As Bourdieu had led me to expect, the middle-class parents of my American and British interviewees mobilised their cultural resources to facilitate their children's educational and occupational advancement. They assumed and expected that their children would do well in school and they held high occupational aspirations for them. These dispositions and values contributed to the interviewees' success in becoming doctors and teachers. That said, in both countries, the parents of my working-class interviewees did not lack cultural capital. They also placed a high premium on academic success although they hoped rather than assumed that their children would do well. Their occupational horizons were somewhat more modest than their middle-class counterparts but they did not seek to limit their children's aspirations as academic success propelled them onwards. They were keen, in other words, to take up educational opportunities that expanded in the post-war period of prosperity. In this chapter, I turn my attention to how the interviewees, now all middle-class parents, seek to mobilise their cultural resources to ensure their children's educational and occupational success. Most of the interviewees' children were still making their way through the education system although some of them, as young adults, were seeking to establish themselves in the labour market. Despite the diversity in their ages, all of them had been in education from the 1980s onwards when a harsher economic and political climate, including tax cuts reducing the quality of public and state educational provision, took hold.

The mobilisation of economic resources by parents certainly helped my American and British interviewees from affluent backgrounds in the pursuit of educational and occupational success as Goldthorpe's theory led me to expect. They were especially useful in risky situations that might jeopardise advancement. A lack of economic resources, however, did not hold back the interviewees from more modest class backgrounds in either country, somewhat contrary to Goldthorpe's theory. Academic success was, of course, crucial and soft money from various sources made up for the absence of financial assistance from parents not in a position to help out. In other words, the mobilisation of resources increased the probability of academic success although a lack of economic resources did not necessarily limit educational and occupational advancement. That said, the experience of competition for good jobs was much easier for the more affluent and far harsher for those from modest backgrounds. These are the key findings of Chapter 2. This chapter focuses on the interviewees as parents and their accounts of how they were applying or had applied their economic resources to help their kids do well in school and get good jobs. Despite their diverse class backgrounds, the interviewees are now, of course, all in middle-class jobs in medicine and teaching although diversity persists in that the medics would be described as upper middle class by Americans and middle class by the British and the teachers would be described as middle class by Americans and lower middle class by the British.

My parents were born in Ireland in 1931. My mother was the eleventh of thirteen children bought up on a small farm in Southern Ireland that passed down through her mother's side when her brothers went to America. Her father had been a valet for Lord Kenmare in Killarney and then London before returning home. When my mother finished her education at the age of sixteen in the late 1940s, she took the boat train to England where she joined some of her siblings. She spent most of her working life in London as the banqueting secretary at the Charing Cross Hotel. My father was the fourth of six children brought up in Northern Ireland. While his mother raised the children in Derry, she also made a living sewing. His father was in the British Army and, after the Second World War, he stayed in London where he was an electrician's mate until he retired. My father, I think, finished school at fifteen and then did shop work before joining the Merchant Navy at eighteen. He left at twenty-one and moved to London in the early 1950s where he joined the Post Office and lived with his father. My parents married in 1959 and my three siblings and I were born soon after. Rather than bring children up in London, they moved to Bournemouth in 1968.

In Chapter 6, I drew on Coleman's work on social capital and the way in which parents use their social networks of interpersonal relations in the local community as a resource to help their children in the education system. According to the interviewees, both middle-class and working-class parents mobilised their social resources to their advantage. I also drew on Granovetter's ideas about the importance of social contacts on careers and considered how the interviewees of different class backgrounds mobilised their own social contacts in becoming medics and educators. The interviewees of upper-middle-class and middle-class origins could certainly draw on their parental social networks but so could my informants of more modest social status. Once again, I now consider my interviewees as middle-class parents mobilising their social resources to ensure their children's educational and occupational advancement. Given that most of my interviewees' children were still making their way through the school system in both countries, attention focuses on social capital and educational success. The role of social contacts in the forging of new careers among the interviewees' older children will be considered more briefly. Attention is not limited to the ways in which social resources come into their own only when academic success is not forthcoming. This is in contrast to both Goldthorpe and Bourdieu who viewed them as important only in terms of a strategy of last resort. Rather, I will consider how social resources are mobilised, indeed deeply embedded, in the process of acquiring educational credentials as well.

Introduction

Over the 1990s, in an effort to improve both its effectiveness and its public image, the IMF began to take steps to make itself more transparent, more accountable and more participatory. This chapter investigates how accountable the institution has become and what ‘accountability’ might and should mean for an international institution such as the IMF. Curiously, although great strides have been made in improving transparency and in better understanding concepts of participation and ownership in the implementation of the institution's programmes, a rigorous definition and concept of ‘accountability’ has been slow to emerge. Indeed, most contemporary proposals for the reform of the institutions use the term regularly without ever developing who should be accountable to whom and for what.

