of America’s own economic master’s tools – globalization, financialization, technology – which have also, as per Sinclair, so dramatically transformed the banking sector. In other words, the appeal of America’s narrative is being diluted by the very strategies that make the continuation of its structural dominance possible. And this loss of grand narratives has consequences for IPE also - in American IR and IPE big picture theories and approaches have all but vanished; instead - causal inference, public opinion research, new behavioralism, experimental models – all conducive to big data and replication – have become the norm.
