Truth-Spots

Herman B Wells Distinguished Lecture of the Institute and Society for Advanced Study given on October 14, 2005

'A bed in the middle of nowhere': parents' meanings of place of death for adults with cystic fibrosis

As populations age and chronic conditions become more prevalent, an individual's ability to choose the location of their end-of-life care and death is increasingly considered important in the provision of good healthcare, with home implied as the 'best' place of death through UK government policy and specialist and voluntary palliative care services. However, considering meanings of place of end-of-life care and death is complex for young adults with life-limiting conditions where the disease course is variable and uncertain, and aggressive and palliative treatments are administered both at home and in hospital often until death. Although 'place' is a pivotal element in healthcare practice, research and policy, there has been little attempt to understand the meaning and importance of place in understanding experiences of care at end of life. Through analysis of in-depth interviews and letters received from parents of 27 young adults in England, Scotland and Wales who died from cystic fibrosis from 1999 to 2002 aged 17-36 years, key factors that influence families' meanings of place at end of life are presented. Both home and hospital deaths are reported, with no deaths in hospices. Preferences for possible locations of death are generally limited early in the disease course by choice of aggressive treatment, particularly lung transplantation. Rate of health decline, organisation and delivery of services, and relationships with specialist and general healthcare staff strongly influence parents' experience of death at home or in hospital, although no physical location was regarded a 'better' place of death. Meanings of, and attachment to place are mediated for families through these factors, questioning the appropriateness of a 'home is best' policy for those dying from life-limiting conditions. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Introduction: looking beyond the walls

In its consideration of the remarkable extent and variety of non-university researchers, this book takes a broader view of ‘knowledge’ and ‘research’ than in the many hot debates about today’s knowledge society, ‘learning age’, or organisation of research. It goes beyond the commonly held image of ‘knowledge’ as something produced and owned by the full-time experts to take a look at those engaged in active knowledge building outside the university walls

Networking expertise: Discursive coalitions and collaborative networks of experts in a public creationism controversy in the UK

Experts do play a particular role in public socio-scientific debates, even more so if they form heterogeneous coalition with other actors and experts. A case study about a public science education controversy surrounding the teaching of evolution/creationism in the UK press is used to investigate in detail how connections and coalitions between experts and other actors involved in the controversy emerged and played out. The research focuses on the question of what role collaborative and other networks of experts played in terms of influence, visibility, credibility, consensus and weight of argument. Issues that are considered in the research are the status of the members of the coalitions forming during the debate and how it is displayed in media representations and letters and petitions, and also how these networks and coalitions of experts perform in relation to each other

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 twelve 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.ESRC Future Research Leaders ES/N016319/1 Commonwealth Scholarship Commissio

The Public Relations Profession as Discursive Boundary Work

Public relations (PR) has spent more than a century as a professional project, marked by a struggle with adjacent professional fields for market control, social closure and elite status. However, the wider literature on professionalisation lacks a systematic account of how professions discursively construct their boundaries, or how differences in field position can influence a profession’s use of discursive strategies to defend or contest its boundaries. This matters for the deepening of PR scholarship, since an effective exploration of the PR profession must include studies of PR’s jurisdictions and its jurisdictional disputes. This article introduces into PR theory, a discourse analytical framework for deconstructing boundary work between PR and adjacent professions. The discourse framework, and accompanying discussion, answers the call to dismantle silo thinking about PR activity, through a methodology designed to examine PR’s intersections with other fields

Technology choice and its performance: Towards a sociology of software package procurement

Technology Acquisition is an important but neglected issue within the social science analysis of technology. The limited number of studies undertaken reproduce a schism between rationalist (e.g., economic) forms of analysis, where the assumption is that choice is the outcome of formal assessment, and cultural sociological approaches which see choice as driven by the micro-politics of the organisational setting, interests, prevalent rhetorics, fads, etc. While sympathetic to the latter critical view, we are dissatisfied with the relativist portrayal of technology selection: that decisions, beset with uncertainties and tensions, are divorced from formal decision making criteria. Influenced by Michel Callon’s writing on the ‘performativity’ of economic concepts and tools, we argue that formal assessment has a stronger relationship to technology decisions than suggested by cultural sociologists. We focus on a procurement which is characterised by high levels of organisational tension and where there is deep uncertainty about each of the solutions on offer. We show how the procurement team are able to arrive at a decision through laboriously constructing a ‘comparison’. That is, they attempt to drag the choice from the informal domain onto a more formal, accountable plane through the mobilisation and performance of a number of ‘comparative measures’ and criteria. These measures constituted a stabilised form of accountability, which we describe through the metaphor of a ‘scaffolding’, erected in the course of the procurement. Our argument is threefold: first, we argue that comparisons are possible but that they require much effort; second, that it is not the properties of the technology which determines choice but the way these properties were given form through the various comparative measures put in place; and finally whilst comparative measures might be imposed by one group upon others in a procurement team, these measures remain relatively malleable

