Institutional maintenance in an international bureaucracy: Everyday practices of international elites inside UNESCO

European Management Journal xxx (2014) xxx–xxx

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Institutional maintenance in an international bureaucracy: Everyday practices of international elites inside UNESCO Toke Bjerregaard ⇑, Bjarke Nielsen Aarhus University, School of Business and Social Sciences, Bartholins Allé 10, DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark

a r t i c l e

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Article history: Received 25 March 2013 Accepted 6 March 2014 Available online xxxx Keywords: Elites Power Bureaucracy Institutions Culture Policy making Strategy as practice UNESCO

a b s t r a c t Scholars have recently called for an organizational sociology of international experts and expertise, the production and functioning of elite worlds. Meanwhile, efforts have been made to refocus organization studies of institutions towards the lived experience and everyday working practices through which organizational actors perceive, reproduce and revise the institutional structures within which they operate. The purpose of this paper is to bridge the study of international elites in the context of international policy making and emergent research on how actors actively accomplish institutional maintenance, the intent being to advance a more differentiated understanding of agency of international elites in microinstitutional maintenance. This research is based on an organizational ethnography among international program experts at the headquarters of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris. The study contributes to knowledge about how maintenance of institutional frameworks of policy making is accomplished by program specialists as they continually apply the legitimate language of the institution, endow it with institutional authority in everyday practices and navigate in hierarchies and social networks. The paper discusses contributions to extant research on international elite worlds, power and agency in institutional reproduction. Ó 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Introduction Organization studies have seemingly drifted away from original concerns with elites, power and politics (Mills, 1956; Zald & Lounsbury, 2010). Yet, lately organization scholars have called for renewed attention to such concerns (Clegg, Courpasson, & Phillips, 2006; Kerr & Robinson, 2012; Maclean, Harvey, & Chia, 2010; Maclean, Harvey, & Kling, 2014; Reed, 2012). To make the sociology of organization further policy relevant, institutional analysts have proposed an institutional analysis of international elites, of new forms of expertise and command posts (Zald & Lounsbury, 2010). Zald and Lounsbury (2010) put forward an agenda for an organizational sociology of international elites operating across nation states in the context of international policy making, drawing on contemporary theories of how power becomes embedded in culture. Such an approach to international elites and expertise could concern itself with professional experts staffing command posts – organizational centres of societal power, e.g. national bureaucracies such as the Federal Reserve, and international bureaucracies like the World Bank, the IMF and the UN. These comprise elites

⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +45 87165413. E-mail address: [email protected] (T. Bjerregaard).

staffing institutions of power in overseeing and aiming to maintain order in economy and society. Recent contributions draw attention to the relevance of scrutinizing micro-practices and forms of agency of organizational elites (Maclean, Harvey, & Chia, 2012). Still, however, research efforts are needed with regard to how international expert worlds function and how these worlds are produced and reproduced in specific organizational infrastructures (Maclean et al., 2012; Zald & Lounsbury, 2010). The purpose of this paper is to bridge the study of international elites in the context of international policy making and emergent research on how actors actively are involved in institutional maintenance, the intent being to add to a more differentiated understanding of agency of international elites in micro-institutional maintenance. This speaks to current concerns to refocus institutional studies of organizations towards the lived experience and everyday practices through which organizational actors perceive, reproduce and revise the institutional structures within which they work (Lawrence, Suddaby, & Leca, 2011; Powell & Colyvas, 2008). Particularly, nascent research calls for uncovering the micro-foundations of institutional maintenance as a non-static process, thus providing a more differentiated view of agency than offered by some traditional institutional theorizations (Dacin, Munir, & Tracey, 2010; Lok & de Rond, 2013; Zilber, 2002, 2009). Hence, the topic to be confronted by this paper is framed by the

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Please cite this article in press as: Bjerregaard, T., & Nielsen, B. Institutional maintenance in an international bureaucracy: Everyday practices of international elites inside UNESCO. European Management Journal (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emj.2014.03.003

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following questions: how do program experts in an international bureaucracy cope and work with imposed institutional mechanisms? And how does their agency in this process actively maintain institutional patterns? This study thus elucidates the stabilizing and destabilizing influence of everyday bureaucratic work on institutional structures of policy and strategy making (Bourdieu, 1981; Jarzabkowski & Spee, 2009). The paper is based on a six-month organizational ethnography among program experts in an international policy institution, namely UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris. First of all it is worth noting that for the staff occupying the corridors of UNESCO, the world is connected. As Calhoun (2003, p. 543) points out: ‘‘‘Good’ passports and easy access to visa, international credit cards and membership in airline clubs, invitations from conference organizers and organizational contacts, all facilitate a kind of inhabitation . . . of the world as an apparent whole.’’ Secondly, there is not only a strong esprit de corps, but much of the professional staff also identify with the ideals and goals of UNESCO. In Hoggart’s (1978, p. 112) words, UNESCO can ‘‘form a total world’’ for staff, who do not belong anywhere anymore except in the international corridors of UNESCO. The Culture Sector of the UNESCO headquarters thus constitutes a fertile institutional setting for the study of how elites are involved in the production and reproduction of international policy frameworks. The professionals staffing UNESCO’s headquarters belong to what has been termed the new elites of globalization (Robinson, 2011; Wagner, 1998). The research thus provides a view into the everyday institutional dynamics of international governance and international communities (Djelic & Quack, 2010; Djelic & Sahlin-Andersson, 2006b). Moreover, this international policy institution is of particular relevance as extant research on UNESCO and similar international policy institutions from an ethnographic insider perspective is scarce. The literature is often informed by formalistic inquiries where institutional rules and regulations, concerning the political structure of the UNESCO bureaucracy and management, are largely taken at face value. Through this lens, institutional rules and regulations are assumed to structure actions inside the organization as well as policy making in a highly linear and transparent fashion, thus missing all that which the neo-Weberian, old institutionalists showed was important in bureaucracies (Hinings & Greenwood, 2002). That is, they are not linked to an analysis of practice, of how institutional rules and regulations are infused with value, sustained or counteracted by bureaucratic actors, and how social and institutional power is patterned and operating through recognition, admiration, alliances and fear (Selznick, 1949). In different terms, what is missing in most accounts of UNESCO is the ‘guts of institutions’ (Stinchcombe, 1997), i.e., that institutional rules and values only work insofar as somebody holds them to their standards and they impact or resonate with the beliefs, concerns or interests of people staffing bureaucratic institutions (Bourdieu, 1981; Herzfeld, 1992; Selznick, 1996; Stinchcombe, 1997; Suddaby, Elsbach, Greenwood, Meyer, & Zilber, 2008). The remainder of this paper is split into the following sections: first, the conceptual foundation of the study is presented. The subsequent section outlines the ethnographic methodology applied. Then the findings are presented. Finally, the paper concludes by discussing contributions to extant research on experts, power and agency in institutional reproduction.

