Description

 
Invitation to apply
Are you researching in social or public policy? Governments everywhere claim that they are
making policy based on evidence. Our research project has been scrutinising the policyknowledge
relationship and we have developed resources that you may find helpful. The
Knowledge and Policy Summer School will provide support to PhD students wishing to study
the relationship between knowledge and policy across Europe.
This is a competitive call. Successful applicants will be awarded a grant to cover their travel and
accommodation costs. Applications should include a brief CV, the preferred sessions (selected from
the list below) and a one to two page argument explaining the relationship between the applicant’s
research interests and the summer school’s objectives as reflected in the description of the sessions
below. See also the guide for applicants page 2.
The summer school offers young researchers a forum to deepen their academic skills and extend
their networking. The methodology for the summer school requires each participant to act as a
discussant for one session: each participant will be assigned a specific paper that he/she will present
and discuss, in relation to his/her own work.
The three day summer school will include two days organized around thematic sessions with active
participation from all participants. On the third and final day, the programme will be completed by
lectures on the role of knowledge in the construction of education and health policy across Europe.
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www.knowandpol.eu
Project n° 0288848-2 co funded by the European Commission within the Sixth Framework Program
Program overview
The summer school will address the following key questions and issues :
- What is knowledge?
- Forms of knowledge: embodied, encoded, enacted?
- Researching the powerful, interviewing the elite
- Does experience-based knowledge matter?
- Knowledge and knowledge regimes
- Knowledge, policy and the problem of comparison
- Trends and changes in the knowledge – policy relationship
- Knowledge based regulation tools
- Public action, or the analysis of complexity
Brief guide for applicants
Applications should be sent by May 20th by email to bernard.delvaux@uclouvain.be,
eric.mangez@uclouvain.be and F.Schoenaers@ulg.ac.be (address to all three). Successful applicants
will be awarded a grant to cover their travel and accommodation costs.
Applications (in Word doc attachment) should contain the following information
- name, surname, postal address, email address
- name of the university/institution
- name of thesis director (when possible)
- a brief CV (one page), including publications (if any)
- the title and subject of the PhD project
- a one-page argument emphasizing relationships between the applicant’s research interests
and the summer school’s objectives
- the 3 preferred sessions (in order of preference 1 to 3)
- expected costs for travelling to Brussels
- number of nights (a maximum of 4 nights will be funded by the summer school)
Practical details
The summer school will be held in Brussels, at the Fondation Universitaire, Rue d’Egmont 11, 1000
Brussels. It will start at 10 am on Wednesday 21 September and will end at 5 pm on Friday 23
September. Information about possible accommodation will be sent to successful applicants in good
time. The summer school will be held in English
The summer school is supported by the Graduate School of Social Sciences from the French-speaking
Community of Belgium
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www.knowandpol.eu
Project n° 0288848-2 co funded by the European Commission within the Sixth Framework Program
Detailed program
Session 1. What is knowledge?
Ordinary understandings of knowledge often view it as a mirror of reality. Knowledge then, as a
mirror, is not affected by, nor does it affect the reality that it mirrors. A series of research findings
emphasize the need to develop a different view of what knowledge is and how it works. Knowledge,
it is argued, needs to be seen as a very “active” element in constructing the social. Quoting
MacKenzie (2006) in his effort to understand the role of “financial models” in shaping the market, we
may argue that knowledge works as “an engine not a camera”. We would suggest conceiving
knowledge as a two-sided engine which rearticulates the past and constructs the future.
Session 2. Forms of knowledge: Embodied, encoded, enacted?
The session involves the conceptualization, operationalization and analysis of the nature and use of
knowledge in public policy: this will comprise an articulation of the embodied/encoded/enacted
framework set out in our international study of the work of WHO and a series of case studies
exploring its use in different contexts.
Session 3. Interviewing the elite, researching the powerful
While researching the powerful with qualitative methodologies, one can distinguish between
different “moments” in the process of interviewing: a moment of access, a scene of interaction and a
scene of exit and conclusions. Any one of these three “moments” can be understood and analysed as
a knowledge-related social interaction worthy of a reflexive analysis.
