knowledge circulation, regulation and...

Knowledge circulation, regulation and

governance

Xavier Pons Agnès van Zanten

Literature review

(part 6)

Literature

review

June 2007

2

Table of contents

1. Changes in regulation and governance. What roles for knowledge?........... 105 1.1 The need for governments to be more effective............................................................105

1.2 New forms of political legitimation ......................................................................................110

2. The forms of knowledge circulation. How do KRTs (Knowledge-based

Regulation Tools) evolve in the policy process? .......................................... 120 2.1 The shaping, circulation and alterations of policies categories ................................121

2.2 The political action of “knowledge entrepreneurs” ........................................................123

2.3 Reception, co-production and resistance by street-level actors ..............................129

3. Conclusion Towards a specific and common

theoretical framework for our research? ................................................. 134

Knowledge circulation, regulation and governance

Xavier Pons and Agnès van Zanten

With the participation of Hélène Buisson-Fenet, Roger-François Gauthier, Martine

Kherroubi, Nathalie Mons, Elena Roussier-Fusco and Eric Verdier

The goal of this review is to explore some theoretical hypotheses and questions on why

and how knowledge is increasingly becoming a regulation tool, how it is shaped, received

and used, and what its impact is. This is not an easy task because, although there is a

wide literature on regulation, on policy tools and on specific “knowledge-based regulation

tools” (KRT) — for example on evaluations, benchmarking, peer reviews or best practises

— there is no literature on this field of research as a whole. Thus this review has led us

to explore various fields of research including works in political science and political

sociology (policy analysis of regulation, governance, multi-level systems, policy tools and

policy categories), in the sociology of networks and interest groups, the sociology of

professions, the sociology of expertise, the sociology of science and knowledge and the

sociology of education and health policies, as well as some economic analyses of

regulation and organizational effects (regulation and agency theory), and to analyse their

possible fruitful convergence. Given this extensive coverage, this review does not

pretend to be exhaustive. Inevitably, some points are more developed than others. This

review also tries to strike a balance between the traditional canons of critical scientific

surveys and the need to provide the members of the Knowandpol project with « tool

boxes », especially for the studies that will be conducted within orientation 3. That is why

we have tried, when possible, to propose in separate boxes and tables typologies,

examples and questions that go beyond the strict analysis of scientific content.

The main underlying hypothesis of this review is that the development of KRT is strongly

linked both to changes in regulation processes in general (the development of

governance, of post-bureaucratic modes of regulation, and of multi-level political

Knowledge circulation, regulation and governance Pons – van Zanten

105

systems) and to new forms of knowledge circulation among the different actors involved

in the policy process (researchers, experts, think tanks, policy bodies, professionals,

clients). An underlying assumption, which is not explored in detail in the review but that

is part of its theoretical background, is that these tendencies reflect an even broader

movement toward cognitive and reflective societies where knowledge is at the core of

social action. The review is divided in two parts according to our two main hypotheses.

The first part analyses the literature on general changes in regulation and the possible

influence of knowledge on these changes. It will try to provide answers to the question:

“why is knowledge becoming more and more a regulation tool?”. The second part focuses

on the circulation of knowledge and explores some theoretical approaches on the career

on KRTs all along the policy process. The main question we are trying to provide answers

to in that section is: '”How does a KRT evolve in the policy process?'”

1. Changes in regulation and governance. What roles for knowledge?

The scientific literature on changes in regulation processes argues that governments are

required to change for at least two reasons. The first is that they have to be more

effective and, in order to accomplish that, to develop new specific skills. The second is

that they need to find new ways to legitimate their action. Knowledge plays a central role

in that double process.

1.1 The need for governments to be more effective

1.1.1 The need for new skills and for new ways of managing knowledge

Many works on new changes in regulation and governance come up with the idea that

governments must develop new skills to be more effective. This idea is put forward by

actors who are involved in policy and organisational changes such as some international

organisations (OECD, 1995; OECD, 2000; OECD, 2001) and experts on New Public

Management or on Knowledge Management. Hood (Hood, 1991; Hood, 1996),

Christensen and Lægreid (Christensen and Lægreid, 2001) and Bezes (Bezes, 2002),

among others, have analysed the main features of New Public Management, a new

stream of reform introduced in all developed countries since the, 1970, and its

consequences for public administrations. We summarize their mains conclusions in the

table below.


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Table 1. The main features of New Public Management

(from Hood, 1991, 1996; Christensen and Lægreid, 2001 and Bezes, 2002)

Principles Goals Typical measures

Reorganizing unities by projects Separating design and management from implementation

Creation of independent agencies and development of contracts

Increasing internal and external competition between administrations

Cutting costs and improving standards through competition

Bids, benchmarking and development of contracts

Improving autonomy and accountability

Clarifying responsibilities to avoid the dispersion of power

Freedom and autonomy of management for the people in charge of the implementation of a reform

More rigor in public spending Cutting public spending, doing better with less

Staff cutting, spending ceilings and definition of goals

Favouring successful private management tools

Changing the structure of incentives and the forms of control

New management tools (cost-accounting, management monitoring) and development of contracts

Quantifying performance Increasing accountability by defining explicit targets

Management by quantitative and qualitative indicators of performance

Stressing the evaluation of outcomes

Shifting to obligation of results Wages linked to performances, system of premiums

Looking at the third column in particular, New Public Management can be regarded as a

central theoretical and practical source for the development of new regulation tools such

as benchmarking, statistical indicators or global evaluation procedures, and at the origin

of the need for new specific skills such as monitoring, and being autonomous,

responsible, competitive and accountable.

The development of works on Knowledge Management in firms and organisations is

linked to a widely shared belief that knowledge has become a critical resource that can

provide a competitive advantage if it is explicitly integrated into an strategy and

managed effectively in a triple context of fast development of information and

communication technologies (Grant, 2000), of new economic pressures on firms created

by globalisation, deregulation and the need to be more reactive to clients and

stakeholders (Dupuy, 2005) and of the rise of a “knowledge economy” and of “knowledge

intensive firms” (Bell, 1973, Drucker, 1993). This knowledge management discourse

which can be seen, in a Foucauldian perspective, as a discursive formation (Driver,

2002), has been developed within an organisational field comprising several distinct

groups such as business schools, management gurus and management consulting firms

(Suddaby and Greenwood, 2001). Its focus is not so much on whether knowledge and

knowledge work can or should be managed but how. Knowledge is assumed to have a

functionality all of its own, if managed properly (Swan and Scarbrough, 2001).

Knowledge management is thus defined as the capitalisation and marketisation of


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existing knowledge. This implies developing new methods for the evaluation, organization

and management of intellectual property. It refers to internal changes in management,

which are supposed to booster the capacity to innovate and to reduce decision cycles, to

diffuse “best practices” and to increase the learning capacity of the organization

(Tysseyre, 1999). The type of management varies nevertheless according to the type of

knowledge being managed as summarised below.

Table 2. Knowledge in the Knowledge management literature: Some key concepts

Concepts Basic definitions and authors (when possible)

Explicit or

‘hard’

knowledge

Objective, impersonal and context-independent knowledge. (Most authors) ‘Knowledge frameworks’ (dictums and rules) that can be explicitly enounced and more or less formalized (Durand, 2005)

Tacit or ‘soft’

or ‘embedded’ knowledge

Routines, taken-for-granted understandings and know-how existing in social groups which are impossible to describe in detail (Badaracco, 1991) ''A fluid mix of framed experience, values, contextual information and expert insight that provides a framework for evaluating and incorporating new experiences and information. It originates and is applied in the minds of knowers. In organizations, it often becomes embedded not only in documents or repositories but also in organizational routines, processes, practices and norms” (Davenport and Prusak, 1998; p. 5). “Practical frameworks” (know-how and routines), which are difficult to imitate and transfer and “behavioural frameworks” (rites, symbols, beliefs and values). (Durand, 2005)

Three levels

of knowledge and

knowledge cycle

The literature distinguishes three levels of knowledge: 1/ data, 2/ information and 3/ knowledge, which can be related in a ‘knowledge cycle’. Data refers to raw images or numbers resulting from observations or measures. When they are related to each other and organized into a meaningful pattern, they become information. The greater is the level of information, the greater is the understanding of a given domain until a level of deep comprehension is attained, that is knowledge (Crié, 2003, Hislop, 2005).

Knowledge-

creating company

It is a firm which has the capacity to capture the subjective and tacit viewpoints and intuitions of its employees and to make the organization as a whole benefit from them. (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995)

Intellectual

capital

It encompasses all the immaterial assets of a given firm including intellectual property (patents, copyrights, brands), human resources (the employers’ knowledge, know-how and leadership), structural or organizational assets (organizational structures and communication systems, corporate culture) and market or client assets (reputation, brand loyalty) (Brookings, 1996, Stewart, 1997)

If the management of explicit knowledge is frequently presented as a technical problem

(since knowledge is supposed to be codifiable and transferable and people naturally

willing to share it), the management of tacit knowledge is presented as a more complex

problem. Some approaches to the management of tacit knowledge are quite directive in

that they advise intermediate managers to proceed to the mapping and analysis of

information flows and personal relationships between employees, teams or departments

and to identify peripherical employees who might represent ‘untapped expertise’ (Prusak

and Matson, 2006). Most of them are however ‘soft’ in that they officially promote

workers’ autonomy and self-determination. For Senge (Senge, 1990) and Kofman and

Senge (Kofman and Senge, 1995), for instance, learning organizations promise a vision


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of ‘communities of commitment’ or ‘communities of practice’ built on voluntary

cooperation for the betterment of the participating organisational members seeking to

achieve organisational goals that they have internalised as their own. A more complete

typology is the one developed by Alvesson and Karreman (Alversson and Karreman,

2001) who distinguish four different categories of knowledge management according to

the medium of interaction (technostructural or social) and the mode of managerial

intervention (co-ordination or control). The first one, called ‘extended libraries’, involves

extensive use of the available technology to blend a company’s internal and external

information and turned it into actionable knowledge for increasing coherence, image and

identity of work effectiveness. The second, ‘community’ is less technocratic as it involves

mostly knowledge sharing through influencing workplace climate. The third, ‘normative

control’ involves using knowledge to develop an organizational culture through

managerial arrangements and control while the fourth, ‘enacted blueprints’ implies

managerial control through codification. The idea is that knowledge can be extracted

from individuals and codified and stored in databases to provide templates for thinking

and action to all workers.

