ABSTRACT
In much of the academic literature, international organizations (IOs) appear as monolithic actors, rather than complex organizations (e.g. Ness and Brechin 1988). Reviews of the IO literature (for instance, Martin and Simmons 1998; Simmons and Martin 2002) barely touch on the issue of how IOs function internally. One work even states that the literature addressing this question is ‘increasingly removed from the central problems of world politics’ (Simmons and Martin 2002: 193). Admittedly, some authors have studied particular types of IO employees in order to answer specifi c questions. They have focused on negotiators ( Jacobson et al. 1983), top bureaucrats in the European Commission (e.g. Hooghe 2001), relief and humanitarian workers (Atlani-Duault and Vidal 2009), and high-level or elected offi cials at the head of IOs (e.g. Volgy and Quistgard 1974). To comprehensively assess the values and motivations of IO staff, the focus of these studies must be broadened. As the literature increasingly considers IOs as agents of various principals, understanding what motivates staff is of considerable importance. This chapter examines whether IO staff hold a particular set of values, and if these values affect principal-agent relationships involving IO staff. Moreover, in dialogue with IO scholarship (e.g. Hooghe 2001; Checkel 2003), we investigate whether these values exist prior to IO staff recruitment, and are therefore dependent on some form of selection, or are the result of socialization.
