Apart from the Bank, three types of social actors appear in the texts during this period: states and governments; companies, banks and industry; engineers, technicians and experts. This social ontology confirms the standard account of post-war reconstruction as industrial, Fordist and Keynesian.

Apart from the Bank, three types of social actors appear in the texts during this period: states and governments; companies, banks and industry; engineers, technicians and experts. This social ontology confirms the standard account of post-war reconstruction as industrial, Fordist and Keynesian.

What has to be managed is the economy—‘the self-contained structure or totality of relations of production, distribution and consumption of goods and services within a given geographical space’, as Timothy Mitchell has put it

Portfolio [...] undergoes a vertiginous rise

Though never absent from the Bank's vocabulary, management started its ascent in the late 1970s, when the debt question became central, and was subsequently associated with the drastic 'structural adjustment' policies of the neo-liberal offensive.

In the passage from 2008, the terms action and cooperation belong to a class of words usually known as ‘nominalizations’, or ‘derived abstract nouns’

What do nominalizations do, that the Reports should use them with such insistence? They take ‘actions and processes’ and turn them into ‘abstract objects’

It’s hard to believe, but the verb to disagree never appears in the Reports; disagreement, twice in seventy years. It’s the formula made famous by Margaret Thatcher: There Is No Alternative.

But those ‘ands’ connect them just the same, despite the total absence of logic, and their paratactical crudity becomes almost a justification: we have so many important things to do, we can’t afford to be elegant yes, we must take care of our clients (we are, remember, a bank); but we also care about knowledge and partnership and sharing and poverty!

We’ve heard so many philippics on ‘accountability’, in recent years, we would expect a landslide of past tenses in the Bank’s language; after all, accountability can only be assessed with reference to what has been done.