However, although the literature on knowledge management may be considered as an

extension and enrichment of the literature on management, its contribution to the

understanding of knowledge creation and transmission as a process is quite limited. In

fact, a large part of the literature on this topic has played a significant role in reinforcing

the notion of knowledge as an objective, portable and manageable commodity. On the

one hand, knowledge is conceived by many of the promoters of Knowledge management

as truth on a subject matter or as a set of principles for dealing with things or social

phenomena and as something that can be stored, transferred and retrieved. The

ambiguity of knowledge, its variety and dynamism are frequently ignored. On the other

hand, knowledge is conceived as a competitive good without dwelling on problems

related to its intangible character and its relative and contextual value or the fact that

once it is diffused, it is difficult to prevent others from using it, which makes it a strange

kind of ‘capital’ (Prax, 2000).

The second type of works on government effectiveness are scientific studies on

governance (Jessop, 2004, Rhodes, 1997, Stocker, 1998, Kooiman, 1993, 2003,

Salamon, 2002) and on regulation (Boyer, 1986, Jessop, 1995, Majone, 1996, Commaille

and Jobert, 1999). Most of them conclude that States or governments are not anymore

central actors of public regulation able to impose alone their own will. They have to take

into account the interests of many actors who intervene in complex and multipolar

decision processes. For Mayntz (Mayntz, 1993), public administrations have to cope with

four main problems: an ‘implementation problem’ (when governments do not succeed in

making actors implement their rules), a ‘motivation problem’ (when targeted groups, or

even administrations, refuse to recognize the legitimacy of a reform), a ‘governability

problem’ (the lack of legal competencies and government instruments) and lastly a


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‘knowledge problem’ that the author defines as the incorrect interpretation of causal links

between ends and means. These new forms of regulation imply for governments the

development of new skills. Every author seems to have his or her own taxonomy of skills.

For example, Salamon (Salamon, 2002) argues that the new governance involves the

development of new governing skills. These are not anymore traditional managing skills

(i.e. control and command) but new ‘enabling skills’ based on negotiation and

persuasion: ‘activation skills’ (activating the networks of actors increasingly required to

address public problems), ‘orchestration skills’ (i.e. the skills of a symphony conductor, a

synthetic view of a complex problem) and ‘modulation skills’ (i.e. the sensitive

modulation of rewards and penalties).

Nevertheless, very few works go beyond these skill typologies to analyse how regulation

by knowledge leads — or does not lead — to better regulation. Indeed the debate about

governance and new regulations seems to focus more on organisational aspects and wide

global changes and on what belongs or not to old patterns of governments' behaviours.

In short, the main questions explored are why to change and what to change with little

interested devoted to how knowledge intervenes in that process. The effective change of

required skills and knowledge is in fact asserted more than demonstrated. For example,

few works analyse the nature of the knowledge these new skills rest on, its changes in

the policy process and its regulation. A possible explanation for this could be the

existence of a common implicit background among these authors on the fundamental

culture of professionals and public managers in general. The literature provides

nevertheless little insight on the mainstays of this culture.

However some answers may be found in sector analyses or in thematic sociologies. The

sociology of economic policies is probably one of the branches of sociology which has

developed in greatest detail the analysis of the link between new sources of knowledge

and changes of regulation. Works in this area have shown for instance how a particular

scientific controversy — the revolution fostered by the hypothesis of rational anticipations

in macroeconomics which led new “neoclassical” economists to question the theoretical

impacts of the traditional Keynesian economic policies — which socially divides

economists (Klamer, 1983) can progressively question, in a specific economic context

(fuel chocks, globalization and stagflation), a broad consensus among governments and

administrations on the mainstays of economic policies (Hall, 1993) and make them move

from Keynesianism to monetarism (Hall, 1986 and, 1992) and neoliberal theories (Jobert,

1994). It also shows how this move has deeply influenced economists and how it had led

governments to develop new economic regulation tools (Siné, 2006). There is however

no consensus among political scientists concerning the extent of this rightwing turn in

economy either in the US or the UK. Some works have underlined that many academic

economists refused to abandon Keynesian assumptions and that neoliberal theories did

not gain universal acceptance among conservative politicians either (Denham and

Garnett, 1996).


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1.1.2 The need for contextual analyses of policies and knowledge

A main problem in trying to draw general conclusions from the literature on governance

and regulation is that each country seems to have its own approach and theoretical

traditions when addressing these wide questions. For example, what is meant by

governance? If in France ‘governance’ is a very debated notion which at best designates

for political scientists all the recent political changes involving actors other than the

State, in Germany, and in the United Kingdom, it seems to refer to society’s capacity to

self-regulate itself (Le Galès, 2004). In the United States, on the other hand, governance

designates the traditional functioning of the political federal system. This is why authors

such as Salamon (Salamon, 2002) prefers to speak about ‘new governance’ to designate

new processes of deregulation and privatization. Thus changes in regulation and

governance cannot be understood without taking into account their embeddedness in

particular social and political contexts. In addition to this, within national contexts, each

sector has its own ‘new regulations’.

In education, for example, the Reguleducnetwork research, which compared five

European countries and six local education spaces, concludes that if these countries have

all been characterised in the past by classical modes of bureaucratic regulation, based on

central and vertical negotiations between politicians and professional organizations, and

if they are approximately going through common trends — an increasing autonomy of

schools, the research of an equilibrium between centralization and decentralization, the

development of external evaluations of schools and of the educational system in general,

the promotion of free school choice for parents, the diversification of training, supply and

control of teachers' work —, the concrete implementation of these ‘post-bureaucratic

regulations’ clearly differs from a country to another according to long-standing historical

traditions (Maroy, 2006). And it is all the more the case when the role of knowledge is

taken into account. For example the research puts forward two post-bureaucratic

regulations — quasi-markets and the evaluative State — that are unequally implemented

in the five countries. We can easily assume that the knowledge foundations of theses

regulations are different and vary between countries. It is indeed highly possible that

evaluation for example relies on different knowledge traditions in England and in France.

The development of evaluation in the former is probably linked to the importance given

to ‘statistical reason’ (Desrosières, 1993) and to the influence of research whereas in

France, it is widely dependant on the important development of ‘state sciences’

developed by old State bodies (van Zanten 2006; Pons, 2007).

1.2 New forms of political legitimation

The second main reason why governments are strongly invited to develop new skills and

forms of knowledge is the evolution of modes of legitimation. In the context of an

increasing rationalization of State actions (Weber, 1971), the legitimacy of rulers is


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based on their capacity to choose the good regulation tools and to justify choices on a

professional and, to a certain extent, scientific basis. By rationalization we do not mean

that the uncertainty of public action is reduced. On the contrary the more complex the

policy process, the more uncertain is the final result. And it is precisely because of this

increasing complexity and uncertainty that decision-makers are more expected to justify

each of their choices.

1.2.1 Process or ‘step by step’ legitimacy and the choice of good regulation tools

According to many political scientists who refer to Simon's (Simon, 1945; Simon, 1957)

works on bounded rationality, the legitimacy of current political leaders is not only

substantial or a priori — that is based on inputs like ideologies, values, or simply

elections — nor is it only consequentialist or a posteriori — i.e. based on out-puts and

accountability. It is also a process or ‘step by step’ legitimacy (Simon, 1957, Lindblom,

1959) or an instrumental one (Foucault, 1978, 1988) and it lies on their capacity to lead

efficiently a political project, that is to say, for our purposes here, to choose the

appropriate regulation tool. What are the different regulation tools? Making a typology of

different regulation tools is not so easy, and it is all the less if one is interested on their

knowledge base. Firstly, as a rapid reading of the contents of three key books on the

subject (Hood, 1986, Salamon, 2002, Lascoumes and Le Galès, 2004) clearly shows, the

list of tools differs considerably according to the countries or the cultural areas

considered. Secondly, the list depends on criteria that must be analytically defined.

Thirdly, it is very difficult to distinguish and develop a hierarchy among these tools on a

cognitive basis. Some authors like Salamon (Salamon, 2002) state that regulation tools

are now less direct, less interventionist and less based on legal and formal rules. These

same authors, however, never show that the ancient tools are less cognitive. Indeed why

writing a legal norm would be less cognitive than signing a contract? This could be an

important topic for discussion in the Knowandpol project. Table 3. summarises the main

analytical typologies of regulation tools.


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Table 3. Typologies of regulation tools. Some key approaches.

Authors Criteria for classifying tools

Types of regulation tools

Salamon, 2002 The target of the regulation tool

‘Internal tools’ (the target is to reform the functioning of administrations) and ‘external tools’ (the target is the society)

Hood, 1986 Role and resources of governments

‘Detective tools’ (they allow governments to collect information from society) and ‘effecting tools’ (the objective is to influence society)

McDonnel and Elmore, 1987

Government’s intervention strategies

‘Mandates’, ‘inducements’, ‘capacity building’ and ‘system changing’

Schneider and Ingram, 1990

Behaviours the tool aims to modify

‘Authority tools’, ‘incentive tools’, ‘capacity tools’ and ‘learning tools’

Van Der Doelen, 1993

Type of intervention Three families of tools: ‘the legal family’, ‘the economic family’ and ‘the communication family’

Bemelmans-Videc, Rist and Vedung, 1998

Degree of strength ‘Carrots’, ‘sticks’ and ‘sermons’.