Caught between Innovation and Tradition: Young Journalists as Normative Change Agents in the Journalistic Field

The necessity of innovation within the newsroom, and the rise of entrepreneurial initiatives outside it, have become increasingly apparent in the past decade. A common thread in this discourse is the desire for young journalists to be “change agents” who foster innovation and thus stretch existing boundaries in the profession. Employers hope new hires, seen as attuned to their generation’s news use and as offering fresh knowledge and insights, will be able to drive new journalism initiatives that can attract a younger audience and so improve the enterprise’s odds for economic sustainability. Using a longitudinal three-wave survey among students enrolled in two leading journalism programs in Britain and the Netherlands, we explore whether students’ perceptions of innovation and entrepreneurialism are in line with this optimistic industry discourse. Do students perceive themselves as change agents who will be challenging and potentially shifting the boundaries of journalism? Or do they adhere to traditional ideas about norms and behaviors that have been ingrained in the doxa and habitus of the journalistic field over previous decades? We find that although journalism students favor the idea of “innovation” and see the value of engaging audiences, they define change predominantly in terms of technology rather than more substantive cultural transformation

Foundation funding and the boundaries of journalism

Private foundations are an important source of funding for many news outlets. It has even been suggested that they may offer a partial solution to journalism’s economic crisis. Yet we do not know how foundation funding shapes journalistic practice. In this article, we show that foundation funding has a significant effect on the ‘boundaries of journalism’. That is, the ways in which journalists understand, value and practice their journalism. This argument is based on 74 interviews with the most active foundations funding international non-profit news and the journalists they support. In general, we found that these foundations did not try to directly influence the content of the journalism they funded. However, their involvement did make a difference. It created requirements and incentives for journalists to do new, non-editorial tasks, as well as longer-form, off-agenda, ‘impactful’ news coverage in specific thematic areas. As a result, foundations are ultimately changing the role and contribution of journalism in society. We argue that these changes are the result of various forms of ‘boundary work’, or performative struggles over the nature of journalism. This contrasts with most previous literature, which has focused on the effects of foundation funding on journalistic autonomy

Hidden in the Middle : Culture, Value and Reward in Bioinformatics

Bioinformatics - the so-called shotgun marriage between biology and computer science - is an interdiscipline. Despite interdisciplinarity being seen as a virtue, for having the capacity to solve complex problems and foster innovation, it has the potential to place projects and people in anomalous categories. For example, valorised 'outputs' in academia are often defined and rewarded by discipline. Bioinformatics, as an interdisciplinary bricolage, incorporates experts from various disciplinary cultures with their own distinct ways of working. Perceived problems of interdisciplinarity include difficulties of making explicit knowledge that is practical, theoretical, or cognitive. But successful interdisciplinary research also depends on an understanding of disciplinary cultures and value systems, often only tacitly understood by members of the communities in question. In bioinformatics, the 'parent' disciplines have different value systems; for example, what is considered worthwhile research by computer scientists can be thought of as trivial by biologists, and vice versa. This paper concentrates on the problems of reward and recognition described by scientists working in academic bioinformatics in the United Kingdom. We highlight problems that are a consequence of its cross-cultural make-up, recognising that the mismatches in knowledge in this borderland take place not just at the level of the practical, theoretical, or epistemological, but also at the cultural level too. The trend in big, interdisciplinary science is towards multiple authors on a single paper; in bioinformatics this has created hybrid or fractional scientists who find they are being positioned not just in-between established disciplines but also in-between as middle authors or, worse still, left off papers altogether