Institutional maintenance in an international bureaucracy: Everyday practices of international elites inside UNESCO

•This article responds to calls for more research on international elites and policy specialists.•We examine how the agency of such specialists is involved in institutional reproduction.•We present an organizational ethnography of UNESCO headquarters.•The study shows how institutional reproduction is reflexively accomplished through everyday policy work.•The research provides a differentiated understanding of agency in institutional reproduction. Scholars have recently called for an organizational sociology of international experts and expertise, the production and functioning of elite worlds. Meanwhile, efforts have been made to refocus organization studies of institutions towards the lived experience and everyday working practices through which organizational actors perceive, reproduce and revise the institutional structures within which they operate. The purpose of this paper is to bridge the study of international elites in the context of international policy making and emergent research on how actors actively accomplish institutional maintenance, the intent being to advance a more differentiated understanding of agency of international elites in micro-institutional maintenance. This research is based on an organizational ethnography among international program experts at the headquarters of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris. The study contributes to knowledge about how maintenance of institutional frameworks of policy making is accomplished by program specialists as they continually apply the legitimate language of the institution, endow it with institutional authority in everyday practices and navigate in hierarchies and social networks. The paper discusses contributions to extant research on international elite worlds, power and agency in institutional reproduction.