Jennifer Smith-Merry (University of Edinburgh)

We argue that the limited impact of practitioner knowledge on the resulting TAMFS policy was a result of both the form of knowledge produced by practitioners and the context of the consultation process as a policy instrument. The type of knowledge used and produced by practitioners, which is tacit, based in experience and transmitted orally through vignettes, does not flow easily through the consultation process and into the policy document. This led us to question the value of their contribution to the consultation. We found that far from being irrelevant, their participation had other important impacts on the policy being consulted for. Practitioner participation in the consultation process was found to have an educative function which was seen to be integral to the effective implementation of the resulting policy. The consultation process in this way served as the first stage of policy implementation.

Jennifer Smith-Merry

University of Edinburgh

School of Social and Political Studies

Edinburgh, Scotland

Jsmith16@staffmail.ed.ac.uk

Sophie Thunus

The origins of the therapeutic projects were the focus of researches in the framework of the European program "Knowledge and Policy". These researches have emphasized an increasing complexity of public action field, in which different actors, relying on political, administrative, or professional logics, advancing national or international considerations, are being involved in a global, coherent and innovative public action in mental health sector.

According to an experimental logic, the therapeutic projects are carried out through local devices typical of procedural public policy (Lascoumes, Le Bourhis, 2005). The two consultation devices in which and between which therapeutic projects are being carried out, respectively the "therapeutic dialogue" and the "transversal dialogue", give a unique opportunity to observe the inner working of these new policy settings, of these "merging scenes" and their dynamics.

Mandated to experiment locally the work conditions in networks and care circuits, the therapeutic dialogue brings together periodically the mental health professionals likely to be involved in the reinsertion of patients suffering from chronic and complex mental disorders.

The 82 local therapeutic projects are empirically evaluated at a national level through the transversal dialogue. Periodic meetings bring together representatives of the projects and of users' associations, which have themselves trained their own experts.

Both experimental levels have been the subject of case studies grounded on the periodic observation of the meetings and on interviews with participants. We found that:

-         different frames of action, cognitive and strategic, are being mobilized and confront with each other: layman versus professional discourse, medical versus social discourse, therapeutic versus administrative rationality

-         the confrontation of these discourses leads to controversies (Latour, 2007), giving opportunities for the creation of a common language as well as revealing potential difficulties related to the collective action in a (dis-)organized context (Friedberg, 1997)

-         action is made possible and thinkable by "investments in form" made by the participants (Latour, 2007)

Finally, these case studies show a process of reciprocal translation between the political and administrative programmes, defined by the central agencies and ministerial staff, and the discussion forums. Asking for action, these programmes are translated by the field players in order to render them possible and thinkable. Reciprocally, the participants in the transversal dialogue, looking for involvement in policy making process, translate their empirical recommendations into the programmes.

Concretely, this communication will first outline the two consultation devices mentioned above: therapeutic dialogue and transversal dialogue. Second, we will analyse the frames of action, types of knowledge and controversies mobilized at both levels. To conclude, we will discuss the interrelations between these "merging scenes" on the one hand, and between these scenes and "coordinating scenes" on the other hand.

Université de Liège

Institut des Sciences Humaines et Sociales

Sociologie des ressources humaines et des systèmes institutionnels

Université de Liège

Liège - Belgium

Sophie.Thunus@ulg.ac.be

Jarkko Bamberg and Pauliina Lehtonen (University of Tampere, Finland)

New tools for public participation has been designed and experimented for the guidance of development in cities. This paper introduces a case study that aimed at developing practices of public participation by utilising potential of information and communication technology (such as the Internet and GIS). The case study represents a participatory action research project that organised a citizen panel in a suburb, which has witnessed negative side-effects of urbanisation, such as increased unemployment and crime. The citizen panel tried to find meaningful ways for residents to affect the development of their neighbourhood. The residents were considered as experts having experiential knowledge of their lived environment. Hence the central aim was to articulate and mediate their knowledge to planners and civil servants that traditionally lean on scientific-technical knowledge. Public participation has often been labeled into particular stages of urban planning, where it has a legitimate role. However, we take public participation more broadly in this context to include varied forms of continuous interaction between residents, planners and other actors in the city government.