What is the role of knowledge in this process? This paves the way for at least two

questions. First: how does knowledge shape a regulation tool? This point is often

underestimated by the theoretical literature on regulation tools (Hood, 1986, Salamon,

2002, Lascoumes and Le Galès, 2004) by comparison with organisational issues. When

Salamon (Salamon, 2002; p., 20) lists the ‘defining features’ of a regulation tool, he

never mentions knowledge. A very attentive reader could possibly link knowledge

influence with the ‘set of rules’ introduced by new regulation tools but this link is very

indirect. Hood (Hood, 1986) or Peters (in Salamon, 2002; p. 556-557) only assert that

ideas influence the choice of tools, but we do not know how. The goal of Salamon's book

is precisely to bridge the gap between the increasing political need for managing

knowledge on the one hand, and the few scientific works on that topic on the other. Yet

knowledge may belong to the ‘design features’ —i.e. features which are specific to some

tools (Salamon, 2002; p. 19) — since many works, which do not explicitly belong to this

theoretical stream of political science, highlight how knowledge shapes particular

regulation tools. There are many studies concerning for example statistics (Desrosières,

1993) or the political use of legal norms (Chazel and Commaille, 1991, Lascoumes, 1990,

1993; Lascoumes and Le Bourhis, 1996). References to these two types of knowledge

are not fortuitous. Both statistics and legal norms have an intrinsic force of persuasion

and enable logical inferences which may be useful for governments to integrate different

groups and to regulate their activity. They are the basis of many regulation tools

(census, tax, labels etc.), when they do not become regulation tools themselves. Second:

how does knowledge become a regulation tool? Once again, the main examples are not

taken from the literature on regulation tools but from different research traditions which

often have in common to limit their analysis to a specific tool, for example planning


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(Bauchet, 1962, Nizard, 1974, Rousso, 1987), evaluation (Baybrooke and Lindblom,

1963, Leca, 1993, , Lascoumes, Setbon and Thoenig, 1998, Nagel, 1990, 2002,

Spenlehauer, 1998), contracts (Harden, 1992, Fortin, 1999; Gaudin, 1999) or

benchmarking and peer review (Bullivant, 1994, Rolstadås, 1998, Ghobadian et al.,

2001, Shatz, 2004, Wait, 2004). Each of these tools has specific properties and specific

links with a knowledge-base that we cannot detail here. However, a single example, that

of policy evaluation in France, illustrates some of the points we want to make:

Box 1. How does knowledge become a regulation tool

and what new knowledge does this tool produce ?

The example of policy evaluation in France.

Spenlehauer (Spenlehauer, 1998) shows that the French interministerial evaluation policy developed in the, 1990's relies mainly on three types of knowledge: the capital of knowledge, experience and skills accumulated by the former Commissariat

Général au Plan (main actor of French economic planning since, 1945), the new

American technologies for the modernisation of administration implemented in the, 1960's (the PPBS program and others) and the political translations of some sociological works on organisations (especially Crozier and Friedberg, 1977). He then argues that the failure of this global evaluation policy is due to the fact that it was promoted by central actors who were discredited by former administrative reforms (in particular the French adaptation of PPBs: the rationalisation des choix budgétaires). But this failure does not prevent evaluation from being promoted by new actors (for example the French State agency of control of public funds, the Cour

des comptes) and from being still institutionalized in some political sectors like health,

employment, education (see for example Kessler, Lascoumes, Setbon and Thoenig, 1998). This on-going and sometimes disorganised institutionalisation of evaluation is supported by the production of new and often sector-based knowledge. In education for example, policy evaluation is an opportunity for high inspectors to recycle their knowledge on the education system, for central statisticians to develop new statistical methods or for the members of the Cour des comptes to go over budget

control to appreciate the global functioning of the education system (Pons, 2007). Thus this regulation tool — policy evaluation — produces new knowledge in each sector. In education, this knowledge is partly administrative and partly scientific (van Zanten, 2006), and can be interpreted as a product of “state sciences” (Desrosières, 1993; Leca, 1993) or “government sciences” (Ihl, Kaluszynski and Pollet, 2003).

1.2.2 Professional legitimation: the role of technocrats professional bodies and experts

Another source of legitimacy for political leaders is to foster the intervention of actors

who are able to produce specific knowledge to improve the effectiveness of regulation. In

this respect, the professionalisation of public actors can be regarded as the construction

of a knowledge monopoly, which is useful for political leaders. Whatever the theoretical


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definition of professions we adopt (Flexner, 1915, Carr-Saunders, 1928, Hughes, 1952,

Freidson, 1986, 2001, Abbott, 1988), the concept of profession always implies

specialisation and monopolisation of specific areas of knowledge or of specific skills. This

perspective, that is the bounding and monopolisation of knowledge, if used for analysing

the actors which intervene in the policy process in a dynamic perspective, may help us to

understand how knowledge circulates — or not, that's the issue — and how such

professions influence the regulation process. Some additional concepts developed by

sociologists of professions, such as Abbott’s (Abbott, 1998) “vacancy principle” — that is

the principle according to which, within a professional sector, a place abandoned by a

profession is always occupied by another one whose features consequently, change—

provide us with models of the circulation of knowledge in a particular professional sector

or with global models of the knowledge organisation of society. Freidson (Freidson, 2001)

for example argues that “professionalism” — that he defines as “a set of interconnected

institutions providing the economic support and social organization that sustains the

occupational control of work” whose main features are the monopoly of skill and

knowledge by the professionals, their freedom of judgement and their discretion in

performing work (p. 3) — can be understood as a third ideal type of social organization

after market and bureaucracy.

When adopted in political science, the perspectives of sociologists of professions have led

researchers to focus on three main professional ‘figures’ that play a key role in the

legitimation of new forms of regulation. The first one is the one of the ‘technocrats’, a

polemic category that is difficult to define. Dubois and Dulong (Dubois and Dulong, 1999)

show that it is easier to date the beginning of technocracy as a social phenomenon with

the creation in, 1932, in the US, of the “Committee on Technocracy'” by Howard Scott

than to construct a scientific definition of it since most definitions are politically or

ideologically biased. Indeed technocracy is more a myth than a concrete social reality.

Authors who have studied the history of this category show nevertheless that if each

particular historical period has its own technocrats, members of this category can be

defined by two main features: technocrats exist because political leaders recognise the

utility and legitimacy of their technical competences, but also because they are able to

recycle their original knowledge and skills in different political contexts. For our project,

this means that the history of one form of technocracy informs us both on the circulation

of a specific kind of knowledge in professional and administrative spheres and on its

impact on the legitimacy of regulation by political actors (Shinn, 1980, Fischer, 1990,

Dubois and Dulong, 1999).

The second figure is the well-known one of the ‘expert’. There is an extensive literature

on expertise but if we focus on the links between expertise and regulation, it is possible

to show the existence of three main lines of interpretation concerning the policy roles of

experts. The first one, which is particularly visible in the first works on the topic, presents

experts as technocrats stealing power from elected politicians (Benveniste, 1972, Fischer,


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1990). The second one, on the contrary, regards them as advocacy actors at the service

of policy-makers (Brint, 1994, Sabatier and Zafonte, 2004). The last one goes beyond

this traditional opposition to consider experts as ‘facilitators of public learning and

empowerment’ (Fischer, 1990), as cognitive intermediaries who pass on ideas (Genard

and Jacob, 2004) or as active builders of necessary consensus (Callon, 1986, Lascoumes,

1996, Callon, Lascoumes and Barthe, 2001). In terms of knowledge, experts seem to be

plunged in a particular dialectic. Trépos (Trépos, 1993) explains that an expert is both a

former highly skilled professional — which means he or she has capitalised for a long

time specific knowledge and skills to be recognized first by his or her original profession

and then by the political leaders who name him or her as expert — and someone who,

once he or she has to cope with the fundamentally original situation of expertise, looses

both the recognition of former peers (who generally think that the expert has betrayed

the profession) and the utility of his or her patiently accumulated knowledge (since by

definition the situation is particular). Trépos concludes that an expert is thus both a

former professional and someone who knows how to adapt his or her knowledge to new

situations. The outcome of this dialectic is however uncertain for the expert and

politically risky for political leaders. That is why there is a tendency to limit uncertainty

and risks through the institutionalisation of expertise, for instance through the

constitution of “wise men” committees (Bachir, 1995).

The third and last figure is less precise since it refers to different professional bodies that

intervene in the policy process as collective holders of expertise. Some of these groups

are specialised in particular sectors such as doctors in health (see for example

Hassenteufel, 1994,1997) or teachers in education (Demailly, 1987,1993, van Zanten,

2001, Rayou and van Zanten, 2004). Others bring together cross-sector professionals

such as the French high State bodies (Darbel and Schnapper, 1969, Birnbaum, 1977,

Suleiman, 1979, Kessler, 1986, Bourdieu, 1989) or members of professions based on a

particular legal status (Crozier, 1965, Menger, 2003, Chenu, 2005). By definition, the

role and the interventions of these professions in regulation is both central and ad hoc

which means it is very much influenced by contextual factors (country, sector, political

circumstances and opportunities).

1.2.3 Scientific legitimation: sciences of government and evidence based policy

The third source of legitimation is scientific. The underlying hypothesis is that scientific

knowledge is more persuasive than others and so more useful for public rulers and

managers to foster participation and build cooperation between different actors in the

policy process. It must be noted that, for this review we have not favoured a particular

definition of scientific knowledge. We potentially take into account all the works produced

by scientific actors or which have properties that can be regarded as scientific. Two main

tendencies seem to emerge. The first one is the growing scientific nature of traditional


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administrative knowledge. Beyond the cameralism that many historical approaches

highlight (Tribe, 1984; Laborier, 2003; Garner, 2005), that is the technologies of “police”

taught by eminent jurists in Germany during the 18th and, 19th centuries to students

who were to be the next executives of the absolute state, there is a whole literature

about “sciences of government'” or “State sciences” (Desrosières, 1993; Leca, 1993).

Those sciences have all in common to have been first ‘arts’ or ‘crafts’ whose main

purpose was to highlight regularities in social phenomena and to advise and legitimate

monarchs, which have undergone a progressive process of institutionalization. This is the

case for example for statistics, geography, polls, economics etc. To study these particular

forms of knowledge, Ihl, Kaluszynski and Pollet (Kaluszynski and Pollet, 2003) propose

three research guiding questions: what are the claims for scientificity? How does

knowledge become more academic? How does it allow political leaders to govern

territories?

