John King Social scientists institutional work: the theoretical background to my work April 2013

The relationship between knowledge and action has been of interest to scholars from the ancient Greeks onwards (Rich 1979) and social scientists have been preoccupied with the possibility of using their knowledge to improve society since the emergence of sociology in the 19th century (Weiss 1995). During the 1970s social scientists found that despite their concern for the betterment of society there was very little evidence that their work was actually influencing public policy (Albaek 1995). In response, the knowledge utilisation field, dedicated to understanding how research influences policy and practice, emerged from work on the diffusion of innovations (Rogers 2003) and grew to encompass work from both political and management science traditions (Contandriopoulos et al. 2010). Analysis of research utilisation is complicated by the many different meanings of use (Weiss 1979) and by the way in which scholarly observations about social processes tend to disappear back in to the society they originate from (Giddens 1984). In the traditional enlightenment mode of knowledge production, the accumulation of knowledge is seen as a good in itself which will lead eventually to social improvement, but a considerable amount of time may elapse between the conduct of social research and its use during which the benefits to knowledge can be extremely unequally distributed (Calhoun 2006). An important motivation for conducting research about knowledge utilisation has therefore been to discover generally effective strategies which may reduce the time taken for knowledge to diffuse into society. Trenchant debates about the onto-epistemological status of knowledge about society notwithstanding (Burrell & Morgan 1979), most social scientists would agree that they cannot make precisely the same claims about the objectivity of their work as can scholars of natural science. Knowledge about society is not a commodity and cannot be wholly separated from the substance of policy and politics (Fox 2010). This is why, reviewing the literature on knowledge exchange in collective settings characterised by high levels of interdependency, Contandrioupoulos et al. (2010) conclude that research is unlikely to provide context-independent evidence for the intrinsic efficacy of knowledge exchange strategies.

As a result, models of research-to-action or knowledge exchange processes which describe how social research can influence public policy or professional practice have become increasingly complex, locally situated and context dependent (Nutley et al. 2007). Early linear models picturing the steady accumulation of knowledge through a sequence of rational decision-making stages (Knott & Wildavsky 1980) have been followed by multi-dimensional characterisations of knowledge producer and user communities (Caplan 1979) and extensive lists of barriers to and facilitators of knowledge transfer (Crewe & Young 2002). The recognition of the importance of context and its inclusion as a variable within positivist frameworks inevitably leads towards models of knowledge exchange which become progressively more complex, generating arguments for the adoption of an approach based on complexity theory (Lemay & Sa 2012), or to calls for the adoption of revised modernist approaches which blend a social constructivist emphasis on local knowledges, contexts and interpretations with the objectivity espoused by traditional models of research dissemination (Cousins & Simon 1996). Unfortunately, little attention has been paid to the ontological and epistemological problems which result from crashing subjectivist and objectivist visions of research use into one another. Accepting that knowledge is both locally situated and dependent for its transmission on an objective social world leads to an ontology of practice which focuses on the practical accomplishments of individual actors who are both constrained and enabled by social structure. Practice theories grounded in the activities and practical reasoning of actors, such as Bourdieus praxaeology and Giddens structuration theory (Bourdieu 1990; Giddens 1979; Giddens 1984), are explicit in their attempts to bridge the gap between subjectivism and objectivism which remains unresolved in knowledge exchange theory. Giddens work bridges the divide between social constructivist and structuralist views of the social world by identifying agency and structure as a duality rather than a dualism. For Giddens, social systems are the overlapping, unstable results of ongoing practices, regular arrays of human activities which are embodied by actors and materially mediated (Tsoukas 2010). Practices which are the most enduring are institutions. Institutions enable and constrain action and rationality by preselecting the opportunities and choices which actors are able to perceive (Barley & Tolbert 1997): as practices are the way things are done locally, institutions are the way things are in society, prohibiting actors from recognising alternatives. Although institutional theorists have focused on institutions themselves and how they affect actors (Lawrence & Suddaby 2006), a practice perspective stresses that institutions are not immutable but are dependent upon and produced by action (Berger & Luckmann 1966), offering a space for strategic agency in the reshaping of society. Institutions

