Economics as intervention: Expert struggles over quantitative easing at the Bank of England

IF 3.2 2区经济学 Q1 ECONOMICS

Socio-Economic Review Pub Date : 2023-11-09 DOI:10.1093/ser/mwad060

Dylan Cassar

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Abstract

Abstract How does a technocratic entity, such as a central bank, craft a key policy intervention when faced with limits to established frameworks of governance? This article explores the Bank of England’s turn to unconventional policy in 2009 drawing on a set of eighteen in-depth interviews with former members of the Monetary Policy Committee, Executive team, and staff economists, and a corpus of documents. Adopting Goffman’s ‘framing analysis’, it argues that the limits to established governance led to the temporary replacement of the New Keynesian frame with a Monetarist frame, as a result of expert struggles, with consequential outcomes on the policy intervention. As the backstage dissensus spilled over onto the frontstage, manifesting as limits to knowledge, the Bank’s ‘expert authority’ was threatened. The Bank engaged in ‘manufactured consensus’—a backstage compromise between competing frames forged into a frontstage consensus via a hybrid frame—which proved to be a fragile strategy. By throwing light on the backstage–frontstage relations of technocratic organizations, I claim that an intervention may be shaped both by internal processes as well as by the ways in which the organization seeks to handle the external demands to which those very same internal processes may give rise.

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经济学作为干预:专家们在英格兰银行的量化宽松政策上挣扎

当面临既定治理框架的限制时，技术官僚实体(如中央银行)如何制定关键的政策干预?本文通过对英国央行前货币政策委员会成员、执行团队和经济学家的18次深度访谈，以及大量文件，探讨了英国央行在2009年转向非常规政策。采用戈夫曼的“框架分析”，它认为，由于专家斗争的结果，既定治理的局限性导致新凯恩斯主义框架暂时被货币主义框架所取代，并对政策干预产生了相应的后果。随着后台的分歧蔓延到前台，表现为知识的局限，世行的“专家权威”受到了威胁。世行采用了“制造共识”——在竞争框架之间的幕后妥协，通过混合框架形成前台共识——这被证明是一种脆弱的战略。通过阐明技术官僚组织的后台-前台关系，我声称干预可能由内部过程以及组织寻求处理外部需求的方式来塑造，这些外部需求可能由这些内部过程引起。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Socio-Economic Review Multiple-

CiteScore

6.80

自引率

10.80%

发文量

期刊介绍： Originating in the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE), Socio-Economic Review (SER) is part of a broader movement in the social sciences for the rediscovery of the socio-political foundations of the economy. Devoted to the advancement of socio-economics, it deals with the analytical, political and moral questions arising at the intersection between economy and society. Articles in SER explore how the economy is or should be governed by social relations, institutional rules, political decisions, and cultural values. They also consider how the economy in turn affects the society of which it is part, for example by breaking up old institutional forms and giving rise to new ones. The domain of the journal is deliberately broadly conceived, so new variations to its general theme may be discovered and editors can learn from the papers that readers submit. To enhance international dialogue, Socio-Economic Review accepts the submission of translated articles that are simultaneously published in a language other than English. In pursuit of its program, SER is eager to promote interdisciplinary dialogue between sociology, economics, political science and moral philosophy, through both empirical and theoretical work. Empirical papers may be qualitative as well as quantitative, and theoretical papers will not be confined to deductive model-building. Papers suggestive of more generalizable insights into the economy as a domain of social action will be preferred over narrowly specialized work. While firmly committed to the highest standards of scholarly excellence, Socio-Economic Review encourages discussion of the practical and ethical dimensions of economic action, with the intention to contribute to both the advancement of social science and the building of a good economy in a good society.