Theoretical foundation: a practice approach to institutional (re)production This study leverages practice theory to elucidate the involvement of elites in institutional maintenance in the context of international policy making and expertise. Thus, on the one hand, we

conceptualize UNESCO as a semi-autonomous, loose-coupled institutional order or field (Goffman, 1983; Vaughan, 2008). It is semiautonomous in the sense that it is related to the larger UN system and to the field of international institutions; yet micro-practices inside UNESCO, through which local institutional patterns are (re)produced, are not determined by these framing relations (a focus we pursue below in the section ‘situating UNESCO’). On the other hand, we draw inspiration from and expand literatures on the role of institutional language and practical sense in institutional (re)production, especially in regard to everyday practices inside the organization. We link these through theory of practice which has gained increasing currency in organization studies (Gomez & Bouty, 2011). DiMaggio and Powell (1991) proposed theories of practice to serve as one potential micro-foundation for researching institutions. Numerous strands of theories of practice have emerged (Rasche & Chia, 2009). This study draws inspiration from Bourdieu (1992, 1990) on language and practical sense. In this vein, this research extends current interest in institutional (re)production from a practice-based view (Jarzabkowski, Smets, Bednarek, Burke, & Spee, 2013). Hence, this perspective is grounded in a social research tradition that concerns itself with how bureaucratic and organizational power operates through everyday acts of support and contestation over institutional rules, values and resources, and with the formation of informal social orders and conflicting interests (Gouldner, 1954a; Herzfeld, 1992; Rocha & Granerud, 2011). This analytical orientation focuses attention on how social processes of bureaucratic authority and power, such as censorship and hierarchy, influence policies as certain policy keywords become endowed with institutional legitimacy and thus institutional authority. Such bureaucratic acts of institution silence the ongoing contestation of notions of culture in policy making (Bourdieu, 1992). As we will demonstrate in the findings section, inside UNESCO institutional authority is sustained due to overlaps of hierarchy, actors and their notions and networks (Shore & Wright, 1996). This theoretical underpinning is particularly fertile for illuminating how institutional norms and values of legitimate policy making are promoted, produced and sustained through everyday interactions of multiple actors as they struggle for influence, recognition, upward mobility and resources. Thus, we conceptualize institutions as ‘social forms’ of as well as for social interaction (Barley, 2008; Bjerregaard & Jonasson, 2013; Hallett & Ventresca, 2006b; Hughes, 1942; Jarzabkowski, Matthiesen, & Van de Ven, 2009). We elucidate the maintenance of institutional patterns of and for micro-level bureaucratic interaction at UNESCO headquarters, yet patterns that are shaped by a wider field of international institutions. Agency in institutional maintenance An institutional logic can be considered a means-end framework shaping the actions that are considered appropriate and legitimate for achieving a given end in a field of activity (Boxenbaum & Battilana, 2005; Dobbin, 1994; Scott, 1987; Thornton, Ocasio, & Lounsbury, 2012). Institutional theory has for long depicted logics as taken-for-granted social facts and institutional reproduction as being based on taken-for-granted, mindless participation (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006; Scott, 2008; Seo & Creed, 2002). Therefore, most scholarly attention with regard to agency has been accorded to projective and foresighted action in purposely accomplishing institutional change, as also reflected in the initial conceptualizations of ‘purposeful’ institutional work (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006). Iterative and practically-evaluative forms of agency in institutional settings remain comparatively under-researched (Battilana & D’Aunno, 2009; Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Smets & Jarzabkowski,

Please cite this article in press as: Bjerregaard, T., & Nielsen, B. Institutional maintenance in an international bureaucracy: Everyday practices of international elites inside UNESCO. European Management Journal (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emj.2014.03.003

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2013). With regard to the reproduction of institutions, institutional analysts have lately categorized various practices which maintain institutions by reproducing existing norms and belief systems (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006). One line of inquiry focuses on policing work. That is, the maintenance of institutions through ensuring adherence to rule systems. Another concerns itself with embedding work. This involves actively infusing the normative foundations of an institution into day-to-day routines and organizational practices. Practices aimed at maintaining institutions thus include policing work, i.e. threats of social sanctions, and embedding work, i.e. an active infusion of the normative basis of an institution into the everyday practices of organizational actors (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006). Institutions can be reproduced through various forms of formal ‘custodial’ practices, but taking our cue from Lok and de Rond (2013), we instead suggest that often institutional maintenance is achieved through continually evolving practice performances (see also Bourdieu, 1992). Thus, while initial definitions of ‘institutional work’ conceptualized relationships between actors, their practices and effects as characterized by a high degree of transparency and purposefulness, more research attention must be devoted to forms of agency that are less purposive and often rife with unintended consequences (Lawrence et al., 2011; Smets & Jarzabkowski, 2013). Recently, more differentiated understandings of agency have been called upon, acknowledging that agency can be reflexive in everyday practice. Yet, reflexive agency does not equal intentional institutional effects even though such practices often reproduce or revise an institutional order (Jarzabkowski et al., 2013; Lawrence et al., 2011). With this backdrop, we argue that institutional orders are not only formally structured and reproduced by actors’ purposive work from above, but highly dependent on being informally accomplished through mundane day-to-day negotiations and interactions of multiple actors (Goffman, 1983; Lok & de Rond, 2013; Strauss, 1978). Practical sense and skilled language usage in institutional (re)production We draw on Bourdieu’s works to develop a more dynamic view on agency in regard to our understanding of how institutional maintenance is accomplished through everyday actions. A central concept in Bourdieu’s work is the notion of practical sense. Actors are endowed with a practical sense which works as a kind of embedded roadmap that is attuned to the local rules and strategies underpinning the operation of symbolic recognition and other kinds of. A great basketball player, for instance, does not reflect on the formal rules of the game before making a move. Formal and informal rules are embedded in his bodily sense of the game which simultaneously allows him to reproduce the rules of the game and to make surprising moves (Bourdieu, 1990; Lok & de Rond, 2013). We draw on the notions of practical sense and skilled usage of institutional-legitimate language to analyze how institutional values and norms are produced and reproduced through everyday practices within an international bureaucratic framework. The skilful and rhetorical usage has been associated with projective agency in accomplishing institutional change (Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005). Yet, as a form of practical-evaluative agency, a practical sense allows actors to adjust to situations at hand, have a feeling for what is appropriate or not, whom to listen to and take orders from or not, whom to network with or not, and how to apply the legitimate, official language of institutions (Bourdieu, 1977, 1979; Emirbayer & Mische, 1998). Actors may acquire common sense knowledge about which people are important or not, which people are higher positioned or not, how people are addressed and how to get their proposals approved by higher-positioned colleagues. They