The second one is the development of “evidence based policy” (EBP), which corresponds

to an ‘utilitarian turn’ in the relationship between science, society and politics, with

renewed expectations about the usefulness of social science (Solesbury, 2001). For

example, the British Education Secretary, David Blunkett (Blunkett, 2000) invited several

years ago the research community to accept an enhanced role in the policy-making

process, stating that “we need to be able to rely on social science and social scientists to

tell us what works and why and what types of policy initiatives are likely to be most

effective”. This utilitarian turn goes hand in hand with a pragmatic attitude about

focusing on ‘what works’ that has come to dominate public policy discourse, especially in

Britain (David, 2002), in response from perceives pressures and opportunities in the

global knowledge economy. According to Moran and Malott (Moran and Malott, 2004),

our century has introduced an era of accountability, with demand for advocates of

important social and cultural activities to ‘prove’ the effectiveness of policies they

promote, so that decisions affecting the public will lead to consistent, socially valuable

goals.

It is not easy however to see what EBP means concretely. Initial works in evidence-based

medicine, precursors of a broader EBP movement, placed emphasis on systematic

reviews of research: this approach seeks to identify, select and synthesise findings from

all relevant studies to inform political and professional choices (Young et al., 2002).

International organisations and some national governments have encouraged the

extension of this approach to the social sciences. According to Oakley (Oakley, 2001),

there is a need in the social sciences for a systematic review, evaluation and synthesis of

currently available research, which would replace the current reviews of poor quality

undertaken before. This author defines valid and reliable knowledge as that produced by

meta-analysis of systematic reviews and by controlled experiments based on the

randomized clinical trials (RCT) model. Research using other methods, such as case

studies, produce evidence that rates much lower in the hierarchy of credibility. So


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judgments about the credibility of evidence are based on systematic reviews of outcomes

and the statistical meta-analysis of the aggregation of several research studies. Its

promoters see the application of these methods to education as particularly useful to

improve teacher practice but as particularly problematic giving the present poor quality

and policy and practical irrelevance of educational research (Hargreaves, 1996,1997,

Woodhead, 1998, Tooley and Darby, 1998, Hillage et al., 1998, Clarke, 1998, Mortimore,

1999).

This approach to research in the social sciences and education has given birth to many

criticisms. One of the most important is that an evidence-based approach to policy is not

ideologically neutral since it supports particular beliefs and values compatible with the

dominant cultural and political paradigms that define how people and society function

(Gough and Elbourne, 2002). A second line of criticism underlines that the enthusiasm

for EBP overlooks the fact that a great deal of research has already been carried out on a

range of social problems providing policy makers with advice that they have rarely

followed (Shulock, 1999). Other critics point to the fact that much systematic synthesis

has been concerned with the synthesis of quantitative data, but that there is also a need

for the accumulation of evidence from qualitative data (Gough and Elbourne, 2002)

although the production of synthesis in the social sciences is difficult because publishing

in social sciences is considerably more fragmented than in other scientific disciplines

where peer- reviewed journal literature is the norm (Ford et al., 1999). Finally, many

researchers point to the difficulty of defining what may be rightly counted as acceptable

evidence in the social sciences and education. Professional consensus, received wisdom

and the judgment of authorities play an important role in evidence-based medicine.

Instead, in the social sciences, it is difficult to develop agreed criteria for evaluating

evidential quality. Concepts are contested and theoretical controversy generally

welcomed as an indication of intellectual health (Young et al., 2002).

Thus Young et al. (2002) list five sets of models about the ways in which the policy

process may handle the input of knowledge:

1) In the knowledge-driven model, it is assumed that research leads policy;

2) In the problem-solving model, research follows policy as policy issues shape

research priorities. These two models both assume a simple linear relationship

between research and policy decision, differing only in the direction of influence.

3) The interactive model is characterized by a more subtle and complex series of

relationships between decision makers and researchers. Research and policy are

seen as mutually influential.


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4) In the political/tactical model, policy is the outcome of a political process. The

research agenda is seen as politically driven, with studies commissioned and

used to support the position adopted by the government of the day.

5) The enlightenment model sees research as distant from immediate policy

concerns. Research does not serve policy in a direct way.

The presence of one of several of these models probably depends on the sector in which

EBP is implemented. In order to illustrate this, we have chosen the example of the

development of the movement of ‘school effectiveness’ in education.

Box 2. An example of an evidence based policy:

the political use of the ''school effectiveness'' theory

Obstacles to the development of EBP in education

In education, the main objections to this approach is based on the argument that education is different from healthcare (Hargreaves, 1996, Oakley, 1999, Davies, 1999). According to Packwood (Packwood, 2002) education has produced few studies that used the randomized clinical trials (RCTs), mainly because of the perceived complexity of the context of teaching. Much educational research has attempted to understand this complexity through an examination of the individual and collective narratives of those engaged in the educational process. Adopting an evidence-based approach requires, on the opposite, high quality systematic reviews and appraisals of educational research in order to produce the credible evidence required for changes in practice. This author stresses a need for carefully designed and implemented research protocols that have to be cumulative to produce a database suitable for meta-analysis. Teachers could then draw on research to inform their pedagogy as part of their professional practice (Davies, 1999). This is a view shared by the British government, which has recently affirmed that continuing professional development will be based on current research and inspection evidence (DfEE, 2001).

The beginning of the school effectiveness movement

This movement was born at the beginning of the, 1980s and was inspired both by New public management, organisational sociology and human capital theory. As opposed to former research in the sociology of education which focused on inequalities and social reproduction, this theoretical stream wants to prove that ‘school matter’, that is, that beyond the social characteristics of students, the management of schools also determines their success or failure (Normand, 2006). Works conducted in this perspective rely on three main procedures and principles (Mons, 2008). The first is the frequent use of comparison. Decisions cannot be the same for every school, it is necessary to compare schools, local areas and sometimes countries to find appropriate measures. The second is that a school action is legitimate if it improves the results of pupils, which must be quantitatively measurable. Third, researchers must highlight the factors that can improve efficiency of schools. For example, Hargreaves (Hargreaves, 1996; Hargreaves,


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1999) argued in a conference given to the Teacher Training Agency (TTA) that the main interest of social researchers must be ‘what works in practice’. Hargreaves’ speech fostered a debate on education research in United Kingdom (see for example Hammersley, 2002) followed by two documents published by the Departement of Education: one was written by Tooley (Tooley and Darby, 1998), president of a think tank of the New Right (the Institute of Economics Affairs) and the second one was called the Hillage report (Hillage et al., 1998). They both insisted on the fact that

educational research was too distant from pedagogical practices.

Its political translation

Even if it was highly criticized in the educational research community (Pring, 1996, Hamilton, 1996, Elliot, 1996, White and Barber, 1997, Thrupp, 2001), this movement clearly inspired new neoliberal governments in the, 1980s. The British government for instance tried to identify the most efficient practices for improving standards in the education system, set up centres of excellence, financed and controlled statistical tests and created a centre at the Institute of Education of London called the Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Co-ordinating Centre (EPPI). The National Educational Research Forum (NERF) was also created in order to set a strategy of national coordination. For Pring (Pring, 1996), Elliot (Elliot, 1996), Gibson and Asthana (Gibson and Asthana, 1998) and Willmott (Willmott, 1999) school effectiveness research ‘pathologises'’ schools since it accepts that the problems of society are to be ascribed to the failings of education and of those who work in the education system, especially teachers. Thus it has reinforced government policies — from the Right first but also from Tony Blair afterwards — which are concerned with identifying schools as the sole agent of success of failure. This can also be seen as a movement to displace responsibility for standards from the State and the government to schools and teachers (Goldstein and Woodhouse, 2000)

The EPPI Centre: statistical and non-statistical data for EBP in education

Britain has a long tradition of qualitative research in education and in the research community there has been important concern about the implications of educational research synthesis based upon positivistic ideas of knowledge accumulation for the internal dynamics of the educational system, for instance for the control of professional practice. Teachers themselves feel that they will be forced to follow the findings of research or that research will provide a mechanism for direct political control (Hammersley, 2001, Vulliamy and Webb, 2001, quoted in Gough and Elbourne, 2002). The Social Science Research Unit at the Institute of Education, University of London, which has been undertaking descriptive, analytic and experimental studies on social interventions, has been concerned since, 1993 with systematic research synthesis in a stream of work now called the Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Co-ordinating (EPPI) Centre. People working in this Centre consider that the involvement of all types of users of research in the review process will ensure that the explicit process of review and access to review findings will democratise the use of research knowledge in society: in this way, it will become less easy for decision-makers to unilaterally determine the research and policy and practice agenda. The EPPI Centre reviews may also address wider questions, use statistical and qualitative


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data (Oxman, 2000). A major component of EPPI work has been a programme of systematic reviews on health promotion and the development of an appropriate review methodology. Recently the EPPI Centre has developed an additional focus in education. The use of specialized database tools to assist with coding and recording and web-based electronic access to such methods and data, allow for access and participation and enable updating of reviews (Gough and Elbourne, 2002). The aims of EPPI Centre are:

1) To provide high-quality, relevant reviews of research that are accessible to teachers, policy-makers, students, parents, governors and others with an interest in education;

2) To support collaboration that develops systematic review methodology for educational research and helps ensure the use of review findings;

3) To ensure a research process that is open to scrutiny, criticism and development;

4) To develop a research process that values and takes steps to encourage participation, at all stages, by anyone with an interest in education (Packwood, 2002). The EPPI Centre shares these principles with other initiatives as the Cochrane Collaboration, working in the field of medicine and its sister organisation, the Campbell Collaboration, which focuses on crime and justice, social welfare, and education. In both organisations, the emphasis is on effectiveness (‘what works’). The most appropriate research method to address these questions is the randomised controlled trial: in fact most of the Cochrane reviews include a statistical summary of their findings in the form of a meta-analysis. All the research synthesis initiatives argue for the importance of user involvement, which is seen as a central drive for setting the research question of what needs to be known (Gough and Elbourne, 2002).

2. The forms of knowledge circulation.

How do KRTs evolve in the policy process?

If the works examined in the first section partly explain why knowledge is more and more

embedded in regulation tools to be help governments become more efficient and find

new modes of legitimation, one important question still remains: how does knowledge

circulate among different actors involved in the policy process and how do they

alternatively promote, alter, and shape KRTs? Once again, there is not a general stream

of literature in the social sciences that focuses specifically on that topic. Diverse kinds of

answers must be looked for in different theoretical fields. We focus here on three of

them: the analysis of the career of specific policy groups, the role played by strategic

‘knowledge entrepreneurs’, and the sociology of the reception of reforms.


