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Papers by Sarah Babb

American Journal of Sociology, May 1, 2019

Since the 1980s, neoliberal policies have been diffused around the world by international institu... more Since the 1980s, neoliberal policies have been diffused around the world by international institutions established to support a very different world order. This article examines the repurposing of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to become the world’s leading promoter of free markets. Social scientists commonly point to two modes of global-level institutional change: formal and fundamental transformations, like renegotiated treaties, or informal and incremental changes of a modest nature. The case of the IMF fits neither of these molds: it underwent a major transformation but without change in its formal foundations. Relying on archival material and interviews, the authors show that fundamental-yet-informal change was effected through a process of norm substitution—the alteration of everyday assumptions about the appropriateness of a set of activities. This transformation was led by the United States and rested on three pillars: mobilization of resources and allies, normalization of new practices, and symbolic work to stabilize the new modus operandi. This account denaturalizes neoliberal globalization and illuminates the clandestine politics behind its rise.

Emergent Methods in Social Research

I arrived in Mexico City in the summer of 1995 with a vague area of interest rather than a clear ... more I arrived in Mexico City in the summer of 1995 with a vague area of interest rather than a clear hypothesis. I was generally interested in how U.S.-trained economists had come to be so influential in the Mexican government, and how changing economic ideas had contributed to Mexico's move to free-market economic policies. The topic was timely. For more than a decade, technocrats with advanced degrees from American universities had been liberalizing the Mexican economy. Universally praised by the international business press, these technocrats had suddenly fallen out of favor, with the sudden, sharp devaluation of the peso at the beginning of that year, which was followed by a tremendous economic crisis. Early on, I decided that my original "take" on these issues would be to study the historical evolution of the Mexican economics profession over the course of the 20th century. My doctoral dissertation, which was the basis for what later became the book Managing Mexico: Economists from Nationalism to Neoliberalism (Princeton University Press, 2001) ended up drawing on a quirky smorgasbord of methods, including primary and secondary historical sources, interviews with key insiders, an analysis of the career trajectories of graduates from Mexico's top economics program

The SAGE Handbook of Neoliberalism

American Journal of Sociology, 2002

European Journal for the History of Medicine and Health

In recent decades, there has been a remarkable shift in the governance of human research ethics i... more In recent decades, there has been a remarkable shift in the governance of human research ethics in the United States. A model once based on review by panels of local volunteers has given way to a system dominated by large, for-profit research ethics committees. America’s reliance on for-profit ethics review is unique among wealthy industrialized countries. How can we account for this anomaly? In this article, I show that for-profit irb s represent only the most visible aspect of the privatization of human research protections in the United States. I suggest that private institutions have emerged as “workaround” solutions to systemic problems, in the absence of comprehensive policy reforms.

Annual Review of Sociology

The dominance of free markets around the world is the defining feature of contemporary globalizat... more The dominance of free markets around the world is the defining feature of contemporary globalization. This current state of affairs is historically linked to the Washington Consensus, a coordinated campaign for the global diffusion of market-oriented policies that started more than 30 years ago. In this article, we review scholarship from multiple fields to assess the origins, evolution, and current status of the Washington Consensus: Where did it come from, how did it become dominant, and what happened to it? After laying out historical background, we present three alternative perspectives on the Washington Consensus: its organizational dimension, its ideational aspects, and its relationship to a historical moment of American dominance in world affairs. We then consider current debates on what has happened to the Washington Consensus. Finally, we lay out three directions for future sociological research on global institutional change, before making our concluding observations.

Regional Development Banks in the World Economy

This chapter traces how the United States (US) Treasury engineered the major shift in the Inter-A... more This chapter traces how the United States (US) Treasury engineered the major shift in the Inter-American Development Bank’s (IADB) policy and formal structure through negotiations over donor contributions to its financial resources. The US behaved as an ‘activist shareholder’—using its control over resources to bargain with management for organizational change. Yet in contrast to ‘shareholder value’ in private firms, international donors can use foreign aid to pursue a range of incommensurable goals. The IADB’s initiation into the Washington Consensus resulted from a historic and durable shift in US policy-makers’ conception of shareholder value, from one in which the banks were worthy of support because of their ability to promote US security and diplomatic goals, to one that valued the Banks’ ability to change national economic policies. US shareholder activism not only brought the development banks into alignment with Washington’s agenda, but also into alignment with one another.

The American Sociologist, 2016

Estudios Sociologicos, 1998

En anos recientes, academicos y periodistas especializados han insistido sobre la creciente impor... more En anos recientes, academicos y periodistas especializados han insistido sobre la creciente importancia que han adquirido los economistas con formacion en el extranjero dentro de los gobiernos de los paises en desarrollo.1 En muchas naciones estos tecnocratas han encabezado las revoluciones de liberacion de los mercados, que abrieron algunos anteriormente cerrados y sustituyeron la reglamentacion gubernamental por mercados libres. En este trabajo se examina dicho fenomeno en Mexico, mediante el uso de las categorias y observaciones analiticas de las profesiones. La palabra "tecnocracia", desde que fuera acunada a principios del presente siglo, inspira una aversion generalizada y evoca en una gran diversidad de contextos nacionales imagenes negativas que resultan sorprendentemente similares. A partir de las experiencias que vivio en Francia, Meynaud resume esas imagenes de la siguiente manera:

… de economía, ambiente y sociedad en tiempos de …, 2005

Review of International Political Economy, 2013

American Journal of Sociology, 2007

ABSTRACT

Preface About two decades ago, a participant at a conference on the Latin American debt crisis ob... more Preface About two decades ago, a participant at a conference on the Latin American debt crisis observed that economists and policymakers in and around Washington, DC, had converged on a common set of prescrip- tions for developing countries. “The economic policies that ...

Socio-Economic Review

During the heyday of the 'Washington Consensus' in the 1980s and 1990s, the Japanese go... more During the heyday of the 'Washington Consensus' in the 1980s and 1990s, the Japanese government became an increasingly vocal critic of its market-liberalizing prescriptions. Drawing on documents produced by the Japanese development bureaucracy, this paper analyses the origins of ...