ABSTRACT

The methodology was usually considered with suspicion. Seen as the preserve of positivists, methodological debates were, to the minds of many critical scholars, misleading attempts to specify a practice that could capture 'the world as it really is'. Questions of method were often treated as secondary and mostly relevant for people who did fieldwork or worked with data sets. This chapter explains the historical narrative of the rise of liberal financial governance around a series of commitments which were aimed to place in perspective, usually through some form of comparison, the agencies involved in the construction of liberal financial governance. This work of tracing involved three different aspects: characterise the concrete agencies in terms of their specific features, build a narrative based on what difference the innovations of agents make and analyse social developments largely as unintended effects of social struggles.