Credibility in Policy Expertise: The Function of Boundaries Between Research and Policy

As science becomes an increasingly crucial resource for addressing complex challenges in society, extensive demands are placed upon the researchers who produce it. Creating valuable expert knowledge that intervenes in policy or practice requires knowledge brokers to facilitate interactions at the boundary between research and policy. Yet, existing research lacks a compelling account of the ways in which brokerage is performed to gain credibility. Drawing on mixed‐method analysis of 12 policy research settings, I outline a novel set of strategies for attaining symbolic power, whereby policy experts position themselves and others via conceptual distances drawn between the “world of ideas” and the “world of policy and practice.” Disciplinary distance works to situate research as either disciplinary or undisciplinary, epistemic distance creates a boundary between complex specialist research and direct digestible outputs, temporal distance represents the separation of slow rigorous research and agile responsive analysis, and economic distance situates research as either pure and intrinsic or marketable and fundable. I develop a theoretical account that unpacks the boundaries between research communities and shows how these boundaries permit policy research actors to achieve various strategic aims.     

‘A Rather Undefined Social Position and Public Recognition’: Professionalisation,Status and Masculinity in Provincial Museums,c.1870–1930

This article examines the background, careers and self-presentation of the first generation of British museum curators in local government-funded provincial museums, c.1900, to explore the issue of masculinity among the lower-middle classes. It argues that while such men were sometimes mocked for the lack of masculinity they showed in their domestic lives, a focus on their professional lives reveals a different set of problems facing them as they attempted to be manly men; curatorial roles, like others available to the lower-middle classes, involved a dependence on local elites, and required many of the skills and attributes which were being colonised by new women professionals. The study then examines the tactics used, with some success, by such men to assert a professional masculinity, focusing on their identification with their museum, their development of a professional body and their investment in manly physical activities.     

TREES AS TOOLS,TREES AS TEXT: STRUGGLES OVER RESOURCES IN ZAMBRANA-CHACUEY,DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

The people of the Rural Federation of Zambrana-Chacuey, in the Dominican Republic, are engaged in complex and multivalent struggles over resources in a forest and farm landscape subject to rapid land use change. Acacia mangium, a fast growing tree recently introduced as a timber cash crop, has become an object, a site and a tool of struggle in conflicts between local and state interests, and between women and men. Until recently, tree cutting has been illegal, so the government-approved acacia has reversed the role of trees from liabilities to assets in land tenure. The acacia has also begun to alter the pattern of land use, land cover, and the species composition of the region's forests, gardens, and fields, and could replace women's diverse gardens with single species blocks of timber.