Overview
- Demonstrates the implicit but far-reaching implications of global knowledge for policymaking
- Applies a new theoretical perspective on the politics of knowledge in global social policy
- Investigates the role of International Organisations in delineating the boundaries of global social security policy
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Science, Knowledge and Policy (SKP)
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About this book
The book examines the politics of knowledge in global social policy, investigating how international organisations (IOs) have contributed to the emergence and development of social security as a global policy field. It reconstructs the role of numerical knowledge in the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the World Bank, theorising how IOs contribute to epistemic infrastructures of global social security. The book shows how IOs’ knowledge production has led to a continuous refinement of the meaning and purpose of social security. First, it reveals how IOs arrived at a shared conception of social security: what the book calls an ontological framework. Second, it traces how numbers have increasingly enabled the assessment of countries according to shared benchmarks: what the book calls an evaluative framework. The author demonstrates the political and epistemic work involved in universalising knowledge of social security, while highlighting the limits of governing by numbers in global social policy.
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Table of contents (9 chapters)
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Front Matter
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
John Berten is a postdoctoral researcher and junior research group leader at the Faculty of Sociology of Bielefeld University, Germany. His research and teaching focuses on global social policy, social policy in the Global South, knowledge and ideas in policymaking, and the role of futures in global politics.
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Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Laboratories of Social Knowledge
Book Subtitle: How International Organizations Construct Social Policy Through Numbers
Authors: John Berten
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Science, Knowledge and Policy
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-89179-3
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-89178-6Published: 25 May 2025
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-89181-6Due: 08 June 2026
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-89179-3Published: 24 May 2025
Series ISSN: 2947-5805
Series E-ISSN: 2947-5813
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XV, 304
Number of Illustrations: 3 b/w illustrations, 2 illustrations in colour
Topics: Sociology, general, Public Policy, Social Philosophy, Social Sciences, general, Governance and Government, History of Economic Thought/Methodology