This paper addresses the Europeanization/EU Integration debates surrounding new modes of governance with a specific focus on the ‘Open Method of Coordination’ (OMC), which was introduced as an official tool of ‘soft’ policy coordination along with the Lisbon Strategy at the European Council Summit in March 2000. In contrast to studies focused on one or two OMCs, this paper’s point of departure is to conceptualize the Lisbon Strategy as paradoxically ‘self-reflexive’ political ideology. The Lisbon ‘ideology’ calls for no less than a ‘great transformation’ of Europe’s political, economic, and social landscape, and is now being used to legitimate nearly all of the EU’s economic, social, and environmental policies in its quest to become ‘the most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion by 2010.’ European political actors and scholars have highlighted the OMC’s potential for achieving common objectives in sensitive issue areas, via its mechanisms (i.e. benchmarking, target-setting, best practice sharing, and multi-level surveillance) intended to enhance deliberative problem-solving, the pooling of knowledge, transparency, accountability and peer pressure, while leaving the decision-making authority with the states. This paper argues that Lisbon European Council’s call for extending the OMC to several new issue domains (e.g. employment, pensions, social protection, economic policy, education, etc.) has resulted in the emergence of a networked form of governance in which the OMCs have become the institutional ‘carriers’ of the Lisbon ideology. An increasing number of political actors are interacting in an institutional and normative opportunity structure that is ‘charged’ by the Lisbon ideology. This paper argues that there is some evidence that the non-binding coordination processes of the Lisbon Strategy has lead to a further ‘dis-aggregation’ of governmental interests (e.g. Social Ministers have new platforms on the EU stage), while simultaneously putting pressure on governmental actors to improve both horizontal and vertical coordination. Thus, the Lisbon-OMCs have multiplied the combinatorial potential of transnational alliances. Furthermore, there is evidence that the diffusion of the Lisbon-OMC network is gradually nudging the logic of social interaction in the direction of what some call ‘argumentative rationality,’ and accelerated the social selection processes required for the emergence of consensual knowledge. Indeed, the abstract ideas of the Lisbon ideology have quickly become more concrete by the emerging network of OMCs, which have lead to a growing body of normative commitments, common policy paradigms, and a growing body of indicators, benchmarks, and targets. Relying on evidence collected in twenty-five in-depth interviews, official documents, and the secondary literature, the author will argue that there is some evidence that Lisbon-OMCs have been causally related to a cognitive & normative ‘convergence’ and that this has lead to certain patterns of institutional and policy change both in the EU and in member states. The tentative conclusions drawn in this paper have emerged from the first phase of research into the question of whether we are witnessing the institutionalization of a paradoxically ‘self-reflexive’ Lisbon ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]