'Knowledge: Embodied, Inscribed, Enacted' – The Framework Reconsidered

Abstract

The volume “Knowledge in policy – embodied, inscribed, enacted” (eds. Freeman and Sturdy, 2014) builds on recent research endeavours and brings together several strands of research to develop a “phenomenological” or “pre-theoretical” framework that classifies policy knowledge from a perspective analogous to “phases of matter,” i.e. embodied, inscribed and enacted forms of knowledge. Thereby, it brings into policy studies the terminology – and perhaps also concerns – of sociology of knowledge and organisational studies (from areas such as organisational learning or knowledge management), using these concepts also to structure the multiple debates on knowledge in/into policy. This panel aims to critically examine the framework, identify areas for its further development and stimulate further debates as well as bring together researchers with shared interests in empirical research of knowledge in policy processes. The relevance of the panel is ensured through involving the authors of the framework as discussants, as well as involving chapter authors from the volume. The papers, with empirical data from sectors of health policy, justice, asylum policy and the environment, address the following topics: • How should the various implied understandings of enactment (as drawing on knowledge resources, as communicating knowledge to other participants, as negotiating knowledge claims, as enacting expert status) be theoretically “sorted out”? • What can be said theoretically or empirically about translations between the different forms of knowledge? What is the relation between enactment and translation – and “knowledge moments”? • How easily can the framework be combined with other theoretical approaches in studies of knowledge and policy and beyond as well as with classifications of knowledge? Which combinations seem to work well? • What forms of agency does knowledge possess (especially knowledge materialised in artefacts, inscribed)? How are actions of humans and things intertwined? How do these associations enable cognitive performance (knowing)? • What language should be adopted for describing the knowledge patterns and hierarchies in policy? What does empirical emphasis on certain forms of knowledge (at the expense of others) signify? How do these patterns “build and form social and organisational space”? In addition, the following topics will be debated in the panel: • The framework aims to “draw attention to aspects of knowledge in policy that had not hitherto been noticed.” Which fields or disciplines can benefit from these new perspectives? • The framework aims to be a ‘phenomenology’ compatible with all epistemologies, a ‘pre-theoretical language’ to span different research approaches. What is the potential of the framework beyond ethnographic research strategies? • What view is afforded by the framework? Do we get a new window on the more traditional concerns such as policy interests, policy diffusion or epistemic selectivity? What difference does the framework make in relation to practice – does it open new corridors of action? • What is the framework’s value as compared to the models of organizational learning such as the integrated framework by Lam (2000), the knowledge spiral (Nonaka & Takeuchi 1995), the Munich model of knowledge management (Reinmann-Rothmeier 2001) or the take on tacit and explicit knowledge by Collins (2010, Collins and Evans 2007)?