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2.1 The shaping, circulation and alterations of policies categories

2.1.1 Following political knowledge under construction: social and cognitive processes

The sociology of policy categories begins with the criticism of traditional cognitive policy

analysis. The latter appears indeed highly paradoxical. On the one hand, cognitive policy

analysis considers the definition of a social issue to be a crucial activity because it leads

to the control of the public agenda (see review theme 1). Politically, naming an issue is

already contemplating its solutions and so regulating, which means that analyzing the

properties of knowledge production should be determinant to understand the features of

regulation. However, on the other hand, this theoretical stream focuses on agenda

building and not so much on the concrete implementation of this knowledge-based

regulation (Dubois, 2003, Laborier and Trom, 2003) whereas it recognizes that naming a

political issue is sometimes the last strategy used by politicians to avoid addressing the

problem and concretely implementing a new policy (Padioleau, 1982, Cobb and Ross,

1997). In addition to this, the works on implementation conducted with a traditional

cognitive perspective insist more on organisational aspects — that is on the evolution of

structures and on local negotiations — than on cognitive ones (Mégie, 2004). In short,

from this perspective, we clearly see why knowledge plays a key role in regulation, but

not how.

To bypass this paradox, many authors propose to analyse the historical shaping and the

different uses and alterations of a policy category in a particular social space. For

example, what does unemployment mean to different groups and in different time

periods (Baverez, Reynaud and Salais, 1986, Topalov, 1994, Zimmermann, 2001)? What

does a culture policy mean today (Dubois, 1996 and, 1999)? What is technocracy

(Dubois and Dulong, 1999) or illiteracy (Lahire, 1999) now and in the past and what are

the various competing definition of them? Some researchers have gone further in this

direction and have analysed the changing forms and meanings of global statistical

systems (Le Bras, 2000; Rosental, 2003, Laforgue, 2005). Present debates in France

concerning the construction and uses of ethnic statistics can be linked to this tradition

(Desrosières, 1993, Simon and Clement, 2006).

2.1.2 Many heuristic examples of circulation, but no integrated theory

The cognitive policy literature provides us with many heuristic examples of knowledge

circulation, which show that States and governments often play a key role. For example,

Dubois (Dubois, 1996; Dubois, 1999) has analysed the ‘great transformation’ in the

cultural domain introduced by the French State when, in the, 1960s, it integrated in a

new ‘cultural policy’ actors and themes that existed before a Ministry of Culture was

created and that had for some of them appeared against the State. Dubois shows that

throughout the process of institutionalization of this new cultural policy actors and once it


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was accomplished, the types of knowledge which appeared politically useful and the

actors which promoted them changed. He describes the progressive appearance of

‘expert administrators’ who have replaced the former intellectual militants and whose

main competence is to refuse to favour one particular definition of culture. He thus

concludes that in this sector, it is necessary to institutionalize vagueness to preserve

creation.

In another sector, Buton (Buton, 1999), who has retraced the history of the treatment of

the deaf and blind pupils by the French educational administration, analyses what he

calls the ‘bureaucratization’ of public action during the, 19th century. By

bureaucratization, he designates “the operation through an administrative order which

increases by legal provision the hierarchical control of an administrative entity on a lower

one” (p. 70). He shows that the logical principle that has allowed the administration to

treat together deaf and blind pupils has historically evolved. Initially, during the 18th and

the beginning of the, 19th centuries, these two categories of pupils were put together

because it was argued that pupils could overcome those two handicaps and follow a

normal schooling. Among handicapped pupils, only the deaf and blind were supposed to

be ‘educable’. During the, 19th century, this principle of educability was replaced by an

administrative one: the main common element between deaf and blind pupils was that

they were sent to special schools — the établissements généraux de bienfaisance —

which were under the direct control of the central administration, and not like others

handicapped pupils to decentralised special schools. Once again, the change in the

construction of the policy category means changes in the knowledge base that is

considered politically useful and in the group of actors who are suppose to possess it. If

at the beginning, doctors played an important role in the global understanding of the

specificity of these two handicaps, administrators specialised in this particular sector

progressively replaced them.

Even if these two examples are heuristic for our research, this literature rarely comes up

with a global and integrated theory about the shaping, circulation and alterations of

policy categories, probably because each circulation is deeply linked to the properties of

knowledge and to the features of different historical periods and different sectors. One

exception is the work of Zimmermann (Zimmermann, 2003) who proposes, on the basis

of her work on the statistical definition of unemployment in Germany, a sequential

analysis of the career of one policy category. She distinguishes four main periods: 1) the

creation and the diffusion of the category which often occur when there is no word to

designate the new phenomenon; 2) the definition of the category, which is linked to the

definition of the problem and to the stock of available solutions; 3) the shaping of

inference criteria and processes which allow the administration to distinguish those who

belong to the category and those who do not; 4) the construction of a consensus on the

relevant inference criteria.


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2.2 The political action of “knowledge entrepreneurs”

The second way to analyze the shaping and circulation of knowledge in the policy process

is to study the role played by key ‘knowledge entrepreneurs’. This will allows us to make

some hypotheses on the main theoretical features of KRTs.

2.2.1 KRT as the result of particular world visions

The first ‘knowledge entrepreneurs’ studied by political scientists are interest groups.

Since Lowi’s (1964) study on the role of the ‘iron triangle’ — i.e. the coalition between

members of government, interest groups and regulation agencies — which characterises

agenda-setting in US policy-making, many classical works, especially in economics

(Greffe, 1997, Weimer and Vining, 1998), have analysed policies as the result of the

action of ‘interest groups’, ‘pressure groups’ or ‘lobbies’ (Meynaud, 1958, Lehmbruch and

Schmitter, 1982, Richardson, 1993), or, more recently, from larger ‘policy communities’

(Jordan, 1990, Richardson and Jordan, 1987). Few of these studies go beyond a strict

analysis of interests. However, if interests are considered as related to particular

representation of public issues, the action of interest groups can be analysed as the

political promotion of specific representations of an issue (Offerlé, 1998). Thus a KRT can

be interpreted as the changing cognitive outcome of this process of mobilization of

interest groups.

2.2.2 KRT as the implementation of policy beliefs

Sabatier (Sabatier, 1987, Sabatier and Jenking-Smith, 1993) has developed a specific

model of cognitive analysis of public action that we will not present in detail here (see the

literature review of theme 1) but which may be very useful for us since it highlights the

emergence of a new collective knowledge entrepreneur, the ‘advocacy coalition’. The

advocacy coalition refers to the cognitive and epistemic alliance of groups which share

the same normative beliefs and perceptions on a particular issue, more often in a specific

sector, and which struggle against other coalitions to impose their representation of this

public issue. Sabatier's research shows that if the composition of alliances evolve all

along the policy process and throughout history, the normative social beliefs that each

coalition defends tends to remain the same, or at least to resist to change. This means

that a KRT can be interpreted as a particular, temporarily limited, and politically oriented

set of beliefs concerning the legitimate policy in a given domain. The analysis of the

career of this KRT may be a good indicator of the circulation of knowledge which is

considered politically legitimate by specific social groups and political actors.

2.2.3 KRT as the materialization of a ‘cognitive policy network’

If many scientists insist on the key role that networks play in society in general (Burt,

1982, Degenne and Forsé, 1994, Lazega, 1998) and in the policy process in particular


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(Thatcher and Le Galès, 1995), once again few works focus on the role of knowledge or

on the cognitive properties of these networks. On the other hand, there is a growing

literature on the social construction of scientific controversies (Bloor, 1976, Collins, 1985,

Latour, 1984, Latour and Woolgar, 1988), on the circulation of scientific knowledge

(Callon, 1986) and on the outstanding role played by social and technical networks in the

definition of a valid scientific piece of knowledge (Callon and Latour, 1985, Callon,

1989,1998). Nevertheless, very few works analyse these theoretical issues in relation to

regulation and public action. Two exceptions can be quoted: some recent works on

informatics communities (see for example Conein and Proulx, 2005) and the sociology of

‘transcoding’ proposed by Lascoumes (Lascoumes, 1996). Bridging the gap between

these two theoretical traditions may be very interesting for our project because it might

show that KRTs exist, are legitimate and effective only if they are supported by a wide,

active and growing network of actors, that is by a ‘policy cognitive network’.

2.2.4 KRT as the original output of a ‘knowledge firm’?

If there is now a wide literature on think tanks and if it is easily assumed that they must

have an influence on the policy process, the concrete existence and forms of this

influence are hard to analyse and to prove for many reasons. The first one is that it is not

so simple to define a think tank. Once the observer decides to go beyond the original

meaning of the term — the term think tank was first used to designate a secure room or

environment where US defence scientists and military planners could meet to discuss

strategy during World War II— or beyond minimal consensual definitions — Stone and

Garnett (Stone and Garnett, 1998) define them as “relatively autonomous organisations

engaged in the analysis of policy issues independently of government, political parties

and pressure groups” while Rich (Rich, 2005) asserts that “think tanks are independent,

non-interest-based, non-profit organizations that produce and principally rely on

expertise and ideas to obtain support and to influence the policy making process”— it

becomes very difficult to distinguish them from other organizations, especially from

interest groups (Abelson, 2000) and academic institutions (Stone and Garnett, 1998).

This is fact due to the existence of a variety of think tanks as summarised below.


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Table 4. Types of think tanks

Authors Types of think tanks

Global definitions or main features

Universities without students

These think tanks have long-term horizons, try to promote a greater understanding of important social, economic and political issues and target the ‘climate’ of intellectual and political opinion.

Contract research organizations

These think tanks serve government agencies and private sponsors on a contractual basis by securing research in a variety of fields. Excellence is defined by contract success rather than by peer recognition.

Weaver, 1989

Advocacy tanks These organisations combine a strong policy partisan or ideological outlook with aggressive marketing techniques in a deliberate effort to influence current political debates. They synthesise and put a distinctive “spin” on existing research rather than conduct inquiries on their own. The importance in their publications is accessibility top policy-makers, which makes them difficult to distinguish from pressure groups.

McGann and Weaver, 2000

Party tanks These organisations are staffed by non-academics coming from government, parties and interest groups who have a narrow social science expertise, their main goal being that of winning the ‘war of ideas’.