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may have a certain distance to the language, norms and values of the institution they staff even while skillfully applying legitimate language. Thereby, they continuously (re)produce institutional patterns without purposively intending such institutional effects. In this manner, inspirations from some of Bourdieu’s concepts can, as argued by Emirbayer & Mische, 1998, p. 980), illuminate the ‘ingenuity and resourcefulness to the selection of responses from practical repertoires, even when this contributes to the reproduction of a given structure of social relationships.’ Institutional maintenance or change may, in this vein, arise from actors’ skilful and ongoing practical, mundane activities which thereby come to constitute institutional work (e.g. Lok & de Rond, 2013; Smets & Jarzabkowski, 2013). Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge that knowing how to play the game, e.g. how to network and when to deviate from or comply with institutional authority, is not just a matter of free choice. All this is, as the findings will demonstrate, dependent on histories of social networks, people who back you up, practical competence and logics in the field of UNESCO. The following sections build on this conceptual foundation in order to bring novel insight into how institutional norms and rules, shaped by broader global processes, are produced and reproduced in an international bureaucracy, UNESCO, through the everyday work of program specialists.

Method One worthwhile methodological venue for an organizational sociology of experts and command posts consists of ethnographic studies that capture micro-social dynamics whilst recognizing their embeddedness in broader international institutional processes (Binder, 2007; Bjerregaard, 2011; Hallett & Ventresca, 2006a; Zald & Lounsbury, 2010). To facilitate such micro-institutional queries, one can use inspiration from the rich case study tradition of early institutionalists in organization sociology such as Selznick (1957), Selznick (1966), Blau (1964) and Gouldner (1954a,b), showing how institutions operate through the influence, agency and compromises of individuals, their aspirations and everyday work strategies (Hallett & Ventresca, 2006b; Lawrence et al., 2011; Suddaby, 2010). The present research is based on a six-month organizational ethnography at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. The study is grounded in a division in the Culture Sector of the Secretariat. The everyday work of this division is concerned with UNESCO’s overall position on culture and cultural diversity. The ethnography analyses normative representations, the politics of culture, as well as what program specialists actually. The methodology is thus in correspondence to the theoretical orientation of a practice perspective (Jarzabkowski, Balogun, & Seidl, 2007). A program specialists’ job is to talk about, write about and represent UNESCO on these issues. The ethnography comprises interviews and talks with program specialists, participant observation, literature studies and an analysis of key UNESCO policy documents on cultural diversity primarily from the mid-1990s and onwards. Triangulation was deployed as a means of contrasting insight from different methods rather than merely serving as a means of validation (Flick, 2007), acknowledging that e.g. interviewees’ variegated accounts and analysis of formal documents do not necessarily lead to convergence around a singular pattern. In other words, different positions and different experience produce potential gaps between formal representations and personal experience (Holy & Stuchlik, 1983). Quality of the research was ensured through tracking what Sanjek (1990) refers to as the ethnographer’s path – an account of whom the ethnographer talked to, how access was gained and focus revised etc. This does not allow for exact replication as aimed for in traditional ways of qualifying research, but demonstrate how

Please cite this article in press as: Bjerregaard, T., & Nielsen, B. Institutional maintenance in an international bureaucracy: Everyday practices of international elites inside UNESCO. European Management Journal (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emj.2014.03.003

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generated knowledge is dependent on particular paths. Thus, dependability was used as one quality criterion (Guba & Lincoln, 1994). In this manner, the aim was more informed understandings and reconstructions of the social constructions (e.g., institutional logics) produced, enacted and sustained by the organization and people staffing it, rather than traditional positivist research goals of prediction and control (Guba & Lincoln, 1994). Participant observation An internship was setup as this was the only way to gain access and participate in the daily life of the UNESCO bureaucracy. Subsequently informed consent for the ethnography was gained. This enabled the researcher to collect the data to participate in meetings and conferences. Furthermore, the researcher was asked to come up with ideas on cultural diversity, to do internal literature scans, to catalogue previous activities, to read reports from other UN agencies, etc. Being employed provided, in this manner, insight into the practice of everyday bureaucracy, power relations and networks. Thus, the researcher’s variegated roles mixed participation and observation and shaped the kind of knowledge gained through the fieldwork (LeCompte, 1999). The study involved not only people from the Culture Sector but also people from Administrative Offices, the Communication Sector and the Social and Human Science Sector. Nevertheless, the ethnography focused mainly on one specific sector, the Culture Sector of the Secretariat; consequently it is not a representation of the governing bodies of UNESCO or the Member States. Interviews In total, the fieldwork comprised 37 formal semi-structured interviews, which on average lasted 1½ h. Nearly all lasted over 1 h and a few up to 3½ h. Nearly all were taped and transcribed verbatim. The interviewees can be divided into four groups:  The first informant group is low-positioned staff. 12 interviews were conducted here.1 These persons, being from different divisions and sectors, have been employed at UNESCO for between 6 months and 3 years. They were all employed on short-term contracts (from 2 to 6 months) and had a burning desire to be employed as program specialists on a regular two-year contract.  The second group can be categorized as middle-positioned professionals from P2 to P3, with whom eight interviews were conducted. They had been working at UNESCO from 3 to 10 years and had a quite sophisticated understanding and criticism of some of the bureaucratic practices in the organization. From these employees an immense knowledge on censorship mechanisms were gained; the hierarchical structure that ensures that higher-positioned staff clear documents and letters before they are printed in text or given as public speeches.  The third informant group comprises highly-positioned professionals from P4 to D1 and D2. Nine interviews were conducted in this category. They had all worked at UNESCO for more than 5 years. Being on that level of the hierarchy they had a management position and proposed their own projects to people working both below and above them. They had in-depth understanding of the system as a political one.

