Although nowadays the World Bank is often portrayed as the reign of economists, there was a time when the organization intentionally diminished the role of economic analysis and economists in its organizational structure. However, the Bank underwent a major reconstruction of its economic staff in the mid-1960s and within only a few years, the Economics Department became the third largest department in the Bank with over 200 newly recruited staff. The economic work at the Bank was reorganized through the central Economic Committee and economic analysis was elevated to top levels of the Bank’s operations with considerable consequences on the Bank’s behavior.

This largely untapped episode of the establishment of the Bank’s economic capabilities poses a challenge to theoretical approaches to international organizations (IOs) established in fields of Political Science and International Relations. It was primarily driven by events within the Bank, without any incentives from the Bank’s shareholders and without following an explicit reorganization strategy promoted by senior management. Using it as a case in point, the paper aims to show how an organizational change can come “from within” by illustrating the instruments of staff strategic agency and the conditions that facilitate the effort of norm entrepreneurs in their attempts to shape the behavior of the IO. Furthermore, given the theoretical underdevelopment of our understanding of “staff as agents”, the paper incorporates the concept of reputation, virtually unsued in the IO scholarship, and shows how reputational concerns enabled and constrained certain types of behavior of the World Bank’s personnel.