So what is the World Economic Forum really? Talking shop, manna for conspiracy theorists or a useful get-together for the great and the good?

It’s certainly a mysterious institution for many. It’s privately run and unabashedly self-promoting, a meet-and-greet that brings together enough of the world’s super-powerful to delight any conspiracy theorist worthy of the name. But a new book tries to get behind the mystique and the hype to try to explain what it is all about - and what impact the WEF really does have on the world.

Geoffrey Allen Pigman, a political economist at Bennington College in the U.S. state of Vermont, has penned an academic study that is part of a series from publisher Routledge that includes the likes of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

The author tells me that one of the WEF’s main achievements recently has been to diffuse some of the criticism hurled at it by what he calls the “alter-globalisation” movement. It is “alter” not “anti”, he says, because many people are not against globalisation but have a different view of what it should comprise to the mainstream capitalism one.

Pigman reckons the WEF did well to incorporate some of these critics and other NGOs into its discussion, inviting them to Davos and setting up a World Social Forum.

But regardless of these achievements, what of the WEF’s overall impact? Some may simply say ‘talking shop’. But Pigman says he has a positive view of what the organisation is trying to do with grand meetings like this one in Davos. ”Words do make realities,” he says.