can be modified through the action of individuals or organisations: Barley (1997) offers the acquisition of suffrage by women and the dismantling of apartheid as examples. Some practices anchor and organise others (Swidler 2001). Knowing how to go on in conversation (Wittgenstein 1967) and how to organise people through signification, domination or legitimation (Giddens 1984) eventually enables the institutionalisation of practices of communication or knowledge exchange to link academics with wider society. Although governments have long sought advice from outside their own ranks, practices such as the appointment of scientists to formal advisory positions or participation in parliamentary scrutiny processes are in most cases a relatively recent phenomenon: the government of the United Kingdom appointed its first Chief Scientific Adviser in 1964 and departmental select committees were not established until 1979 (Sandford 2005). Less formal, but institutionally recognised, knowledge exchange practices such as events run by government, think tanks and private or third sector organisations offer entry points into the communities of practice (Wenger 1998) known as issue networks (Heclo 1978) that gather around specific fields or organisations (Stone et al. 2001). Researchers who gain sufficient legitimacy within an issue network or who otherwise come to the attention of government ministers may be offered an appointment as a policy tsar, a new practice which confers additional legitimacy and direct access to ministers, bypassing civil service recruitment and tendering processes (Levitt 2012). Whether they seek to change the deeply embedded structures of capitalism or the micro-practices of accountancy, there is always a dialectic of control through which academics can attempt to exert influence over institutions through the use of one or more structural principles (Giddens 1984). The practice of creating, maintaining or disrupting institutions institutional work encompasses activities such as advocacy, constructing identities and networks, connecting, theorizing, enabling and policing practices (Lawrence & Suddaby 2006). Institutional work offers academics a method with which to act upon and reshape society, just as politicians may engage in their own practices of reframing or circumscribing debates and using research in political or tactical ways (Weiss 1979). Institutional work consists of boundary work attempts to alter or maintain boundaries (Gieryn 1983) and practice work, which involves the creation, maintenance or disruption of practices (Zietsma & Lawrence 2010). Accepting that there are unlikely to be any objective, generally applicable strategies of knowledge exchange, but that scholars can and do engage in practices which

contribute to social change, my research aims to uncover the links between social scientists intentions, their engagement in institutional work and the strategies they employ. University researchers express four different types of intentions of academic practice: to fulfil the requirements of an academic role, become well known, solve an intellectual puzzle or make a wider contribution to society (kerlind 2008). As they progress through their careers different sets of actions which rely on different structural principles become available. Reaching the top of a profession usually confers membership of the elite institutions which legitimate access to the higher echelons of government. Very few academics will achieve this status. Although not all social scientists will wish to make a contribution to society other than by solving problems within their field, if they do they will be required to draw upon the more modest resources available to them earlier in their careers. Studies of social movements draw attention to the critical role of strategic practice in mobilizing initially limited resources in order to achieve social change (Ganz 2000). Strategies are patterns in a stream of actions (Mintzberg 1978). Individuals express their agency and influence social structure by drawing upon structural principles (signification/discourse, domination/power and legitimation/normative expectations); they gain power and increase their influence by mobilising the support of others through purposive, reflexive organising (Whittington 1992). A strategy for social change is a pattern of actions which draws upon structural principles to (re)organise society. Strategy is itself a practice; a strategy as practice perspective is useful because it draws attention to what people [actually] do in relation to strategy and how this is inuenced by and inuences their organizational and institutional context (Johnson et al. 2007). Strategy as practice scholars often focus on middle managers; for middle ranking academics, the ability to influence context is important because it permits the development of mechanisms which link researchers and research users, enabling the sustained interactivity which encourages the uptake of research (Huberman 1994). Most of the time, individuals act non-deliberately, reacting spontaneously to events, acting purposefully but without having a purpose consciously in mind. This practical coping forms the inherited background which structures and lends sense to the activities of practitioners (Tsoukas 2010), allowing actors to carry on within a practice (Giddens 1984). Although from the perspective of an observer, regularities in actions can appear to be the result of a conscious strategic engagement, in fact

strategy is immanent in practice (Chia & Holt 2006); it emerges from practice. If practical coping is interrupted, for example if an agent encounters a problem or if they are asked to describe what they have done, two forms of intentional directedness may take over (Tsoukas 2010): explicit awareness, where agents start acting deliberately, becoming conscious of aspects of their practice, enabling them to retrospectively make sense of it (Weick 1995); and thematic awareness, where the agent becomes detached from a situation in order to gain an reflective understanding of its properties. Thematic awareness enables formal episodes of strategizing (Whittington 2006) and can build into a theoretical understanding profoundly familiar to academics - whereby awareness of the properties of an object is linked to wider concepts or more basic theories about the world (Tsoukas 2010). Social scientists are enmeshed to varying extents in the organisational practices of their departments and disciplines. Some work in interdisciplinary institutes which focus on applied research (Tight 2012) and might be expected to be less attached than others to institutional norms of universality, communism, disinterestedness and organised skepticism (Merton 1979), about which scientists are in any case ambivalent (Mitroff 1974). They may adopt consensual, contentious or paradigmchallenging stances toward those they wish to influence (Nutley et al. 2007; Rein 1976), informed by research which seeks to explain how society is regulated or how it changes (Burrell & Morgan 1979). My research will seek to explain how members of an interdisciplinary institute at the centre of a nexus of societal, academic, disciplinary and organisational practices engage in the institutional work of creating, maintaining and disrupting institutions through the middle range activity of practice work and boundary work: for example, by connecting practices to or disassociating them from their moral foundations, changing assumptions and beliefs, using rhetoric and persuasion and redefining the relationship between actors by constructing new identities for them (Lawrence & Suddaby 2006). By exploring how strategy emerges from their day to day activities, punctuated by episodes of sensemaking and formal strategy development, I will explore the reciprocal relationship between institutional work, strategy and intent. My research will contribute to the developing fields of institutional work and strategy as practice and will inform academics who seek to influence social change.

References

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