: A Second Cut

In a 1988 seminal paper, Ness and Brechin called for considering IOs as organisations. They tied successful explanation of international politics to adequate treatment of internal management processes boosted by specific technologies and know-how within a challenging environment. They also made the case for studying leadership and decision-making. More than twenty years later, this call is still unheard. Linking an organizational vision with strategic issues is an urgent task if one wants to build a new discipline focussed on IOs. This paper addresses the issue of borders shifting in the research on international Organizations (in the plural), and its contribution to a more accurate knowledge of world ordering (International Organization in the singular). Once a subfield of political Science or a section of International Studies -that was contained within the boundaries of the legal approach to world institutions (such as the UN-), it may now reach the stage of a full- fledged discipline. Increasingly drawing from Organization Theory and Management Studies, research on IOs definitely takes such bodies as baseline organizations with managerial problems like performance and resilience, leadership issues, and constraints on decision-making processes. Therefore, "agents" matter more now to scholars that was the case in the past, whereas "structure" must be understood as applying to the world order