This symposium aims at examining the OECD from the perspective of what takes place inside the organization. The papers delve into the OECD ‘black box’ by taking as primary sources internal documents, interviews, and ethnographic accounts of meetings and events. In focusing on these little explored sources, they offer a nuanced perspective of how the OECD became a major global player, and how it maintains this position.

The OECD has been under much scholarly examination. Studies have highlighted the power of the organization in framing global educational agendas and influencing education policies worldwide. Its impact on education policies in Europe has been well documented. Yet less is known about what takes place inside the organization.

The starting point is that the OECD is a complex intergovernmental organization with three overlapping constitutive dimensions, those of actor, arena and instrument. This perspective draws on traditional international relations studies’ analyses, but elaborates them further based on contributions from global governance, historical, organizational and constructivist approaches (see ‘symposium descriptor references’ below).

The dimension of policy actor highlights policy agency and the OECD’s capabilities for autonomy and influence. The OECD is an autonomous and influential policy actor because it has the capability to produce legitimate knowledge and thereby to shape interpretative horizons. This enables the organization to behave autonomously from its constituency. The dimension of arena stresses the organization’s internal dynamics and institutional specificities. It stresses the embeddedness of the OECD policies in its in-house environment, while the dimension of instrument seeks to capture the interplay between in-house and out-of-house constellations and motivations. The latter addresses, on the one hand, how different actors act on the OECD with different purposes. On the other hand, it also highlights the organization’s embeddedness in its external socio-political context. These two dimensions put forward that the organization does not operate in a vacuum.

In looking behind the scenes of the OECD’s work, the four papers illuminate different aspects of the OECD’s constitutive dimensions, as well as their overlap. Together, the papers cover the entire lifespan of the organization, as well as different areas of the OECD’s educational activities.

The first introductory paper expounds on the three overlapping constitutive dimensions. It introduces the OECD from a renewed angle, based both on original historical research and existing literature. The second paper presents a historical inquiry and explores how the OECD secured organizational survival since its beginnings. The paper illustrates how the overlapping of the OECD’s three constitutive dimensions is at the basis of the organization’s international empowerment.

While the first two papers provide a general and historical account of the OECD, the last two explore particular fields of work and focus on recent activities. The third paper zooms in on higher education policies and research. Drawing on interview material and the analysis of the OECD documents and publications in the 1990s and early 2000s, the author elaborates on the role and place of the organization in higher education development. The paper illuminates the constitutive dimensions of actor, by looking into the nature of the OECD’s capabilities for influence, and of arena, by drawing particularly on the field of higher education. The fourth paper provides a vivid account of one of the most controversial educational issues: international large-scale assessments (ILSAs). The author draws on interviews with OECD’s staff and ethnographic accounts of OECD events to illuminate important aspects of how ILSA research takes places. It illustrates further the OECD’s three constitutive dimensions and their overlaps. It particularly contributes to an understanding of OECD’s dimension of arena, by focusing on the multiple voices, practices and approaches.

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