1 Due to anonymity, only the positional grades are mentioned when quoting informants.The different grades are as follows: DG (director general), DDG (deputy director general),ADGs (assistant director generals), Ds. (directors), PSs (program specialistsranging from P1 to P5, the latter at the top), GS (general service, ranging from GS1to GS7 in distinction), and then finally consultants and interns. Interviews were conducted outside the Culture Sector as well.

 The final group is the Dinosaurs, the Dinos, as they were referred to in everyday speech. They are people who have worked at UNESCO for more than 10 years and all occupied positions from P4 and up. Eight interviews were conducted which gave insight into issues ranging from a historical overview of decisions made to explaining tiny details about who they knew and why having a network and political support are of the utmost importance. After having conducted most interviews with low-positioned staff, levels of saturation occurred. The fieldworker tried subsequently to get access to higher-positioned employees by writing emails. However, as this did not lead to any response, the sampling strategy had to be changed. The fieldworker, then, deployed a strategy of ‘upward snowballing’ by asking already known people if they could recommend somebody in a higher position. In this vein, the ongoing methodological process of gaining and negotiating access at the same time provided insight into the social and institutional dynamics under investigation. Analysis The method of analysis is informed by Spradley’s (1980) insights on explorative ethnography. This concerns how data levels are continuously integrated into an ongoing process of interpretation, which expands gradually and gets focused and refocused as the material grows. With the expansion of this interpretive process, the ethnographer tries to find connecting patterns of social practice by comparing different empirical representations, including observations, interviews and literature, thereby reaching levels of saturation. This continuing interpretation process was also achieved when analyzing and coding the material both while being in the field and afterwards. Situating UNESCO: a semi-autonomous field in wider international relations In the words of an informant, the birth of UNESCO ‘‘was an enormous vision, an enormous dream, it was like a dream becoming true’’ (Director). But this dream did not and does not exist in a vacuum. Rather it is situated in international relations as will be argued in the following. The constitutional mandate and purpose of UNESCO is to create a more equal and peaceful world through ‘‘altering the minds’’ of men (Hoggart, 1978). Its Constitution states: Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed; peace must therefore be founded, if it is not to fail, upon the intellectual and moral solidarity of mankind (UNESCO, 1946, p. 5). The institutional architects of UNESCO considered prejudice and ignorance in regard to human diversity as sources of war and conflict. Solidarity, peace and equality should be promoted through, the Constitution continues, ‘‘the free exchange of ideas and knowledge [. . .] for the purposes of mutual understanding and a truer and more perfect knowledge of each other’s lives’’ (UNESCO, 2000a, p. 1). UNESCO’s raison d’être was peace, which relates to its post-war origin. The belief in the necessity of progress was based in Enlightenment values: democracy, popular government and education, equal rights for all, no inequalities based on origin and especially progress by application of reason and science (Hobsbawm, 1994, p. 176; Laves & Thomson, 1957). The formulation that ’’wars begin in the minds of men’’ informed a certain way of framing and dealing with societal problems. Dissemination of knowledge should serve as a means for promoting peace through developing the minds of people. The idealism of UNESCO

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Constitution embodies the following logic as a means-end framework (Boxenbaum & Battilana, 2005) undergirding policy making: knowledge ? understanding ? peace (Hoggart, 1978; Nielsen, 2011; UNESCO, 2000b). UNESCO is the UN institution par excellence which produces global politics of culture (Drori, 2005, p. 189). Until the 1970s, UNESCO’s notion about culture was largely an elite tool to enhance mutual understanding and solidarity among humankind through the dissemination of knowledge, e.g. via works of art, architectural wonders and museums. That is, the culture perspective of the organization was concerned with the universal heritage of humankind and a canonical idea of enlightening world culture. This view on culture had its heydays inside UNESCO and in the wider international community during what Hobsbawn called the entrance of the western world economy into its Golden Age (1950–1970s): ‘‘Western political democracy was, backed by a huge improvement in material life, stable, and war was banished to the Third World’’ (1994, pp. 52–53). Although many of these wars were directed towards liberation (ibid.), the real importance, in sustaining (international) stability, was the belief in modernity; belief in progress, growth and a better future, a firm belief in the nation state as an organizing principle for politics and securing jobs for all – in short, order (see also Friedman, 2003). The dominant logic in this period linked development to national economic growth, that is, growth and competition within the nation (McMichael, 2000, p. 25). However, in the 1970s, decolonization had peaked and world capitalism was under transformation: ‘‘[the] recent phase of globalization has not been a period of general economic growth but of overall stagnation amid great unevenness between regions’’ (Mann, 2001, p. 54). In this period the western world experienced an economic crisis, massive unemployment, and re-configurations occurred in the world economy as a new economic centre rose in East Asia due to substantial investments. These processes were paralleled by the almost total disconnection of the global South regarding global trade (Arrighi, 1995; Carlbom, 2003; Cheah, 1998). In the light of such processes, the World Bank redefined development as ‘‘successful participation in the world market’’ during the 1970s (McMichael, 2000, p. 112). In the following years, globalization and development became synonymous: ‘‘In the late twentieth century ‘‘globalization’’ replaced ‘‘development’’ as a serious discourse and project of political and business elites’’ (McMichael, 2000, p. xxviii). Thus, instead of seeing the nationstate as the way forward, the globalization project became the dominant political and economic construct and frame for discussing progress (ibid., p. 149). Such processes towards the global reorganization of capital and a declining western hegemony in terms of production meant an increasing feeling of insecurity and disorder among national and international politicians and managers (Arrighi, 1997; Robinson & Harris, 2000). These processes begged elite questions on how society and economy should be ordered. Wright argues that in general, and especially at UNESCO, culture emerged as a key mobilizing concept in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the search for a new way ‘‘of conceptualizing how to order and govern a fast changing world’’ (Markowitz, 2004; Strathern, 2004; Wright, 2000, p. 2). Inside UNESCO, representations linking cultural diversity to a global world became mobilized as a means to progress and development, forming a new logic and legitimate means-end framework for policy making (Boxenbaum & Battilana, 2005). The ‘new’ perspective did not transcend and displace the ‘old’ one overnight, but the development-as-globalization-project was set in motion during the crisis decades after the ‘golden age’ of the 1950– 1970s (Hobsbawm, 1994). The transformation began in the 1970s but did not become fully manifest in the cultural policies of UNESCO before the late 1980s and early 1990s. Being situated in the midst of these international developments and processes, UNESCO