Legacy-based think tanks

These are organisations created by aspiring office holders and their supporters and former leaders.

Abelson, 2000

Policy clubs These are places where academics, policy analysts and policy-makers meet to discuss public policy issues

Full-service think tanks

These TT address a broad array of issues

Multi-issue think tanks

These TT produce research and information on a variety of subjects

Rich, 2005

Single-issue organisations

These TT deal only with specific topics that they want to put in the policy agenda and are very similar to interest groups.

The second obstacle is that the nature of think tanks depends on the political

environment (the organisation of political parties and bureaucratic administrations), on

the legal environment (notably the national laws on philanthropic and non-profit

organizations) and on the funding environment (McGann and Weaver, 2000). Some

analysts argue for example that think tanks are a specific US institution linked to the fact

than the US system is more open, pluralistic and permeable than European political

systems. They assume that there are fewer opportunities for think tanks to enter the

policy fray in Europe and elsewhere due to factors such as stronger party systems,

corporate modes of decision-making, strong and relatively closed bureaucracies or weak

philanthropic sectors (Weaver, 1989). Others pretend that ministerial cabinets in France

fulfil a similar role to that of think tanks in the UK (Gaffney, 1991). Fieschi and Gaffney

(Fieschi and Gaffney, 1998) have extended the comparison with ministerial cabinets to

include a broader range of French institutions such as political clubs, which try to elevate


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politics above partisan lines and define or redefine political morality and ‘vision’, and

public institutes such as the CNRS or the INSEE that provide research and expertise to

the public and to private industries.

The third and most important factor is that most existing research fails to show the

causal effect of think tank’s ideas and proposals on policies. This might be due to the fact

that many observers of think tanks have focused only on policy formulation and on the

activities of ‘proximate policy makers’ while for others who use Kingdon’s (Kingdon,

1984) categories for analysing the policy process, it appears that the influence of experts

and think tanks is most important during the phase of issue articulation, especially

through provision of new alternatives. As Peschek (Peschek, 1987) puts it, “it is at the

more subtle levels of identifying and defining problems, shaping public understanding of

issues and constructing a political agenda that the impact of think tanks can be felt”. The

difficulty to show the impact of think tanks may be due, however, to the fact that this

influence is quite small. Smith (Smith, 1993), after an analysis of a century of policy

decisions in the United States (see box 3.), concludes for instance that national policies

have more often been a consequence of opportunity, circumstance and compromise than

of intellectual convictions working their way relentlessly through the political process.

Finally, the failure to show a consistent influence of think tanks on policy may also be

due to the fact, pointed out by Yee (Yee, 1996), that there are important problems in the

literature devoted to testing and analysing the effects of ideas on policies. On the one

hand, works conducted with a perspective he calls ‘meaning-oriented behavioralism’ rely

only on statistical associations and correlations that cannot prove causation or on process

tracing procedures that show the intervening cognitive steps between beliefs and policies

but do not explain how ideas and beliefs led policy-makers to take those steps. On the

other, the perspective he calls ‘institutional ideation’ focuses on the role of policy

entrepreneurs and of institutions but not on that of ideas themselves. Finally,

‘discursivists’, who analyse ideas, do not generally focus on their causal effects.

In addition to this, it is important to note that few works indeed have studied think tanks’

influence and, more generally, experts’ influence on policy from a perspective centred on

the kind of knowledge and the type of relationship between knowledge and political

action that is proposed by experts and expected by policy-makers. A notable exception is

the historical work of Smith (Smith, 1993).

BOX 3. Why are there think tanks in the United States?

The key role of knowledge

A rich historical analysis

Smith (Smith, 1993) has studied the historical development of American think tanks and, more generally of those he calls the “idea brokers”. He links the early and


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important development of relationships between research and policy in the United States to the pragmatic orientation of social science research influenced by Dewey and James who were interested in creating a social science that could be justified both as a method of scholarly investigation and as a practical tool of social improvement. Up to the end of the, 19th century, the general vision was optimistic in that it was thought that social science would help institutions operate more efficiently and would lead to a more rational appraisal of the needs of individuals. It would make for greater social harmony, with factual knowledge helping to reconcile conflicts of political ideology and economic process. And, in the end, it would provide a surer method of social improvement than reliance on corrupt and partisan political processes.

Later, at the turn of the century, the metaphors that most attracted the reform-minded proponents of social science were drawn from medicine and the related field of public health. The ideals of prevention and cure strongly appealed to those who wanted to address social and economic concerns through scientific means, and as the diagnosis metaphor caught on, it provided a compelling rationale for public intervention in many areas, including working conditions, housing for the poor, education and recreation. However, as presented in great detail by Smith, once the complexities of social and economic phenomena became apparent, social science research became more narrowly focused and less easily communicated to the ordinary citizen. And, finally, as the metaphor of prevention lost its hold on social scientists, experts seemed less willing to attempt to communicate with the general public. Rather, they sought a new public role for themselves, not as doctors seeking to prevent and cure social ills, but as scientists of efficiency — Taylor’s principles of managerial efficiency having become the new gospel —, experts in the techniques of institutional management.

This meant that researchers entered into a new relationship with both governments and citizens. They were employed first as business consultants and then as corporate managers who explained that if concepts of efficiency could be applied to men, machines and money, they could also help improve society and government. Expert administrators would make decisions not on the basis of patronage but according to criteria of competence and efficiency, defining the public interest differently from public officials. At all levels of government, experts forged an alliance with the executive branch, selling the ideal of an efficient, rational administration over the chaos and confusion of the legislative process. However, at the same time, in the, 1940s and, 1950s, public confidence in social science started to falter as a consequence of its specialization and detachment from social concerns. It was in fact World War II that restored the public’s faith in the possibilities of scientific progress. By the end of the, 1950s, a huge, government-funded market for expertise had begun to take shape in which experts would begin to speak more routinely of client-agency relationships than of public responsibility. Reports and studies typically responded to the questions raised by policymakers and their staffs.

This was the first wave of development of what we know today as think tanks. Smith shows that to survive, research organisations, dependent on contractual relationships, now had to “market” their services to the government. Ideas were “sold” and research “products” were supplied to the contractor. The Rand corporation became the model as well as the “system analysis” it used to inform policy. Drawing upon cost-benefit analysis, linear programming techniques, game theory and more,


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systems analysis was ideally suited to the needs of contract firms for which methods of general analysis were more useful than narrow substantive expertise as it is in fact, at its core, a cluster of procedures for determining how to choose among policy means, frequently with little consideration of ends. It is thus a fitting tool for the contract adviser for it limits the adviser’s role to evaluating the ways to accomplish ends set by the client.

A second wave of think tanks’ development coincided with the doubts about the state of the educational system and technological development in the US generated by the Soviet launching of Sputnik in the late, 1950s and with the election of John Kennedy who recruited numerous outside experts as “bureaucratic intellectuals” (Merton, 1968) in the administration. This sudden ascent of the expert in the, 1960s was the result of a rare coincidence of favourable circumstances: public officials emphasizing technical competence in addressing public policy, a receptive president who brought experts into important positions, agreement on national goals and on the technical means of attaining them, funding in a period of prosperity. The position of these ‘action intellectuals’ changed however rapidly and deeply from producers of new ideas to evaluators of the hundred of research project who were underway and because of this they progressively became a source not of ideas but of institutionalized scepticism. Indeed as experts and policy analysts published the results of their evaluations of the programmes carried out under the ‘War on Poverty’ global policy, their data engendered disillusionment and reinforced mistrust toward governmental action but also toward research. New institutions emerged then which criticised the excesses of American liberalism and put forward a much more conservative agenda for a new conservative counter elite (Peschek, 1987).

Smith’s historical study shows clearly that at the root of the development of American think tanks is a consensual view of knowledge which is seen both by a large fraction of researchers and by politicians and civil society in the US as a tool of improvement. This invites researchers to analyze think tanks in different countries in relation to common national views of the social role of knowledge and not only in relation to the political system. It is clear for instance that in France cultural traditions that have to do with the relation to abstraction and ideals, with the separation between universities and society and with the view of social change as coming from revolution rather than from incremental improvement leads to a less positive view on expertise while in other countries still the role of tradition or religion might countervail that of knowledge. This study also shows that the kind of research conducted by think tanks and similar organisations also counts and that some types of theories — systems analysis in the past and we can add rational choice today — and some methods — quantitative rather than qualitative — are more likely to please policy communities looking for simple and systematic procedures to make and legitimize policy choices. This points to the need for a more careful analysis of the nature of the research conducted and promoted by different research communities in different national contexts.

A typology of think tanks' experts

Smith (Smith, 1993) sees six different types of experts in the US today. The first are ‘scholar-statesmen’, that is experts who hold prominent public positions and can speak with high authority. The second are ‘policy specialists’ who devote more time to research and teaching than to policy-making and look for long-term impact by formulating broad concepts through which social problems are defined and


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investigated. The third are ‘policy consultants’ who work on short-term contracts and on problems defined by a client. They also monitor and evaluate programs and social experiments. The fourth are ‘government experts’, that is members of the bureaucracy with academic expertise who provide day-to-day analysis of policy matters. The fifth, a growing category, is that of ‘policy interpreters’. This category comprises experts who comment on social, economic and policy issues. These experts, whose chief claim to authority is their visibility and their availability, speak both to the policy-makers and to the public and set the contours for policy debate. The sixth category is that of ‘policy entrepreneurs’ who are primarily engaged in building institutions. These experts mobilize resources to push a particular proposal, create coalitions among diverse groups of researchers and activists and initiate new journals and other publishing enterprises. They can broaden the policy agenda and create new mechanisms for bringing experts into play.

2.3 Reception, co-production and resistance by street-level actors

The last way to analyze the circulation of knowledge and its possible regulatory role

through policy tools is to focus on the reactions of those who are supposed to be the

target of KRTs. We call them ‘street level actors’ as they are not always bureaucrats, as

in Lipsky’s (Lipsky, 1980) analysis, but also professionals or ordinary citizens. For

purpose of convenience, we adopt a highly questionable top down approach in our

analysis, since we start with the association of citizens along the policy process and go on

with the reception and finally the local redefinition of KRTs. Of course, the three

dimensions are interconnected in reality and not always ordered like this.

