“Public Policy is Like Having a Vaudeville Act”: Languages of Duty and Difference among Think Tank-Affiliated Policy Experts

This research note uses in-depth interviews, ethnographic observations, and archival records to examine the self-understandings of think tank-affiliated policy experts. I argue that policy experts draw on a series of idioms—those of the academic scholar, the political aide, the entrepreneur, and the media specialist—to construct a unique albeit synthetic professional identity. The essence of the policy expert’s role lies in a continuous effort to balance and reconcile the contradictory imperatives associated with these idioms. An analysis of the policy expert’s mixed “professional psyche” offers a useful point of entry into the objective social structure of the think tank

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

Folliculin, the Product of the Birt-Hogg-Dube Tumor Suppressor Gene, Interacts with the Adherens Junction Protein p0071 to Regulate Cell-Cell Adhesion

Birt-Hogg-Dube (BHD) is a tumor suppressor gene syndrome associated with fibrofolliculomas, cystic lung disease, and chromophobe renal cell carcinoma. In seeking to elucidate the pathogenesis of BHD, we discovered a physical interaction between folliculin (FLCN), the protein product of the BHD gene, and p0071, an armadillo repeat containing protein that localizes to the cytoplasm and to adherens junctions. Adherens junctions are one of the three cell-cell junctions that are essential to the establishment and maintenance of the cellular architecture of all epithelial tissues. Surprisingly, we found that downregulation of FLCN leads to increased cell-cell adhesion in functional cell-based assays and disruption of cell polarity in a three-dimensional lumen-forming assay, both of which are phenocopied by downregulation of p0071. These data indicate that the FLCN-p0071 protein complex is a negative regulator of cell-cell adhesion. We also found that FLCN positively regulates RhoA activity and Rho-associated kinase activity, consistent with the only known function of p0071. Finally, to examine the role of Flcn loss on cell-cell adhesion in vivo, we utilized keratin-14 cre-recombinase (K14-cre) to inactivate Flcn in the mouse epidermis. The K14-Cre-Bhdflox/flox mice have striking delays in eyelid opening, wavy fur, hair loss, and epidermal hyperplasia with increased levels of mammalian target of rapamycin complex 1 (mTORC1) activity. These data support a model in which dysregulation of the FLCN-p0071 interaction leads to alterations in cell adhesion, cell polarity, and RhoA signaling, with broad implications for the role of cell-cell adhesion molecules in the pathogenesis of human disease, including emphysema and renal cell carcinoma

Hybrid intellectuals: Toward a social praxeology of U.S. think tank experts

Drawing on archival records, interviews, and an original database of the educational and career backgrounds of policy experts, this paper develops both an objectivist topography and a constructivist phenomenology of the growing space of American think tanks. Adapting Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of field, I argue that think tanks make up an emergent, constitutively hybrid “proto-field” that traverses, links, and overlaps the divergent worlds of academics, politics, business, and journalism. Think tank-affiliated experts understand their distinctive social role in terms that mirror their intermediate structural location, through the competing idioms of the academic scholar, the policymaker, the business entrepreneur, and the journalist. The study of think tanks destabilizes the category “intellectuals” and thereby challenges the common notion that they are a negligible presence in American politics. Instead, it points to the existence of a highly developed, differentiated, and dynamic – but heteronomous – field of intellectual production

10. Terra obscura

Celles et ceux qui cherchent à comprendre la place et le rôle des « think tanks » dans la vie politique se heurtent d’emblée au caractère instable, controversé, voire confus de ce concept. Comme l’a remarqué Simon James il y a dix ans, « la discussion à propos des think tanks […] tend à s’enliser dans l’épineuse question qui consiste à définir ce que l’on entend par “think tank ” – exercice qui dégénère souvent en sémantique futile ». L’objectif de ce chapitre est de proposer une conceptualis..

Hybrid intellectuals: Toward a social praxeology of U.S. think tank experts

Drawing on archival records, interviews, and an original database of the educational and career backgrounds of policy experts, this paper develops both an objectivist topography and a constructivist phenomenology of the growing space of American think tanks. Adapting Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of field, I argue that think tanks make up an emergent, constitutively hybrid “proto-field” that traverses, links, and overlaps the divergent worlds of academics, politics, business, and journalism. Think tank-affiliated experts understand their distinctive social role in terms that mirror their intermediate structural location, through the competing idioms of the academic scholar, the policymaker, the business entrepreneur, and the journalist. The study of think tanks destabilizes the category “intellectuals” and thereby challenges the common notion that they are a negligible presence in American politics. Instead, it points to the existence of a highly developed, differentiated, and dynamic – but heteronomous – field of intellectual production