Symbolic power in diplomatic practice: Matters of style in Brussels
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper investigates the workings of symbolic power in diplomatic practice. At the level of empirical observation, it focuses on the intangible and incalculable ‘feel for the game’ that distinguishes a well-informed and relaxed insider from an ill-informed and ill-at-ease outsider in European Union (EU) diplomatic circles in Brussels. By highlighting the play of social resources, such as reputation, presence, poise, and composure in these circles, I examine EU diplomacy from an angle – symbolic power – that is often overlooked in the existing work on that field. Conceptually, the analysis focuses on the role of informal social resources rather than formal institutional structures in diplomatic practice. It also outlines the potential synergies between the study of diplomacy in international relations (IR) on the one hand and geography, anthropology, and sociology on the other. The paper thereby advances the analytical toolbox of diplomatic studies and practice theory. Such conceptual sharpening is needed, especially now that diplomacy is becoming more transnational and less linked to the foreign ministries of states.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it