Reinventing Authority: Embedded Knowledge Networks and the New Global Finance

The author challenges common assumptions about the nature of the emerging global economy. Rather than being the product of disembedded market forces, this new global political economy is organized by specialized forms of intelligence gathering and judgment determination inside the new global finance (NGF). These embedded knowledge networks (EKNs) include the major bond-rating agencies, such as Moody's Investors Service, and Standard and Poor's (both based in New York, but increasingly operating internationally). The author analyzes central features of EKNs, including their relationship to social interests, epistemic authority (the consequences that follow from EKN reputational assets), market coordination (the policy implications of EKN transformation of uncertainty into risk), and the complexities that characterize the interaction between EKNs and governments. The author argues that rather than disappearing with the increasing freedom of global market forces in the NGF, authority has been reinvented—characteristically in the form of EKNs—altering the postwar balance of public and private influence on policy formation.