As scholarly interest in the concept of identity continues to grow, social identities are proving to be crucially important for understanding contemporary life. Despite-or perhaps because of-the sprawl of different treatments of identity in the social sciences, the concept has remained too analytically loose to be as useful a tool as the literature's early promise had suggested. We propose to solve this longstanding problem by developing the analytical rigor and methodological imagination that will make identity a more useful variable for the social sciences. This article offers more precision by defining collective identity as a social category that varies along two dimensions-content and contestation. Content describes the meaning of a collective identity. The content of social identities may take the form of four non-mutually-exclusive types: constitutive norms; social purposes; relational comparisons with other social categories; and cognitive models. Contestation refers to the degree of agreement within a group over the content of the shared category. Our conceptualization thus enables collective identities to be compared according to the agreement and disagreement about their meanings by the members of the group. The final section of the article looks at the methodology of identity scholarship. Addressing the wide array of methodological options on identity-including discourse analysis, surveys, and content analysis, as well as promising newer methods like experiments, agent-based modeling, and cognitive mapping-we hope to provide the kind of brush clearing that will enable the field to move forward methodologically as well. for comments on this version.

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Recent decades have witnessed the remarkable rise of a kind of market authority almost as centralized as the state itself – two credit rating agencies, Moody's and Standard & Poor's. These agencies derive their influence from two sources. The first is the information content of their ratings. The second is both more profound and vastly more problematic: Ratings are incorporated into financial regulations in the United States and around the world. In this article we clarify the role of credit rating agencies in global capital markets, describe the host of problems that arise when their ratings are given the force of law, and outline the alternatives to the public policy dilemmas created when ratings receive a public imprimatur. We conclude that agencies designated for regulatory purposes should be required to provide more nuanced ratings exposing their perceptual and ideological underpinnings (especially for sovereigns), and facilitating consideration of alternatives to ratings-dependent regulation.

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Why were capital controls orthodox in 1944, but heretical in 1997? The scholarly literature, following the conventional wisdom, focuses on the role of the United States in promoting capital liberalization. Although the United States encouraged capital liberalization bilaterally, US policy makers never embraced multilateral rules that codified the norm of capital mobility. Rather, European policy makers wrote the most important rules in favour of the free movement of capital. Paradoxically, French policy makers in particular played decisive roles. For the debates that mattered most-in the EU, OECD, and IMF-the United States was, respectively, irrelevant, inconsequential and indifferent. Europe did not capitulate to global capital. Rather, French and other European policy makers created today's liberal international financial regime. French and European policy makers have promoted a rule-based, 'managed' globalization of finance, whereas US policy makers have tended to embrace an ad hoc globalization based on the accumulation of bilateral bargains. Once liberal rules were codified in the EU and OECD, they constituted the policy practices of 'European' and 'developed' states, for which capital controls are no longer considered a legitimate policy tool. During the middle of the 1990s, the IMF debated new, universal rules in favour of capital freedom, but the proposal was defeated, primarily by the US Congress, after the financial crises of 1997-98. By then the vast majority of the world's capital flows were already governed by the liberal rules of the EU and OECD.