Power and Poverty

Poverty alleviation is one of the main objectives of the International Bank for Reconstruction an Development since the early 1970s. The following analysis based on a sample of texts of the former „World Bank“ president J. Wolfensohn, deals with the poverty discourse of the bank, its topics, aims and strategies. The dominant features of the discourse clearly characterise the organisation as a profit oriented enterprise. The strategies the World Bank and its staff utilise to build up an imposing organisational self, are the same as those other market oriented organisations employ. It is not the aim of this paper to prove, that a bank is bank; the analysis of the corpus rather supports the argument, that there is a more or less hidden contradiction between the Bank’s identity and aims at the one hand and its discourse on “fighting poverty” on the other.