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began to distance itself from nation-centered growth and thus from nationalism. The organization began to highlight cultural diversity as a way to progress instead of the former canonical view on culture as the common heritage of mankind. In the development-as-globalization-project, the organization began to celebrate cultural diversity, and notably openness between cultures as a ‘local’ way to participate in globalization. During the 1990s and throughout the 2000s, cultural diversity and intercultural dialog became ‘‘principal priorities’’ of the Culture Sector (Pavone, 2007, pp. 89–91; UNESCO, 2001, p. 121; UNESCO, 2003, p. 171). Culture should enable people to live in harmony and ensure general selfdevelopment; acknowledging and promoting cultural diversity should result in progress towards equality and peace (UNESCO, 1996, 2000a; Wright, 2000). In the words of the organization itself, it began to promote culture as ‘‘a dynamic source of change, creativity, freedom and the awakening of innovative opportunities. For groups and societies culture is energy, inspiration and empowerment’’ (UNESCO, 1996, p. 11). That is, culture is now promoted as the potential way out of misery, because open cultures equal energy, innovation and empowerment. In other words, if cultures are open to global cultural input and output so to speak, it will ensure development in this logic (Nielsen, 2011; Pavone, 2007; Stoczkowski, 2009, p. 91; UNESCO, 1996, p. 11). In doing so UNESCO also began to take part in the dominant international agenda – neoliberalism (Friedman, 2003; Wright, 2000, pp. 9–10). UNESCO operates, in this vein, within a larger international, social and political institutional field where a logic emphasizing participation in the global over the national as a means to development has become institutionalized as the road forward. The institutional logic of legitimate policy and strategy formulation in UNESCO (from the mid-1990s), according to which cultural diversity and global participation are mobilized as a means to development, is articulated and produced within this larger field (Robinson & Harris, 2000). Shifts in logics of legitimate forms of policy making in UNESCO have thus occurred in interaction with a broader international field in which it is embedded as a semi-autonomous order (Djelic & Sahlin-Andersson, 2006a; Goffman, 1983; Vaughan, 2008). In the following section, we shift our attention to everyday practices, hierarchies and networks involved in institutional reproduction at the UNESCO Secretariat, that is, the professionals making the place run. The organization is elitist in terms a constituting a semi-closed world for the international experts operating in UNESCO. Yet, as argued in this section, it is simultaneously shaped by being embedded in institutional relations to a broader field of international institutions and organizations (Zald & Lounsbury, 2010).

Findings: institutional maintenance in UNESCO Representations of culture as a means to progress and development that form part of the institutional logic of legitimate policy making do not merely gain their significance through their integration into the institutional framing of UNESCO. They acquire significance by being connected to hierarchies, key actors and their favorite notions and networks – they are wrapped up in and (re)produced by overlaps of power, networks, actors and their legitimacy. In the following we account for the reproduction of such an institutional pattern or form of and for bureaucratic action in UNESCO (Barley, 2008; Hallett & Ventresca, 2006b). Words that constitute institutional language do not have intrinsic power gained from their semantics, but through being linked to the logics of the field within which they are produced (Bourdieu 1992, p. 139).

Please cite this article in press as: Bjerregaard, T., & Nielsen, B. Institutional maintenance in an international bureaucracy: Everyday practices of international elites inside UNESCO. European Management Journal (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emj.2014.03.003

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Hierarchies, networks and institutional reproduction The Secretariat is organized in a straightjacket system. And the organization was imagined – once again 50 years ago – in a way that keeps everybody in their own little hole. [..] Here is the DG [Director General], the ADGs, the Ds, the P5s and so on. And this structure is repeated at each and every level. So you see it is always kind of nested pyramids from bottom to top. Now the major problem with this kind of system is that when the people are down here – they only look up here, all of them. They want to push themselves up here, and everybody has concerns about how they are judged from above (P5). UNESCO is a hierarchically organized institution based on a bureaucratic and political division of labor. However, daily work (i.e. policy formulation, writing speeches etc.) is also influenced by informal social networks. Position and recognition are difficult to separate in this system as they are mutually constitutive. Overlaps between social networks and persons in censorship positions imply that most employees have an interest in engaging in practices which have institutionally reproductive effects; e.g. through applying dominant UNESCO language. Reproducing key concepts is not only linked to personal concerns and interests in advancement in the hierarchy but it also serves to promote own program activities and positions. In other words, the ongoing (re)production of ideas occurs through institutionalized censorship mechanisms: mechanisms that, however, are not only formally structured but also socially effectuated in everyday practice. Institutional maintenance thus occurs through practice – a practice that is structured by many overlaps between networks and formal positions. An understanding of these is, therefore, important in order to account for how specific socialites and their ongoing constitution through everyday practice are involved in institutional maintenance at UNESCO. Formal positions to a large degree frame the ongoing classifications of staff and their ideas in practice since employees always, no matter their position, try to gain legitimacy and recognition from their immediate superior, who again represents his/her own work further upwards in the system in order to gain legitimacy and recognition. The VISA system is a central locus in the organizational hierarchy of UNESCO and can be seen as an extension of grades and positions in relation to the clearance of key ideas: In all this [. . .] locus classicus is the handling of ‘visas.’ Visas are initials on documents which signify that officers at all the right levels appropriate to the importance of a particular document have seen and approved its contents (Hoggart, 1978, p. 122). Censorship activities are related to the official restrictions connected to the legal status of the field itself, that is, the formal structure. But they are also related to the social forms and formalities of the field. Employees have to understand the logic of the game to produce successful representations (Bourdieu, 1992, p. 139). In this sense, actors and their utterances are characterized by their relational status – they make sense and become efficient vis-à-vis each other. In other words, the ongoing (re)production of ideas occurs through institutionalized censorship mechanisms – mechanisms that, however, are not only formally structured, but also socially effectuated in everyday social practice. Working at UNESCO headquarters thus requires an implicit practical sense of key actors and their ideas and concepts in relation to constraints. The latter will be elaborated below. On the surface, UNESCO everyday language is formalized and very polite. The most obvious example is the way people are addressed and presented both on an everyday level and at political meetings. The polite structure of French language is applied; everybody is addressed as Vous, whereas positions are furthermore

