Bridging the gap between the home and the hospital : a qualitative study of partnership working across housing, health and social care

Rising demand and financial challenges facing public services have increased the impetus for greater integration across housing, health and social care. To provide insight into the benefits and challenges of partnership, we interviewed 37 housing professionals and held a validation workshop with eight external agencies working within a new, integrated housing service in the United Kingdom. The strength of the initiative rests on the capacity of neighbourhood officers to conduct home visits and refer tenants to support agencies. Yet this strength poses problems in partnership building because increased referrals threaten to overwhelm already stretched health services. Despite broadly supporting the initiative, officers expressed concern over losing specialist housing knowledge whilst filling in gaps for services. Tensions over professional role boundaries between officers and social workers, poor communication, lack of capacity in external agencies and difficulties in sharing information were identified as barriers to partnership. Whilst capacity issues were acknowledged, partner agencies welcomed the initiative and called for joint meetings and colocation of services. Lack of capacity of external agencies to respond to referrals threatens integrated housing and health initiatives. Greater interprofessional collaboration and further investment across the system is required to increase capacity and ensure referrals are translated into healthcare outcomes

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

Advocacy in the tail: Exploring the implications of ‘climategate’ for science journalism and public debate in the digital age

This paper explores the evolving practices of science journalism and public debate in the digital age. The vehicle for this study is the release of digitally stored email correspondence, data and documents from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the weeks immediately prior to the United Nations Copenhagen Summit (COP-15) in December 2009. Described using the journalistic shorthand of ‘climategate’, and initially promoted through socio-technical networks of bloggers, this episode became a global news story and the subject of several formal reviews. ‘Climategate’ illustrates that media literate critics of anthropogenic explanations of climate change used digital tools to support their cause, making visible selected, newsworthy aspects of scientific information and the practices of scientists. In conclusion, I argue that ‘climategate’ may have profound implications for the production and distribution of science news, and how climate science is represented and debated in the digitally-mediated public sphere

Is international agricultural research a global public good? : The case of rice biofortification

The status of international agricultural research as a global public good (GPG) has been widely accepted since the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. While the term was not used at the time of its creation, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) system that evolved at that time has been described as a 'prime example of the promise, performance and perils of an international approach to providing GPGs'. Contemporary literature on international agricultural research as a GPG tends to support this view and focuses on how to operationalize the concept. This paper adopts a different starting point and questions this conceptualization of the CGIAR and its outputs. It questions the appropriateness of such a 'neutral' concept to a system born of the imperatives of Cold War geopolitics, and shaped by a history of attempts to secure its relevance in a changing world. This paper draws on a multi-sited, ethnographic study of a research effort highlighted by the CGIAR as an exemplar of GPG-oriented research. Behind the ubiquitous language of GPGs, 'partnership' and 'consensus', however, new forms of exclusion and restriction are emerging within everyday practice, reproducing North-South inequalities and undermining the ability of these programmes to respond to the needs of projected beneficiaries

Inscribing a discipline: tensions in the field of bioinformatics

Bioinformatics, the application of computer science to biological problems, is a central feature of post-genomic science which grew rapidly during the 1990s and 2000s. Post-genomic science is often high-throughput, involving the mass production of inscriptions [Latour and Woolgar (1986), Laboratory Life: the Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press]. In order to render these mass inscriptions comprehensible, bioinformatic techniques are employed, with bioinformaticians producing what we call secondary inscriptions. However, despite bioinformaticians being highly skilled and credentialed scientists, the field struggles to develop disciplinary coherence. This paper describes two tensions militating against disciplinary coherence. The first arises from the fact that bioinformaticians as producers of secondary inscriptions are often institutionally dependent, subordinate even, to biologists. With bioinformatics positioned as service, it cannot determine its own boundaries but has them imposed from the outside. The second tension is a result of the interdisciplinary origin of bioinformatics – computer science and biology are disciplines with very different cultures, values and products. The paper uses interview data from two different UK projects to describe and examine these tensions by commenting on Calvert's [(2010) “Systems Biology, Interdisciplinarity and Disciplinary Identity.” In Collaboration in the New Life Sciences, edited by J. N. Parker, N. Vermeulen and B. Penders, 201–219. Farnham: Ashgate] notion of individual and collaborative interdisciplinarity and McNally's [(2008) “Sociomics: CESAGen Multidisciplinary Workshop on the Transformation of Knowledge Production in the Biosciences, and its Consequences.” Proteomics 8: 222–224] distinction between “black box optimists” and “black box pessimists.

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

‘Remembering as Forgetting’: Organizational commemoration as a politics of recognition

This paper considers the politics of how organizations remember their past through commemorative settings and artefacts. Although these may be seen as ‘merely’ a backdrop to organizational activity, they form part of the lived experience of organizational spaces that its members enact on a daily basis as part of their routes and routines. The main concern of the paper is with how commemoration is bound up in the reflection and reproduction of hierarchies of organizational recognition. Illustrated with reference to two commemorative settings, the paper explores how organizations perpetuate a narrow set of symbolic ideals attributing value to particular forms of organizational membership while appearing to devalue others. In doing so, they communicate values that undermine attempts to achieve equality and inclusion. Developing a recognition-based critique of this process, the discussion emphasizes how commemorative settings and practices work to reproduce established patterns of exclusion and marginalization. To this end, traditional forms of commemorative portraiture that tend to close off difference are contrasted with a memorial garden, in order to explore the potential for an alternative, recognition-based ethics of organizational commemoration that is more open to the Other

“Essential—Passion for Music”: Affirming, Critiquing, and Practising Passionate Work in Creative Industries

This chapter considers “passion” as an enthusiastic orientation to work within creative worlds: work motivated by intense attachments to the products of work and their conditions of production. Drawing on Luc Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology of critique and justification, the chapter argues that the passionate lens most usefully trains our sights on normative questions: not what or how—but why such work is undertaken. Embedded in research on cultural and creative industries, the contemporary recorded music sector is presented as a “passionate” industry in transformation. Interviews with workers, who both criticize and defend their industry, act as a springboard to explore three possible interpretive approaches: affirmative, critical, and pragmatic. Theoretical flexibility is needed to keep “passion” open to future inquiry—particularly regarding inequalities in creative work