Between autonomy and engagement: interpreting and practising knowledge exchange in UK academia
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Date
08/07/2019Author
Bandola-Gill, Justyna Estera
Metadata
Abstract
Scholarly interest in “impact” - the focus on the social and economic relevance of
science as a research assessment criterion - has been steadily rising in UK academia
since the early 1990s. In this context, knowledge exchange between researchers and
policymakers has become increasingly incentivised by funders and universities.
Building on theories from STS, evidence-policy relations and organisation studies, this
PhD thesis explores the cultural and institutional determinants of the changing
relationship between science and policy over the last thirty years. The thesis employs
the concept of institutional logics to examine the broader implications of these
changes, arguing that the so-called “research impact agenda” has resulted in the
emergence of new practices in UK academia. In this work I identify and define two
main logics that both co-exist and compete: the logic of excellence, which views
science as intellectually driven and underpinned by the freedom of inquiry of
academics, and the newly emerged logic of impact, which is problem-driven and
assumes high levels of engagement with research users for the purpose of solving
policy relevant problems.
The empirical foundations of this thesis rest on two case studies of publicly-funded
knowledge exchange organisations: the ESRC Genomics Policy & Research Forum
and Fuse – the Centre for Translational Research in Public Health. Based on 51 in-depth
semi-structured interviews with academics and policymakers engaged with these
two organisations, plus an analysis of over 80 documents (including research funding
policy statements and case study organisations’ strategies and reports), this thesis
offers insights into the academics’ responses to the dual logics shaping contemporary
academia.
This thesis argues that this paradigmatic pluralism poses a particularly acute challenge
for academics engaged in knowledge exchange organisations who perceive themselves
to be guided by contradictory expectations and incentive systems. In particular, three
areas of contestation of these logics are foregrounded: i) academic knowledge
practices including producing academic research, translating research and producing
policy research; ii) various framings of knowledge exchange employed by academics,
including viewing it as challenging policy frameworks, facilitating learning, producing
usable evidence, or advocating for specific policy options; and iii) practices of
boundary work between science and policy in terms of both blurring existing
boundaries and setting new ones.
Establishing hybridity between different logics within designated knowledge
exchange spaces involves a rhetorical, material and structural process of navigating
these multiple framings of knowledge exchange, research practices and boundary
work. Through employing such diverse framings and practices, the interviewees aimed
to secure legitimacy in the eyes of both policy audiences and fellow academics by
variously positioning themselves as both relevant to the policymaking process and
independent from it. This thesis argues that the authority of science in knowledge
exchange processes and its effectiveness at contributing to policy change stem neither
from the close engagement of academics with the political context nor from complete
autonomy from such setting, but rather it is grounded in an ability to constantly
negotiate the two. To understand this persistent institutional and cultural duality, this
thesis proposes we should understand science and policy as symbiotically intertwined
but nonetheless distinguishable from one another.