applied when addressing or presenting people from the director level and upwards, e.g. Madame la directrice, Monsieur le directeur, Monsieur le directeur general, Sir chairman of the board etc. This structure is also applied in text production; a lower-positioned employee writing a policy proposal is not mentioned in the (VISA) acronyms in the upper right corner of a document, whereas all those who have read, corrected or approved a document are visaed – and to visa a document, you typically occupy a position from P5 and upwards. These linguistic practices of the institution are so widely recognized and general that they are used on a daily basis. It is a practice of positioned interaction that is visible in other spheres of very mundane everyday practices. For instance, when people wait for the elevator, there is a social pattern and structure to it: first middle-aged, very well (and expensively) dressed employees enter, typically the ones highest in the hierarchy, then more middlepositioned employees enter and finally the younger ones, typically consultants or interns, enter. If employees occupy similar positions, ladies enter first. People high-up are recognized and their position is confirmed and maintained through these mundane everyday social practices. Such examples signify the positional logics of the implicit rules of the game. It is through practice that positions and the values ascribed to them are produced and reproduced (Bourdieu, 1977; Bourdieu, 1992). Positions are sustained and objectified through interaction in practice, because these interactions influence not only the practice of formal organizing but also the practice of informal organizing (Kunda, 1992; Wright, 1994). This structure of recognizing higher-positioned employees transforms a grade from being an official position to a human quality maintained in mundane everyday social interaction; employees in higher positions are endowed with symbolic capital worth striving for and admiring. Even directors subscribe to their position in the hierarchy by looking upwards: ‘‘I mean I am not at the level of the DG [Director General], I am only director of one single division’’ (Director). That employees – low and high – subscribe to and believe in the authority of higher positions does not necessarily imply their agreement with the program priorities of people positioned above themselves, but it does imply that they do not oppose these priorities in public. They have, in different terms, an understanding of their place and status (Bourdieu, 1990). Furthermore, hierarchy is not only significant regarding who does what, but it is also highly significant regarding which knowledge people have access to and their level of experience; how they are able to play the game – and more importantly participate in it ‘the right way’: The use of language, the manner as much as the substance of the discourse, depends on the social position of the speaker, which governs the access he can have to the language of the institution, that is, to the official, orthodox and legitimate speech. [Bourdieu, 1992, p. 109] In Bourdieu’s sense, this is a logic of double structuring – or structuring structures – since it translates into a feel for the game, which says that ‘I am not important enough’ to disturb the really important people. From below, people high up are ascribed with values of admiration, recognition and fear. Furthermore, many superiors are entirely dependent on lower-positioned professionals in their everyday work: for producing texts, for reading books, either internal publications or academic ones, used for legitimizing present program activities and priorities. In the words of an informant ‘‘[most] good ones work for someone else, cover someone else – everybody will tell you about that’’ (Director). But a very important part concerns being connected to specific people inside the organization:

Please cite this article in press as: Bjerregaard, T., & Nielsen, B. Institutional maintenance in an international bureaucracy: Everyday practices of international elites inside UNESCO. European Management Journal (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emj.2014.03.003

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Networks are the most important social security line in UNESCO – if you know people, you are ok (P3). Networks are important security lines, but it is not enough to know people. More important is who you know and the implications of these relationships. Networks have implications for program responsibility and how daily work gains recognition and is represented upwards, whether you are given voice, and consequently for job security. People believe so much in the power of networks that it is an ongoing fight to keep good relations with certain people and superiors: It all depends on my relationship with my boss; when she retires, when she is gone, then nothing else is certain, because I worked with her and she knows who I am, and we get on, so that is why she gives me the contracts. . .. But if she goes, nothing is certain there (consultant). My boss is the main reason why I have the position [P5] I do. He made that position possible through fighting for me and supporting my application. But he has a lot of enemies here. . . he asks people to re-write stuff all the time, and they don’t like that. . . and I am sure that if he quits for some reason, I am out of here as well – or at least I will be shifted to some basement job. Because there is a huge informal hierarchy operating here as well – through networks. . . and they will use the opportunity to get rid of people he backed and supported, you know. . . that is the way it works (P5). On the one hand, the way employees are judged as valid or invalid in this system is by representing something safely through the system, which implies that keywords associated with the dominant institutional logic of policy making and present agreed priorities are applied continuously. This structure is repeated all the way up to the Secretariat’s representation of achieved work and work priorities in progress towards the Executive Board and the General Conference. On the other hand, social networks are important in regard to recognition and influence. They are clear signals communicating whether it would be best to agree with you or the reverse; that it is quite safe to disagree. Thus, people are classified and associated with certain networks, and these classifications, even though they are not outspoken, are of high importance for trying to make a career in the organization. A history of former loyalties and networks constrains as much as it opens possibilities; employees’ histories are parts of an ongoing classification whom to be careful towards and whom to trust. Through overlaps of networks and people occupying censorship positions, most employees have an interest in reproducing the current dominant UNESCO language, because it benefits themselves, if not explicitly through advancement in the organization, then implicitly through maintaining own program activities and positions. Navigating, practical sense and institutional (re)production Playing this game, becoming a good player, involves understanding without asking, mastering the premises for playing as a kind of embodied compass (Bourdieu, 1992). In other words, staff generates shared modes of meaning attribution through participation: Actors compete in the same game, compete for the same overall stakes. In this sense, it is fruitful to pay attention to the practical sense of UNESCO’s professional staff (Bourdieu, 1992, p. 176), which is socially acquired through participation in the institution. On the one hand, it is necessary to acquire a special kind of knowledge (theories, concepts, historical traditions) considered suitable and acceptable at UNESCO – to master the political rhetoric and language spoken in the organization, because utterances make sense vis-à-vis other utterances as a result of acquiring

