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Contemporary thinkers are pessimistic about the endurance of transnational communities. The deviant case of the century-and-a-half-old transnational Esperanto community features a process that can explain transnational community survival: rationalization. Rationalization manifests in Esperantists reproducing a form of community logic integrating symbols, principles (justifications, values, etc.), communication practices and technologies, and organization centered on the Esperanto language. The Esperanto language and community logic enable unifying Esperanto activities across space and time. The Esperanto case suggests that community rationalization and language rationalization – an element thereof – are global phenomena integral to modernity. Having affected communities and language too, rationalization as a global process appears to be more extensive than previously suggested. Transnational communities can endure as manifestations of a global community institutional order organizing social life alongside but largely independently of nation-states, science, professions, and religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While recent concepts from the sociology of science stress novel sites of knowledge production (e.g. government, industry), they ignore international organizations’ (IOs) growing research capacity. Conversely, prevailing theories of IOs stress their regulative and normative influence in national policymaking, equally neglecting their scientific work. Using bibliometric data for a large sample of 1325 international organizations, this work examines, for the first time, the evolution of scientific output from international intergovernmental research organizations, intergovernmental organizations, and nongovernmental organizations in the period 1950–2015. The analysis finds a striking increase in scientific activity since the late 1980s and particularly since the early 2000s across organizational types, sectors (e.g. law, nutrition), research fields (e.g. life science, social sciences), output formats (e.g. articles, books), and geographic areas. Indeed, some of these organizations are among the most productive science producers worldwide. Additional analyses of IOs’ research collaborations suggest strong cross-organizational diversity reflecting wider trends of scientific internationalization and integration. The article argues that IOs’ scientization requires a thorough revision of theories of institutional change in science and research systems and of theories about the nature and role of IOs. These organizations reflect, and, indeed, spearhead, wider trends of the rationalization of social order and evidence-based global governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]