Section 2 of the chapter discusses why accountability is now so prominently on the agenda and why the traditional structure of the IMF no longer meets expectations as to how accountable the institution should be. Section 3 examines the demands of new actors to hold the institution better to account, focusing in particular on the rise of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and their engagement with the IMF. Section 4 critically examines the role of the United States in reforming the Fund and evaluates the recommendations of the Meltzer Commission.

The emergence of the current global architecture

The starting point of our discussion is the global frameworkof international institutions, set up at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference. The IMF was perhaps the chief element of this framework and passed its initial two decades within its confines. In this framework, the IMF helped to manage balance of payments adjustment within a global system of pegged but adjustable exchange rates. The IMF now does something looser than this – it exercises surveillance over and influence on macroeconomic policies worldwide. In this section we set out how and why this change came about, describing how the Fund's role has changed as the overall framework has changed. In subsequent sections we consider the role for the Fund within this new framework. Its central role has come to be that of helping to manage macroeconomic stability in developing countries, and, in particular, the management of international financial crises. Crucial to this is its role in responding in appropriate and differentiated ways to liquidity and solvency crises. A discussion of this role will form the focus of this chapter.

The global architecture of the golden age

The post-war world into which the Bretton Woods' twins (the IMF and the World Bank) and the GATT were born was one in which the main issues were: to prevent a collapse in economic activity and employment; to promote growth; to avoid the emergence of payments imbalances; to promote the growth of international trade and avoid a slide back into the protectionism of the 1930s; and to promote economic development through international lending.

It is a distinct privilege for me to have been invited by the manager of the Cyril Foster Fund at Oxford University to give this year's lecture.

Of course, the impressive list of my predecessors for the occasion makes me very modest, as I am far from displaying comparable talents and achievements. But I also feel immensely rewarded by what is very peculiar in this invitation: the wish of Mr Cyril Foster that such lectures deal with the ‘elimination of war and the better understanding of the nations of the world’. To devote our thoughts to these two essential objectives of humanity could bring us to the heart of the intense debate we are having now, all around the world, about globalisation. This is a debate about its opportunities, of course, but also its risks, which are so clearly demonstrated by the new breed of economic crises the world suffered during the 1990s, the instability of the world finances, the threat of marginalisation of the most vulnerable and rising inequality.

This debate about globalisation is striking by its intensity and even more by the contrast between the optimism of officials in charge who pretend that their efforts to adapt the system to the new realities should end up by making globalisation an opportunity for all and the total rejection of this view by many protesters in our streets, including here, I suspect.

Introduction

The financial crises of 1997 and 1998 have had a profound effect on East Asia's view of international financial and monetary arrangements, including the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in international policy dialogue and financial cooperation. There has been a tectonic shift in the policy landscape of the region. While there are differences between and within countries, no longer is East Asia content to rely almost exclusively on global forums, mechanisms and institutions; it now wants to develop a complementary regional structure. The process of developing a regional economic and financial architecture may be in its early stages but the political and policy dynamics under way make it irreversible.

There are many elements to the expansion of regional arrangements – ranging from strengthened policy dialogue, greater financial cooperation, deeper economic and trade integration and even common currency arrangements. Much of the content of the evolving debate and policy on regional financial arrangements is tied directly to the region's discontent with the IMF and its concomitant, disillusion with the way the United States dealt with the financial crisis in East Asia. It is also motivated by a profound sense that deep economic and financial integration in East Asia can be of substantial benefit, both nationally and internationally, to countries in the region. At the same time, the European experience is seen as compelling.

In 1994, the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) launched the Global Economic Institutions (GEI) Research Programme, with the objective of funding academic research on the functioning of multilateral economic organisations and about the global institutions within which economic activity takes place. The IMF and the World Bank are the two major global institutions established at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, and they have now been joined by the World Trade Organization (WTO). An earlier volume (Gilbert and Vines, 2000) arising out of the GEI Programme was devoted to the World Bank. In this volume, which will be the final publication from the programme, which ended in 2000, we move to the IMF.

This book began with a conference on the future of the Global Economic Institutions, held at the Bank of England, in May 2000 at which a number of the papers included as chapters in this volume were presented. We are very grateful to the Bank of England for hosting the conference. The conference discussion suggested to us that it would be valuable to bring together some of the presenters of papers at that conference and others to produce a book on the future of the IMF within international financial architecture.

The process of assembling the book has been overtaken by the crisis in Argentina. This crisis has hardened attitudes about the IMF, in that all wish to avoid repeat events like the Argentine crisis.