The emergence of late 20th century globalization has led many social scientists to investigate the international, supranational and «global» dimensions of humanitarian intervention, environmental issues, markets mechanisms, consumer societies, or the diffusion of cultural goods, public services and production methods. The growing role of the US economy, of its organizational modes, its commercial and marketing style, as well as its cultural models, have also figured prominently in the current phase of internationalization and globalization. Heated debates about the so-called «knowledge society» and «post-industrialism» have also constituted a leitmotiv of this historical phase.
Among these questions, our sinergia research network will focus on the regulation of market societies through social and private insurance, the regulation of international services, as well as the influence of philanthropy on international public health. These three dimensions constitute complementary empirical fields dealing with the regulation of social and market risks inherent to our contemporary societies. Our research groups will study these fields in an historical perspective rather than focusing on recent developments, as most of the «globalization» scholarship. Our network thus contributes to the currently emerging research field in the history of globalization well as to those international relations studies emphasizing and historicizing new patterns and agents of change beyond states and markets.
The members of our research network will examine a variety of international organizations (International Labour Organization, World Health Organization, etc.), private foundations (Rockefeller Foundation) or specialized associations (International Congress of Actuaries, International Social Security Association, etc.). We will look at them as laboratories and places of interaction where vectors of internationalization were shaped. We will investigate the actions of the individuals who worked in or brought to life these institutions. We will pay attention to the networks that linked these actors, and how these institutions used these networks as levers for their action. Instead of taking as our starting point institutions, such as civil society or international organizations, or multinational enterprises and consider them as visible markers of the constitution of a global world community, we study individual actors to highlight the transnational circulatory patterns they enhanced and fostered these evolutions. We argue that the bottom-up reconstruction of the genesis of the components that have crystallized into a «global community» formed neither above nor against nation-states, but genuinely between and in collaboration with them. This emphasis on circulation between nations and investigation of shifts from the local to the international levels, in passing by the national level, is what we mean by using the word transnational.