The scene of access includes all actions and interactions necessary to gain access to the field (getting
in touch with an actor and presenting oneself, obtaining an appointment, sometimes being delayed,
or rescheduled). How do such actions and possible difficulties inform us about the very object of our
analysis?
The scene of interaction is the interview itself, which can be very informative beyond the words
uttered and the ideas expressed. How is the scene set up and ordered? How does the interaction
evolve – the tone of the participants, including signs of deference or authority, and so on?
The scene of exit and conclusions is related to the type of feedback that the researchers provide their
informants with. It includes the reactions of the interviewees and possible negotiation about the
content of the work. How are our analyses received by those they actually speak of, when the latter
are powerful?
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www.knowandpol.eu
Project n° 0288848-2 co funded by the European Commission within the Sixth Framework Program
Session 4. Does experience-based knowledge matter?
Experience-based knowledge is characterised by the fact that it is contextualised, not subject to
disciplinary segmentation, and often circulates in the form of anecdotes and stories. For a long time
it was regarded as of little value in politics. But nowadays, in different ways depending on the
country and the sector, it is presented as an important resource for public action. Two types of
arguments are used to support such discourse: axiological (with reference to the democratic ideal of
participation by all), and instrumental (with reference to the greater efficacy of policies based on
participation). The incorporation of experience-based knowledge in public action thus acquires a
paradigmatic status in some countries and sectors, at least at the rhetorical level.
This workshop aims to explore the issues (of definition and also of concrete uses) raised by
experience-based knowledge in the framework of public action. Beyond the effort to clarify this
polysemic term, attention will be focused on how this type of knowledge makes itself heard and the
questions of power that inevitably arise once it is mobilised.
Session 5. Knowledge and knowledge regimes
Various processes increase the circulation of knowledge and (policy) ideas across Europe and
beyond. Ideas however do not spread like a virus: they are recontextualized in different cultural,
political and administrative settings. Understanding knowledge as a social construct means that it is
constructed and reconstructed by social groups who are themselves situated in a context marked by
its own past. The notion of contextuality of knowledge means that knowledge is not only about
“what you know”; it is also about “who you are”, as a community (even a transnational community)
or as an individual (who may be an international expert). The contextuality of knowledge and notions
such as “community-based knowledge” or “local knowledge culture” must be considered
simultaneously for a plurality of “levels”, “contexts”, “spaces” or “communities”, whether they be
the national context, the level of a sector, the level of a community of users, or that of a given group
of professionals, the “spaces” invested and created by a transnational community or the level of
Europe for example.
The main hypothesis we wish to explore in this session is that such different spaces might develop
different views on knowledge and therefore generate different “knowledge regimes”. The knowledge
regime hypothesis should not be understood as a strictly cognitive hypothesis. Its point is rather to
identify possible relations between political and institutional arrangements, cultural traditions and
knowledge utilization.
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www.knowandpol.eu
Project n° 0288848-2 co funded by the European Commission within the Sixth Framework Program
Session 6. Knowledge, policy and the problem of comparison
Classical comparison draws on a set of assumptions. It assumes that time is linear and space
geographical; that the “units” of comparison “exist” – that they exist as such “before” the
comparison starts – that the “units” are not affected by the comparison – that the person who
compares is not affected by the “units” that are being compared. There are however good grounds
to be wary of each of these assumptions.
Such a critique of comparison raises questions for research and governance.
The first concerns the role of comparison in research. It questions in particular the construction of
knowledge in and through international (comparative) research projects. Such projects bring
together a variety of traditions, each of which carries its own understanding of knowledge and its
own ways of knowing. How can they produce knowledge together? What kind of methodological
issues does this raise? If knowledge is socially constructed, how can one think of (international)
comparison?
The second issue concerns the role of comparison in governing. If comparison works as a mode of
governance, which potentially affects the reality that it compares, then its governing potential needs
to be investigated. Comparative knowledge in particular tends to function as a means of governance,
affecting the “units” that are being compared, transforming them in particular by shaping the way
people think of – and hence govern – themselves.
