Anchoring International Organizations in the Study of Organizational Sociology

This paper session aims to bring together scholars who adopt a sociological perspective to the study of international organizations (IOs). IOs have historically been studied by jurists and later by political scientists through the prism of theories in international relations (IR). In the past two decade, growing scholarship in IR has shifted the focus to analyzing IOs as actors in IR in their own right. To this end, scholars have not only developed new methodologies, traditionally used by anthropologists and organizational sociologists, but have also embraced sociology as a discipline and more precisely the field of organizational sociology. In this way, IOs have been studied as bureaucracies, as organizations within which various actors compete, which comply and produce norms and values. Nowadays, organizational sociology provides a fascinating basis to study IOs not only from within, but also with respect to their environment in a dynamic perspective