2.3.1 Toward a growing participation of citizens?

Two kinds of research orientations are interested in the participation of citizens in policy

making and regulation. The first are analyses of the role and functioning of different

‘forums’ or ‘arenas’ in which motivated citizens can intervene and can influence the

definition and use of a KRT (Dewey, 1964, François and Neveu, 1999, Callon, Lascoumes

and Barthe, 2001, Rosanvallon, 2006). Callon, Lascoumes and Barthe (Callon, Lascoumes

and Barthe, 2001) for example notice that there are more and more ‘hybrid forums’ in

different policy processes — such as ‘focus groups’, wise men committees, ‘consensus

conferences’, local information commissions or wide public inquiries — that they define as

public spaces of dialogue composed of heterogeneous social actors: professionals,

scientists but also laymen. They argue that in a context of growing scientific

uncertainties, the main political stake is not to bound the political debate to scientific and

technical aspects, but to open it to laymen, to make them become ‘amateurs’ — i.e.

persons who have a ‘social expertise’ on the phenomenon under consideration — and to

develop what they call a ‘dialogical’ democracy. The second type of research studies is

interested in the concrete bottom-up mobilisation of citizens who try to develop their own


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expertise. These studies are part of the global literature on social mobilisation and social

conflicts (for example Touraine, 1993; Neveu, 1996) and of sector based studies on the

growing role of users of public services (Weller, 1998, Buisson-Fenet, 2004), two fields of

research that we cannot analyse in detail here.

2.3.2 The sociology of the reception of reforms

Since the founding work of Hirschman (Hirschman, 1970) on three ideal-typical

responses — exit, voice and loyalty —, to decline and coercion in organisations —and its

explicit use in political science (see for example Rose, 1988), the sociology of reception

has developed in a disorganised manner and remains sector or subject-based. It

concerns for instance the reception of media messages (Klaus, 1986, Wilson, 1993,

Miller, 1998), or that of literary works (Dirx, 2000; Charpentier, 2006). In box 4, we give

some examples of the analysis of the reception of educational reforms.

Box 4. The different levels of reception of educational reforms

Three main levels

Referring to Ricoeur’s (Ricoeur, 1985; Ricoeur, 2001) categories, Mangez (Mangez, 2006) stresses that reform is both a symbolic space where ideas and pedagogical knowledge circulate and a social space where different social actors meet and move, in ways that vary according to specific political contexts (Ball, 1994). Thus three main levels of reception can be distinguished (van Zanten, 2004). The first one concerns the national variations of international models through processes of hybridisation and ‘creolisation’ that makes them take new meanings and integrate into national ideological and organisational frameworks (Anderson-Levitt, 2001, van Zanten and Ball, 2000, Maroy, 2006). The second level concerns the work of mediation done by intermediate actors — such as inspectors or advisors - whose modes of recruitment, professional careers and practical imperatives differ from those of teachers (Lessard and Tardif, 1999, Rayou, 1999, Mangez, 2006). The third level is that of the classroom and of teachers who are both receivers and producers of reforms.

No reform without the teachers?

According to Hess et al. (Hess et al., 2000), one of the points of consensus which emerged from the reform efforts that characterized the period of the, 1980s and, 1990s in US education was that the effectiveness of reforms depends largely on the teachers who actually implement changes in classrooms (Hess, 1998, Wagner, 1994). Historically, reforms lacking the support of staff in the classroom core do not produce improvement in the schools (Elmore, 1996, Mirel, 1994, Pauly, 1991, Sarason, 1990,1996). In fact, because of their autonomy and isolation, teachers enjoy considerable power over how educational policies are implemented (Lipsky, 1980) and on how classrooms operate in practice (Elmore, 1997). They can easily denounce the discrepancy between pedagogical theories and ‘best practices’ proposed by researchers or policy-makers (Huberman and Miles, 1984, Hargreaves, 1984,1993, Anderson-Levitt, 2001). They mediate between educational policy and practice (Brain,


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Reid and Boyes, 2006). Researchers thus agree on the idea that the main factors that can improve teaching and learning are the attraction and retention of committed professionals and the cultivation of teacher expertise (Schön, 1994, Carter and Cunningham, 1997, Elmore, Peterson and McCarthy, 1996, Fullan, 1991, Hess, 1999, Johnson and Pajares, 1996, Murphy, 1991, Odden, 1991).

Reforms and practices in class

Schoolteachers reposition themselves in the face of rapid and extensive change. Local responses to public policy prompt teachers to become increasingly pragmatic in their philosophy and practice. They tend to appropriate all that can enrich their practices — which are characterised by complexity, emergency and uncertainty — and oscillate between routines, do-it-yourself and improvisation (Huberman, 1983; Perrenoud, 1994 and, 2001). Two forms of pragmatism have been distinguished in the literature: ‘Principle pragmatism’ characterises teachers who feel generally positive toward recent reforms and able to affirm their pedagogic identities by drawing eclectically on a range of educational practices and traditions. ‘Contingent pragmatism’ is adopted by teachers who are opposed to reform. Dori and Herscovitz (Dori and Herscovitz, 2006) show the process that teachers go through gradually moving from exposure to new teaching methods to implementing these new methods. In their case study, teachers were exposed to a long-term professional development program aimed at educating and training them to teach interdisciplinary topics, active classroom teaching and ended up in actually implementing interdisciplinary and active classroom teaching. Wood (Wood, 2004) explains the process of creative mediation, adaptation but also resistance that teachers use, basing themselves on their professional knowledge and expertise, to translate reforms. Using Goodlad’s concept of ‘educational renewal’ (Goodlad, 1994) to bridge the traditional disconnection between teacher education, schools and content area disciplines.

Despite the fact that research is scattered, recent works in the sociology of reform

reception provides us with interesting perspectives that link with others on the

‘reflexivity’ of modern societies (Giddens, 1984, 1990, Hargreaves, 2003). They are part

of a ‘cognitive turning point in social science’ in that they are interested in the analysis of

the interpretative frameworks that professionals — regarded as reflexive and critical

individuals — elaborate in specific contexts and according to their priorities in terms of

values and interests (Ball, 1998, Draelants, 2006) when they have, as ‘street level

bureaucrats’, to implement a reform (Crozier and Friedberg, 1977). Social actors are

described as autonomous and as having a critical capacity, the latter being either a tool

for mobilisation (Boltanski and Chiapello, 1999; van Zanten et al., 2002) or an

explanation or a justification for lack of participation in reform (Martucelli, 2002). Thus

reception becomes “a cognitive activity through which messages can be accepted,

refused or negotiated” (Mangez, 2006).

Three main theoretical fields can be explored with respect to the reception of reforms.

The first one in interested in the study of the modernisation of public services (Dewey,

1964, Weller, 1998, 1999, Dubois, 1999) and in actual bureaucratic work when


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employees and managers have to implement a reform they refuse. These studies often

borrow concepts from theories of social action that consider that actors do not

automatically assimilate social patterns but appropriate them through different logics

(Ladrière, Pharo and Quéré, 1993, Dubet, 1994, 2002, Lahire, 1998, Quéré, 2002). The

second one is the sociology of institutions which borrows either from organisational

sociology when it describes how social actors develop strategies to master uncertainty

and preserve their autonomy (Crozier and Friedberg, 1977) or from ethnomethodology

when it tries to understand rationales and moral frameworks that professionals and

citizens refer to in their ordinary activities (van Zanten et al., 2002, van Zanten, 2007) or

from a new institutionalism which considers action to be a kind of practical rationale

through which individuals both use and shape existing institutional models (Draelants,

2006). The third theoretical stream uses the sociology of translation developed by Callon

(Callon, 1986) to argue that reception is fundamentally a production of new knowledge

according to pre-existing interests (Derouet, 2000, 2002). Reception is not anymore the

final vertical outcome of knowledge transmission but the experimentation of new forms

of knowledge. It is fundamentally a definition, or a redefinition, of an issue by street-

level actors so that this definition complies with their interests and representations. To

make sense in a social sphere different from the one where it was produced, knowledge

must be partially deconstructed and reconstructed according to the main stakes of the

sphere under consideration (Derouet, 2000). Thus reception induces many feedbacks on

the original policy or regulation tool. This redefinition can be analysed through many

perspectives. For example, the sociology of technology insists on ‘the logics of use’ tinged

with subjectivity and pragmatic rationality (Perriault, 1989) whereas the sociology of

management focuses on the redefinition of management devices understood in a

Foucauldian perspective (Boussard, 2006).

2.3.3 The local redefinition of reforms and the role of KRTs

Since in these different theoretical perspectives reception becomes more and more an

active term designating a specific and highly cognitive interaction, it is possible to

contemplate KRT as an opportunity for coordination for different local actors (Star and

Griesemer, 1989, Timmermans and Berg, 2003). Several types of studies try to explain

why and how. A first group of studies insists on the cognitive properties of KRTs. In

reference to Löwy (Löwy, 1992), it could be argued that a KRT relying on a “boundary

concept” — i.e. on a polysemic concept which favours the establishment of links between

heterogeneous scientific fields and between very different actors— is more likely to

enable participation. A second group of studies is interested in the analysis of the

evolution of professional identities. Buisson-Fenet and Le Naour (Buisson-Fenet and Le

Naour, 2007) for example show that the implementation of a new regulation tool implies,

for the professions involved in the policy process, to reinterpret their political role so that

finally this implementation can be regarded as a social space of struggles between

different professions which want to preserve their own monopoly of action. The


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educational sector provides a good example of processes of coordination in the case of

teachers (see box 5). A third group of studies, who use an interactionist framework,

show that opportunities for coordination depend on the nature of local interactions and

on the argumentative capacity of actors (Weller, 1999, Dubois, 1999).

Box 5. Reforms, KRTs and the professional identity of teachers

Researchers in English-speaking and in French-speaking countries have underlined that reforms complexify and intensify teachers’ work (Hargreaves, 1984, Lessard and Tardif, 1999, Cattonar and Mangez, 2000, Maroy, 2006). In addition to this, some of them have argued that there is a tension between the values of the majority of reforms and the dominant pedagogical conceptions of teachers, which are the result of their training, of their experience and of their vision of teaching as predominantly affective and emotional work (Mac Ness et al., 2003).

