Atlas and the Transnational Institutionalization of the Neoliberal Think Tank.
Chapter 1 in Garsten and Sörbom (eds), 2017, Power, Policy and Profit, Edward Elgar.
Over the last 40 years, neoliberalism has become the ‘new dominant 'regime of truth’ with a significant performative impact, through time, on national policymaking and on dynamics of transnational governance. Of particular interest in that context is the carrier and boundary-spanning role of a dense ecology of neoliberal think tanks and research institutes that has come to be structured over the past four decades. Neoliberal think tanks espouse a market- and business-friendly ideology and have made it their mission to champion, spread, defend and entrench, in a multiplicity of contexts, this ideology and its associated politics. In this chapter, I am interested in the historical dynamics of emergence of this dense ecology of neoliberal think tanks. Starting from the setting up, in 1955, of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) in Britain, I explore the role of an organization, Atlas, that was created to replicate and diffuse the success of the IEA and to ‘litter the world’ with free-market think tanks. As I explore the founding of Atlas and its early years of operation, I am particularly interested in the process through which the organizational form of the ‘neoliberal think tank’ came to be constructed, diffused and progressively institutionalized during that period. Through this historical case study, I unpack potent – albeit subtle and indirect – mechanisms of influence that have largely been neglected in the literature. Neoliberal think tanks were constructed to shape and spread ideological, political and practice templates and to help
crystallize and stabilize them across the world. The key, as Hayek argued in 1949, was ‘to shape public opinion’ and orient it towards a belief in the superiority of market solutions
and economic logics' (Hayek 1949, p. 417).