Abstract

It is commonly assumed that state agencies legitimize themselves via outputs. This paper shows that in situations of organizational crisis, state agencies may adopt new policy areas symbolically to compensate for lost legitimacy. Drawing on an ethnography within the Bundesbank, internal documents, and insider interviews, I trace how the German Bundesbank adopted financial stability as a policy area to compensate for the loss of monetary policy and banking supervision in the early 2000s. By focusing on the relationship between internal organizational struggles over the Bundesbank’s identity and the boundary work it has to conduct to establish its new role, I show that the Bundesbank failed to shift the state-economy boundary post-crisis in its effort to regain its position as autonomous purveyor of macroeconomic governance.

摘要

人们普遍认为，国家机构通过产出使自己合法化。本文表明，在组织危机的情况下，国家机构可能会象征性地采用新的政策领域来弥补失去的合法性。借助德国央行内部的民族志、内部文件和内部采访，我追溯了德国央行如何将金融稳定作为一个政策领域，以弥补 2000 年代初期货币政策和银行监管的损失。通过关注关于德国央行身份的内部组织斗争与其为确立其新角色而必须进行的边界工作之间的关系，我表明德国央行未能在危机后改变国家经济边界以重新获得其地位作为宏观经济治理的自主提供者。