Hegemonic Battles, Professional Rivalries, and the International Division of Labor in the Market for the Import and Export of State-Governing Expertise

Abstract

This article draws on research by the authors, especially in Latin America and Asia, to give concrete sociological meaning to the processes of globalization of governing expertise. The article relates professional competition, competing discourses of universals, and imperial competition to the reproduction of state elites and the construction of fields of state and transnational power. The three parts of the discussion in the article involve first, the complexity of the North–South dimension in the import and export of governing expertise; second, the perennial role of imperial processes involving cosmopolitan elites acting as double agents; and third, the role of particular state elites as gatekeepers facilitating and moderating the imperial processes.

Fielding transnationalism: an introduction

“…Or we can see how some new, genuinely global fields emerge that were never national. This is the creation of entirely new fields: arguably, the first is the system of states itself after 1648. International law is another, studied by Yves Dezalay and Bryan Garth (, , , ). Humanitarianism, defined as cross‐border neutral relief, is another genuinely transnational field, though organizations may at the same time be embedded in national fields of charities (Krause, ; see Dromi, this volume; also Stamatov ).…”

Legal Professionals and Development Strategies: Corporate Lawyers and the Construction of the Telecoms Sector in Brazil (1980s-2010s)

“…We argue that each is important to understanding recent developments in law and political economy in countries like Brazil, but that to offer a full account of such changes, it is necessary to integrate insights from both traditions. LLG, pioneered by Dezalay and Garth (2002a, 2002b, looks at social processes starting in the 1990s in which law-like institutions of governance gained prominence and lawyers' professional power was reproduced on a global scale. LLG charts the role of lawyers in the diffusion of neoliberal ideas of political economy that led to calls for privatization, opening of markets, promotion of foreign investment, and limited regulation.…”

“…It shows how liberalization and privatization set in motion processes that led to the creation of a powerful corporate bar in the periphery (Liu, Trubek, and Wilkins 2016;Wilkins, Khanna, and Trubek 2017;Cunha et al forthcoming). Dezalay and Garth (2010) see this as the construction of US hegemony post-Cold War, whose twin pillars of free markets and political liberalism find in corporate law firms and NGOs the outposts of a nonimperial empire. 2 Early accounts of the role of lawyers in this transformation treated it as a simple, one-way imposition of models from the center to the periphery.…”

“…2 Early accounts of the role of lawyers in this transformation treated it as a simple, one-way imposition of models from the center to the periphery. This would modernize the legal profession and replace a traditional legal elite--in the case of Brazil, jurists combining family capital with part-time positions in prestigious law schools and ties with the state--with a new one--lawyers with foreign education and stronger ties with global capital and philanthropy (Dezalay and Garth 2002a). LLG took a different approach, presenting lawyers both in the center and on the periphery as active participants in processes of diffusion.…”

Building an economic field with supranational supports? Lessons from wine production in Romania

“…Although these analyses are somewhat sketchy, researchers inspired by Bourdieu have taken pains to make them more precise: for these commentators, it is possible to identify an international field where efforts to reproduce national elites are played out; these elites draw upon their international cultural capital, inherited from their family (familiarity with foreign languages and international codes of sociability) in order to regain or consolidate lost or threatened positions within the internal order (Dezalay and Rask Madsen 2006, p. 280). Conversions between forms of capital acquired in the national and international fields can be identified (Dezalay 2011, Leander 2011. We can supplement these analyses by pointing to the power exerted by supranational and international administrations over the economic field.…”