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a relational status. On the other hand, employees are socialized into playing the game according to an existing logic ‘‘which tends to inculcate the practical mastery of the immanent logic of the political field and impose a de facto submission to the values, hierarchies and censorship mechanisms’’ at work in this field (ibid. 176). As expressed in the experience of UNESCO staff: We were a few people who were critical towards the culture of peace concept. It was such a buzz-word, and who can disagree with peace, love and flowers. . . And millions were spent on it. But we didn’t oppose this in public, [since] we talked to an old crocodile, a colleague of ours, and he said ‘‘forget it, don’t go out and fight against this, because it is an avalanche and it will just destroy everything in its way’’. He was very wise, I must say, because it is not worth to commit professional suicide for the sake of an empty concept (P5). Over a conversation, an informant, a PS5, notes: It is about implementing the right kind of words. .. even when I write about complicated phenomena as ethnic conflicts, I apply the phrase ‘cultural dialogue’ and voila the problem is ‘solved’... and that can be a bit too simplistic (field notes). In other words, you have to be pragmatic to work inside the organization. That is, you have to accept approved policy keywords even if you disagree, at least if you value your career, and most UNESCO employees do value their careers. You can speak to trustworthy colleagues about the non-sense of some projects and overall policy tools, but you cannot talk about this openly or put it into writing. For example, several informants have explained that they emphasize the right keywords, they write in an optimistic tone, but they know it is idealistic and bureaucratic. The above quotes further convey two important insights in regard to the pragmatic, everyday reproduction of the dominant language of the institution; that is, positive keywords, i.e. the ‘culture of peace’ or ‘cultural dialogue’, are articulated even though many do not necessarily believe in the ideas promoted through such keywords. First, when concepts such as ‘‘culture of peace’’ or ‘cultural dialogue’ are agreed upon, they are endowed with institutional authority and political legitimacy (Bourdieu, 1992; Shore & Wright, 1997). Resources flow in their direction. Both divisions and actors in the Secretariat have an interest in maintaining priorities attached to specific keywords, since, roughly speaking, resources – ‘‘millions and millions of dollars’’ – equal prestige and symbolic capital within the Secretariat (Hoggart, 1978). Second, according to several informants, to oppose legitimate resource-generating keywords in public would amount to ‘‘professional suicide’’, because it could trigger opposition from powerful networks. Hence, while employees have a degree of reflective distance to key concepts associated with the dominant institutional logic of legitimate policy and project formulation, they maintain existing institutional patterns through such everyday practices. They might have a sense of detachment from the institutional categories and keywords they reproduce, but not from the social ‘game.’ They are deeply engaged in the latter, concerning positions, networking, resources and projects. In this sense, UNESCO’s reproduction of specific culture keywords is not powerful per se but becomes powerful and legitimate through practice. Institutional authority and reproduction is, in this vein, ‘‘not just a matter of what I think about a situation; it is somehow inscribed in that situation itself’’ (Eagleton, 1991, p. 40; see also Zizek, 1989). Thus, the uses of dominating, resource-generating keywords not only sustain the logic of framing cultural diversity as a means to development at UNESCO, but also contribute to constituting a social pattern, because ideas, resources, actors and practices are interconnected at UNESCO (Barth, 2002; Bourdieu, 1992; Herzfeld, 1992; Wolf, 1994, 1999).

Please cite this article in press as: Bjerregaard, T., & Nielsen, B. Institutional maintenance in an international bureaucracy: Everyday practices of international elites inside UNESCO. European Management Journal (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emj.2014.03.003

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Following the above, bureaucratic procedures and their authoritative practices can be understood as both personal and (formal) anonymous. Inside UNESCO, bureaucratic procedures are personal in the sense that actors mush have personal experience, networks and understandings to have their ideas approved; they have to know whom to let visa a certain proposal: ‘‘It has to do with who that draft letter should go to, and how to strategically put it in terms that are relevant to the person that has to go through it’’ (P3). Practices like these are dependent on personal knowledge and experience of the system along with networks, and are linked to the ability of skilled actors to apply bureaucratic rules (Herzfeld, 1992, p. 20). This also testifies that although formal positions and the values ascribed to them are very important, they are not the only thing important; to a certain degree these are possible to bypass from below when knowing who to approach with proposals to get them cleared and approved (Beetham, 1996; Herzfeld, 1992; Shore, 2000). But institutional procedures are anonymous and distant in the sense that decision-making procedures are both complicated and non-transparent, i.e. in regard to the present priorities of UNESCO and how they have risen. Questions on dominant priorities and how they arise in the larger bureaucratic and political frame are often explained with statements such as ‘‘you know it is the UN itself’’ (P4). Ascribing this kind of authority to the system by explaining phenomena within a system by referring back to it actually makes the legitimacy of the system indisputable on the surface. Thereby, it gains authority not because it is straightforward and obvious but because it, in everyday practice, is used as an explanation of what is otherwise unexplainable. In this sense, decision-making is impersonal and generalized. It is wrapped up in non-transparent bureaucratic and political procedures, and this impersonality ensures that the system itself becomes endowed with institutional authority, because decision-making is objectified and universalized (Shore & Wright, 1997). Even though, as Hoggart (1978, p. 56) rightly argues, ‘‘in most of UNESCO’s main areas (the chief exception is the natural sciences) there is nobody of sure knowledge and so no prior agreed ground.’’ But through formal routines, like political meetings and conferences, roundtables on culture, world summits, the visa system etc., it appears as if there were an objective knowledge and truth, because agreed priorities not only gain authority but also get objectified through these bureaucratic processes. That is, these processes can be understood as ongoing ‘acts of institution’ which contribute to the institutional maintenance of key practices and ideas inside UNESCO (see also Bourdieu, 1992; Herzfeld, 1992, p. 10; Hastrup, 2003).