Between a necessary adaptation and the fear to loose their professional

autonomy

Change in educational policy sets new and more challenging demands on teachers, which are often in conflict with their beliefs and value systems. According to Vandeyar (Vandeyar, 2005), these conflicting demands are made through changes in assessment policy and changes in the target population of learners: the process of assessment is not only technical, but also social and personal. Proudford (Proudford, 1998), who defends the idea of an ‘emancipatory’ approach to educational changes, underlines that there are three key dimensions involved in teachers’ responses to reform: professional confidence, professional interpretation and professional consciousness. Teachers mediate the external pressure set upon them through the ‘filter’ of they own professional identities. According to Locke, Vulliamy, Webb and Hill (Locke, Vulliamy, Webb and Hill, 2005), there have been shifts in the meaning of the terms ‘autonomy’, ‘altruism’ and ‘knowledge’, which are embodied in the classical definition of professionalism: these shifts reflect policy–makers’ moves from a ‘professional-contextualist’ conception of teacher professionalism towards a ‘technocratic-reductionist’ conception that characterizes neo-liberal educational reforms in many countries. In their study, they show that teachers experience increasing constraints on their autonomy as they become far more subject to ‘extrinsic’ accountability demands. Whether these demands are perceived as enhancing or diminishing teacher professionalism depends however on the manner in which they are filtered through the profession’s defining quality, namely teachers’ altruistic concerns for the welfare of the children in their care. According to Wood (Wood, 2004), a new “paradigm war” has emerged from national policy frameworks in education: in England the policy framework for the early childhood phase (age 3-7) has created tensions and dilemmas for teachers as they strive to reconcile their professional knowledge with increasingly prescriptive frameworks. So unintended negative consequences have arisen as an outcome of the ‘high pressure-high support’ policy levers that operated to improve teacher effectiveness. Johnson (Johnson, 2003) shows that if efforts to promote greater collaboration between teachers help most teachers feel better about themselves and their work, and provides them with opportunities to learn from each other, a minority of teachers are negative about new teaming arrangements claiming that the changes have led to an increase in damaging competition between teams for


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resources, recognition and power. Bushnell (Bushnell, 2003) shows how educational reforms subordinate teachers and reduce their opportunities for professionalism: as in Foucault’s image of the panopticon, educational administration and the public participate in monitoring teachers’ practices, leaving teachers in a difficult position to use their professional autonomy and reducing opportunities for professionalisation. Teachers themselves are made to participate in their own subordination and are left with limited opportunities for resistance. Van Veen et al. (Van Veen et al., 2005) show how teachers’ identity can be affected in a context of reforms through a case study of a teacher and the analysis of his emotions of enthusiasm for the reforms but also of the ways his identity and concerns are affected, resulting in a loss of reform enthusiasm.

The evolution of the perception of professional identity: what about new

teachers?

Rayou and van Zanten (Rayou and van Zanten, 2004) argue that new teachers are less hostile to pedagogical reforms. According to Achinstein and Ogawa (Achinstein and Ogawa, 2006), the resistance of new teachers provide an extreme example of teachers’ resistance because novices are especially prone to adopt the instructional ‘logics’ embedded in state instructional policies (Coburn, 2001) and to enact practices that reflect their districts’ approaches to instruction. They may also be extremely vulnerable because they can be dismissed and might be expected to have only tentative commitments to professional principles, which are defined as “conceptions about teaching and professionalism in which teachers view themselves as professional with specialised expertise, who have discretion to employ repertories of instructional strategies to meet the individual needs of diverse students, hold high expectations for themselves and students, foster learning communities among students, and participate in self-critical communities of practice” (Achinstein and Ogawa, 2006, p. 32). According to Hess et al. (Hess et al., 2000), veteran teachers become cynical about reform because, in recent decades, they have witnessed numerous reform efforts that have come and gone (Chubb and Moe, 1990, Hess, 1998, Hill et al., 1997, Johnson and Pajares, 1996, Tyack and Cuban, 1995, Wagner, 1994). Discouraging personal experience through reforms encourage veteran teachers to view reform efforts as an institutional imposition and to lose interest in changes that promise to yet again remake education (Mohrman and Lawler, 1996).

3. Conclusion Towards a specific and common

theoretical framework for our research?

It is impossible to conclude this survey with a precise theoretical framework because,

although we have tried to show that there are many rich analyses and descriptions of the

links between knowledge and regulation in different scientific fields, we have also insisted

on the fact that there are very few global theories that focus precisely on the links

between the circulation of knowledge and regulation. True, some theories in sector-based

approaches have a global ambition (see for example the sociology of cognitive motives


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developed by Benamouzig, 2005 in the health sector), but the possibility to apply them

to other sectors remains to be tested. This means that our project will probably have to

create new theory rather than just use existing theoretical models and that it is

necessary to decide together whether we should adopt a specific theoretical approach

and which one or rather which combination of existing approaches. For instance, how

useful would it be to bring together the sociology of social and technical networks and

the sociology of public action networks (see section 2.2.3)? To inform this necessary

discussion within the knowandpol consortium, we provide a final list of very open and still

under-developed theoretical questions that came to our minds during the elaboration of

this survey.

Box 6. Some theoretical questions

1/ To what extend can the example of economic policies be generalized to the education and health sectors?

Theories on paradigm and ‘referential’ change (Hall, 1993, Jobert and Muller, 1987) were developed in reference to changes from keynesianism to liberal economic policies. This critical episode — on the importance of which there is no perfect agreement among researchers — may seem too particular to prevents us from adapting this model in our research unless we are able to specify strong paradigms in the two sectors under consideration and key critical tensions between them. 2/ How to interpret the different calls for new governance skills: is it the triumph of pragmatism? In France for example, Chanut (Chanut, 2004) has examined the training in New Public Management given by a public school for civil servants working in the equipment sector. She concludes that the knowledge transmitted is mainly ‘ordinary knowledge’, based on pragmatism and adaptation skills. On the other hand, Bezes (Bezes, 2000) highlights that New Public Management is only a new leitmotiv for State reform, which began at least two decades ago, and that it does not imply specific new knowledge. According to their will to reform or not their administration, civil servants may use more or less this doctrine in order to legitimate their action. This points to the necessary distinction that we should make in our research between the stream of political discourse and the streams of policy and of ordinary action as concerns KRTs.

3/ What can we learn from research on the modernisation of administrations?

If there are few conclusions concerning the links between knowledge and regulation in the mainstream literature on governance and regulation, can we learn more from research in specific domains such as the modernisation of administrations? It is hard to give a general answer since this literature is often very dependent on national contexts. Concerning France for example, first works clearly focused on ‘sociographic’ dimensions (Darbel and Schnapper, 1972) or organisational ones (Dupuy and Thoenig, 1985). More recent works integrate the analysis of professional careers (Rouban, 1994, Rouban, 1995, Rouban, 1999, Hassenteufel et al., 1999) but they rarely address the question of the knowledge base of reform (what knowledge can these professions defend? How is it integrated in their concrete work?). Bezes (Bezes,


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2002) however analyses how French high civil servants mix different representations and sources of knowledge on administration malfunctioning to tell a new story about the need for administration reform in order to suggest their utility and heroism.

4/ Is there a “knowledge path dependency” ?

To what extend, knowledge regulation depends on former knowledge, on the cognitive routines of actors involved in the policy process? This is a question that, to our knowledge, has not been addressed in the literature and one that we might try to tackle in our empirical studies.

5/ How heuristic is the definition of technocracy as capturing and recycling knowledge?

Are there technocracies in our field of research? If there are, what does it mean about the concrete functioning of this sector: why such a technocracy is tolerated by political leaders and, possibly, public opinion? How do long-standing professionals manage to remain in decision spheres?

6/ What are the consequences for our project of the definition of professionalization of public actors as the construction of a knowledge monopoly?

Each theory within the sociology of profession has its own taxonomy and interest for us. For example, Abbott (Abbott, 1988) distinguishes three steps in the job of professionals which, when they are used for the analysis of the concrete work of the actors who intervene in knowledge regulation, may all have an impact in the policy process: diagnosis (when the professional imposes a definition of a problem), treatment (when the professional classifies the problem according to his or her own competency and experience) and inference (when according to the treatment he or she contemplates different solutions).

7/ How do experts pass on strategic information in the policy process and how do they use their knowledge to cope with a particular situation? In Génard and Jacob (Genard and Jacob, 2004) for example, experts pass on strategic information because of their particular institutional position, which allows them to be both very close to street-level bureaucrats and to some political leaders. And their expertise often relies on their capacity to cover different territories and so to propose comparative conclusions. Crozier and Friedberg (Crozier and Friedberg, 1977) also speak about the role of “secant marginals” in the transformation of organizations. These are people who belong to an organisation and who, because of their professional background and choices, are marginal in it. Their power lies in fact in their capacity to cross sectors and organisations, to gather pieces of information from different social spheres and to import them in their organisation to make it evolve. 8/ How relevant is the triple definition of KRTs as the composition of particular world visions, the implementation of policy beliefs and the materialization of a ''cognitive policy network''? (See section 2. 2.)

The question here is: can we avoid in this project to adopt and advocate a particular theoretical vision about “knowledge entrepreneurs” when analyzing the KRT? These viewpoints have all in common to insist on the actors behind the regulation tools. But the sociology of interest groups clearly differs from the policy network analysis for


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example. What to choose?

9/ Despite its strong prescriptive and pragmatic character can we use the knowledge management literature in our research ?

It might be an useful perspective, if taken critically, to examine how all kinds or organisations, political, professional, commercial and non-profit in our sectors participate in the commodification, capitalisation and external marketisation of knowledge under pressure from clients, stakeholders, or decision-makers. It can also be used to analyse processes of internal transfer, distribution and retention of knowledge in organisations as well as the subtle distinctions that organizations may make between employees and managers according to their knowledge-value.

10/ If think tanks are not a universal phenomenon or a not very important one is some countries, can we use the literature on this topic to inform the analysis of other State, private or other sector organisations role in the production and circulation of regulation knowledge?

For this we need working definitions of what we would consider as ‘idea brokers’ and ‘policy thinking and planning organisations” in each country and ways to measure their intellectual autonomy and their political influence.

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