The historical transformations of public health policies can be seen as the combined shifts in the organization of States and the evolutions of scientific and medical knowledge. In the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries biopolitics based on the expansion of central state bureaucracies and emerging medical, statistical and economic knowledge constituted the health of the population as a factor of State power. In the XIXth and early XXth centuries, marked by the consolidation of industrial capitalism and the rise of the social question redefined public health. In the framework of the Nation-State welfare State reforms based on insurance schemes and preventive hygienist policies recast public health policies. In the post-war period, medical advances, decolonization, pandemics such as AIDS and the rise of international organizations such as the WHO, UN, OECD, the World Bank and the EEC and EU contributed to reframing health as a global issue.
The proposed thesis subject will be focused on the post-war period characterized by a transnationalization of risks, a change in approaches to public health and the emergence of networks of international experts. The empirical point of entry will be the OECD, an organization created in 1961 which replaced the OEEC, an administration put into place in 1948 to administer the Marshall Fund. Nothing predisposed the OEEC/OECD, which has no direct regulatory powers, to play an important role in the redefinition of public health issues. However, since the 1960’s, the OECD has become an essential international platform for the production and circulation of expertise around two important questions: First, the OECD established strong contacts with the pharmaceutical industry and strongly contributed to the creation of guidelines for best practice and international standards. Second, the OECD promoted policies to promote public health in developing countries and diffused models of public policy to developed nations which provided levers for reform.

In a perspective combining the political sociology of international organizations and the history of science, the thesis will seek to provide answers to some of the following questions.

1) When, how and in which political context did the OECD move into the field of public health? What were the driving forces behind the successive redefinitions of OECD policy in this area?
2) What types of actors were involved (academic experts, industrial actors, think thanks, national top civil servants…) in the production of knowledge and policy recommendations? The research question will consist in analyzing the articulation of different forms of expertise, institutional interests and their effects on the framing of issues and possible solutions.
3) Based on the analysis of the pool of international experts throughout the history of the institution, a sociographical approach on careers and networks will seek to empirically study the diffusion of knowledge and models of action to other international organizations and to private and public actors in national contexts. The goal is to go beyond a purely institutional perspective to study the multipositionning of experts and linkages between different epistemic communities.

The thesis will broadly seek to gain better knowledge on the relations between the OECD and other institutional actors such as the WHO, the World Bank and the European Union. It will seek to further the understanding of the transformations of health policy, the sociology of international institutions and the relationship between scientific knowledge, expertise and public policy.
The candidate must be a holder of a Masters degree from a highly recognized University in the fields of history or sociology of science, political sociology or political science. A masters thesis on international or European public policy or on the history of medicine or science demonstrating a mastery of research techniques and the scientific literature on the subject is a plus.
The candidate must demonstrate the mastery of research techniques in social sciences: archival work, sociological interviews, the construction and analysis of quantitative data, and sound analysis of textual sources.

The candidate must be able to work and write in English and French. The thesis can be written in English or French.

Context and working conditions
The PhD student will receive a net monthly salary of 1.347 Euros for the duration of 36 months (October 1 2014- October 1, 2017)
The thesis will be directed by Christian Bonah (Professor of medical history) and Jay Rowell (CNRS Research Director in Political sociology). It will be carried out at the Societies, actors and government in Europe research centre at the University of Strasbourg (http://sage.unistra.fr). Students will be enrolled in the Social and Human Sciences doctoral school at the University. The project also involves close collaboration with the ERC GLOBHEALTH project directed by Jean-Paul Gaudillière at the University of Paris Descartes.

Candidates for the position are asked to send a letter of motivation, a detailed CV and a copy of their Masters thesis by email to Christian Bonah (bonah@unistra.fr) and to Jay Rowell (Jay.Rowell@misha.fr) before June 23, 2014