Session 7. Trends and changes in the knowledge – policy relationship
Various factors have significantly changed the relationships between knowledge and policy: more
knowledge is being produced, the forms of knowledge are diversifying, and there is greater
international circulation of knowledge. What is referred to as ‘the knowledge society’ is in fact a
society of knowledges. In Europe, information and expertise are now more widely available and more
widely distributed than ever before. At the same time, expectations of transparency and public
accountability have increased. Knowledge is both contested and a means of contestation: it has
become both vehicle and substance of politics. Such a trend towards what we may call postbureaucracy
generates various changes. The nature of knowledge itself is changing. It is now used for
governing. The new role of knowledge in policy / politics also calls for a new type of actor: reflexive,
accountable, creative.
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www.knowandpol.eu
Project n° 0288848-2 co funded by the European Commission within the Sixth Framework Program
Session 8. Knowledge based regulation tools
Knowledge is increasingly used in the area of regulation. Indicators, evaluations, audits, best
practices, evidence-based practices, etc are on the increase. They tend to replace normative or
incentives-based regulation of a more conventional variety. Several phenomena explain this trend.
First, it is growing more difficult to convince people that intervention through norms that target a
given factor will have the expected impact. Second, there is a widespread perception that regulation
through norms or rules is less appropriate in social systems characterized by very broad and
increasingly dense interdependencies. The development of instruments of knowledge-based
regulation also stems from the policies of actors who have no legal or financial instruments of
intervention, and whose knowledge therefore constitutes one of their main means of action. These
organizations – such as WHO and the OECD – sometimes serve as “evaluative third-parties”
positioned between users and producers, between citizens and policy-makers, and sometimes even
change the nature of these parties’ interactions.
The strength of these instruments of regulation is their ability to conceal normative proclivities
behind cognitive factors, which are portrayed as value-free or ideology-free, whence the term by
which they are sometimes known: ‘soft governance’. Nonetheless, these instruments in fact give the
targeted actors greater leeway, serve as a vehicle for knowledge that is always open to criticism; to
be sure, the same knowledge can often be mobilized to support opposing arguments. Thus, these
instruments of regulation, which are supposed to compensate for the relative inefficiency of more
conventional instruments, in fact only partially compensate for the weaknesses of the latter.
Session 9. Public action, or the analysis of complexity
It has now quite generally understood that public policies are not as linear and state-centred as used
to be supposed and that attention has to be paid to the multiplicity and diversity of the actors, the
composite character of the public actor, the attenuation of hierarchical relations between actors, the
relativising of the impact of the moment of political decision-making, the non-linearity of the
processes and the fragmentation and flexibility of public action.
Such options require the researcher to shift and enlarge his/her field of investigation. But approaches
in terms of public action are not accompanied by a unified theory capable of addressing this
expanded, more complex field. Moreover, this expansion raises methodological questions that are
particularly acute when one examines the role of knowledge in such processes. The aim of the
workshop is to discuss such issues, particularly in the light of the thinking and practices developed in
the course of KNOWandPOL research.
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www.knowandpol.eu
Project n° 0288848-2 co funded by the European Commission within the Sixth Framework Program
The organizing committee
Bernard Delvaux, Université catholique de Louvain
Eric Mangez, Université Catholique de Louvain
Frederic Schoenaers, Université de Liège
The scientific committee
Iván Bajomi, Eötvos Lórand University, Hungary
João Barroso, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
Bernard Delvaux, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium
Gábor Eross, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary
Richard Freeman, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Adel Kiss, University of Transylvania - Sapientia, Romania
Eric Mangez, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium
Christian Maroy, Université de Montréal, Canada
Philippe Mossé, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France
Armin Nassehi, Ludwig-Maximilian Universität, Germany
Jenny Ozga, University of Oxford, UK
Helge Ramsdal, Østfold University College, Norway
Zoltan Rostas, University of Transylvania - Sapientia, Romania
Frederic Schoenaers, Université de Liège, Belgium
Agnès van Zanten, SciencesPo, CNRS, France
The summer school is supported by the Graduate School of Social Sciences
from the French-speaking Community of Belgium