The Place and Role of Enacted Knowledge in the Articulation of Policy Process

This paper empirically studies the moment of enactment by examining the work of justice and health coordinators responsible for the implementation of two policy plans in the fields of mental health and internment. It draws from two PhD researches focusing on interrelated policy initiatives respectively designed to reorganise mental health care provision and to develop specific care trajectories for mentally ill offenders. Both researches relied on qualitative methods including document analysis, semistructured interviews and direct observation of meetings between health and justice practitioners, coordinators and policy makers. The phenomenology of knowledge in policy describes the different forms that knowledge takes as embodied, inscribed, and enacted. Enacted knowledge is defined as a social, transient and uncertain form of knowledge resulting from human actions and interactions. This definition partly borrows from the idea of enactment, which originally developed in the field of organisational sociology. It is, among others, at the core of Karl Weick’s reflection on sensemaking in organisations (Weick, 1995). In this paper, we suggest improving our understanding of both the consistency and scope of enacted knowledge by examining the coordinators’ work in the light of Karl Weick’s definition of sensemaking. The work of justice and health coordinators consists in “articulating” separated work processes (Corbin & Strauss, 2014) and transferring, transforming and translating (Callon, 1986; Freeman, 2002, 2009) different types of knowledge held by mental health and justice practitioners and policy makers. By looking at their work, including how they tell their work through interviews and how they perform their work through meetings, we intend to address the following research questions: What is enacted knowledge? From which types of social practices does enacted knowledge flow? Which are the properties of the social moments and processes through which knowledge is enacted? Does the enactment of knowledge present the same properties that Karl Weick’s sensemaking? And, finally, what do those similarities/dissimilarities tell about the place and power of enacted knowledge in ongoing policy processes?