Discussion and concluding remarks This paper set out to examine how institutional values and norms are produced and reproduced in everyday program work in an international policy institution. These values and norms are linked to global processes and wider international relations (Djelic & Quack, 2010; Djelic & Sahlin-Andersson, 2006b). By bridging the study of international policy elites and research revolving around the recursive nature of interaction between institutional structures of policy making and everyday bureaucratic agency, the present paper furthers understanding of how institutional maintenance occurs through the everyday work of program specialists in an international bureaucracy (Jarzabkowski & Spee, 2009; Lawrence et al., 2011; Zald & Lounsbury, 2010). This ethnographic research has provided insight into how institutional norms and rules shaped by a broader field of member states and global processes are endowed with institutional power and produced and reproduced through the micro-work practices of a group of international program experts aiming to develop and oversee societal order. In this

way the strategies of international program specialists bring local bureaucratic aspirations and global expectations and transformations together in a dialectical articulation (Burawoy, 2009). Various contributions emanate from this study. First, taking up recent calls to focus the sociology of organization on (international) elites and the institutional structures within which they operate, the present research provides insight into the everyday production and reproduction of expert worlds in an international policy making institution (Reed, 2012; Zald & Lounsbury, 2010). The field of international elites is relatively under-researched and not easy to access. The present research contributes valuable insight into this underexplored area of study through a rare ethnographic study of UNESCO headquarters. By elucidating everyday work of international professionals, this study sheds light on the processes through which power becomes embedded in and legitimized through institutional culture, that is, everyday logics and interactional patterns within the organization. The norms which these international elites operate within are shaped in the broader field that UNESCO is situated in. Yet, UNESCO also figures as a semi-autonomous normative interaction order in this regard (Goffman, 1983; Vaughan, 2008). Shifts in the wider international field have been reflected in new institutional discourses of cultural diversity and global participation as a means to development and progress. The paper provides insight into how representations of keywords that form part of this shifting institutional logic, like cultural diversity and cultural dialogue, acquire significance by being connected to hierarchies, key actors and their favorite notions and networks. Institutions do not have an intrinsic power to compel action but gain their relative salience and significance through the ‘guts of the institution.’ The latter has been left underelucidated by some neo-institutional theorizing of institutions in which ‘collective representations operate on their own (Stinchcombe, 1997, p. 2). In day-to-day routines, social mechanisms of bureaucratic authority influence the kinds of policy input accepted, and thus policy output produced, as certain keywords become more legitimate than others (Barnett & Finnemore, 1999; Beetham, 1996; Galtung, 1986; Mosse, 2004; Shore & Wright, 1996). Second, following emergent research on the micro-foundations of institutional maintenance and change, the present study provides additional insight into the everyday practical agency involved in the reproduction of institutions (Kellogg, 2009; Lok & de Rond, 2013; Powell & Colyvas, 2008; Zilber, 2009). Theoretically, the study contributes to more differentiated understandings of agency by demonstrating how actors can be practically reflexive in everyday work without intending particular institutional effects while their practices end up maintaining existing institutional patterns (Jarzabkowski et al., 2013; Lawrence et al., 2011). The study advances insight into the under-investigated iterative and practically-evaluative dimensions of agency in institutional settings (Battilana & D’Aunno, 2009; Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Smets & Jarzabkowski, 2013). The theorization of how agency interacts with institutions in, for instance, the initial conceptualizations of ‘institutional work’ (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006) was dominated by overtones of ‘purposive’ and projective forms of agency (Smets & Jarzabkowski, 2013). We have shown the reproductive institutional implications of the practical-evaluative agency involved in the everyday practice of networking of program staff, and in regard to their practices of positional navigation. But these implications would be difficult to analyze in a perspective seeing such processes as transparent outcomes of intentions. Resource-generating institutional keywords are not merely mobilized as ‘cultural toolkits’ (Swidler, 1986) but are rather mobilized for practical reasons (Jarzabkowski et al., 2013). By continually applying the self-same legitimate resource-generating keywords they often criticize, program staff reproduces logics of legitimate policy and strategy making through everyday bureaucratic practice.

Please cite this article in press as: Bjerregaard, T., & Nielsen, B. Institutional maintenance in an international bureaucracy: Everyday practices of international elites inside UNESCO. European Management Journal (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emj.2014.03.003

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The findings show, in this vein, how program experts may actively and reflexively maintain institutions while fulfilling institutionally prescribed roles – processes which researchers have called for more studies on (Lawrence et al., 2011). Program specialists exert practical-reflexive agency in institutional reproduction, often by being detached to institutional categories and key concepts (Herzfeld, 1992; Lok & de Rond, 2013). Yet, they do not necessarily have a distance to the social ‘game’ of positioned interaction, resources and significant networks – to which they strongly subscribe. Participating in this social reality requires that you apply the right kind of keywords that form part of the dominant institutional logic of policy and project making – even when you find them ‘too simple’ to recall an earlier informant quote. The study thus demonstrates how institutional maintenance occurs through actors’ continuous enactment of legitimate keywords, despite of not necessarily believing in them. The study has drawn inspiration from Bourdieu (1977), as other recent studies of elites (Maclean et al., 2012), to illuminate how institutional patterns of values and norms within which program experts operate, are (re)produced through everyday bureaucratic practice (; Emirbayer & Mische, 1998).

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Please cite this article in press as: Bjerregaard, T., & Nielsen, B. Institutional maintenance in an international bureaucracy: Everyday practices of international elites inside UNESCO. European Management Journal (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emj.2014.03.003