Based on the case study we propose that governance in cities takes place in settings that can be described as systems of fragmented knowledge. These are learning settings in which people, symbols, and technologies co-constitute understanding of social and organizational action. In this light we draw on a perspective of citizen participation where actors such as residents and city government act inside a shared system of fragmented knowledge that consists of various different practices. Actors interpret this system and various practices in local interaction from their viewpoints. We suggest that one of the key questions is to construct boundary infrastructures that can facilitate the movement and translation of different kinds of knowledge within merging scenes. The case study indicates that one of the characteristic features of boundary infrastructures is to use map as a translating device in communicating knowledge between residents and planners.

Jarkko Bamberg, Department of Regional Studies, University of Tampere, Finland, jarkko.bamberg@uta.fi

Pauliina Lehtonen, Journalism Research and Development Centre, University of Tampere, Finland, pauliina.lehtonen@uta.fi

Helena Leino (University of Tampere, Finland)

My aim in this paper is to examine practices of participatory knowledge production as boundary processes. The attempt is to open up the discussion of the potential of the new kinds of emerging scenes for cooperation and to consider the different types of knowledge that could be utilized through these cooperative practices. The resources for knowledge used in urban planning are gathered and operated in diverse cooperative groups, participatory workshops and participatory internet programmes. These spaces for increased interaction can be interpreted as boundary processes themselves; they offer a place where multiple knowledges are produced by different actors.

I am interested in the self-organizing practices that are developed by the situation at hand. Public participation in urban planning is about momentary action and fragile, ambiguous practices. There is a strong focus on the situational context. Participatory action is triggered by situations that require some sort of action from the actors. The situation at hand enables and constrains, it signals to the actor that certain actions are called for, but also that certain conventions, commitments, physical obstacles, normative beliefs, procedures and rules have to be taken into account (Wagenaar & Cook 2003). The same emphasis applies also on the nature of knowledge production; the situated knowledge speaks up for local, specific knowledge that has its value on particular situation at hand.

In this paper I discuss the complexity and also the richness of knowledge production that is revealed when the actors and their way of knowing are interlinked together.  The aim is also to contribute to the relationship between unofficial self-organizing participatory practices and the official proceedings of urban planning and decision making. 

Helena Leino, Senior Lecturer, Department of Regional Studies

University of Tampere, Finland

helena.leino@uta.fi

Catherine Mangez and Christian Maroy (Université Catholique de Louvain)

Our communication deals with the knowledge managing in a new merging scene in Belgium. The merging scene is a commission created in 2002 gathering actors from the education sector (various stakeholders, unions, schools federations, parent's associations, inspectors, civil servants and experts). The commission is empowered to produce recommendations about educative stakes.

Our analysis is a deep study of the process of an opinion's production in 2003-2004 about a minister's proposition around external evaluation devices. Our work is based on participant observations and documents analysis. Our study shows how civil servants who are in charge of the administrative support of the commission, manage the debates' agenda and the knowledge screening in the debates.

The Minister request was about two issues, first the capacity to evaluate "relative performance", and secondly a plan for a common examination at the end of primary education. What was most remarkable about the preparation of the commission recommendation was less the controversies concerning the procedures and modalities of the common exam than the manner in which the first part of the Minister's request was "buried". First the debates agenda was organized to talk primary about the second proposition and secondly the type of knowledge used to fuel the discussion was different in the two issues.

Scientific expertise was mainly called upon to deal with the "relative performance" proposal, from the outset object of the strongest criticisms and reservations. And the conclusion was to move aside the proposition because of the complexity of the matter. However, only experience-based knowledge was mobilized for the common exam proposition that was the most important in the eyes of institutional actors.

Catherine Mangez, Université Catholique de Louvain, Grsef, groupe interdisciplinaire de recherche sur la socialisation, l'éducation et la formation, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, Catherine.Mangez@uclouvain.be

Christian Maroy, Université Catholique de Louvain, Grsef, groupe interdisciplinaire de recherche sur la socialisation, l'éducation et la formation, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, Christian.Maroy@uclouvain.be

Roger-François Gauthier and Margaux le Gouvello (Science Po, Paris)

This presentation is based on a fieldwork and a report, written for the Know&Pol project in 2009.

In this paper, we analysed the case of the decisions that led to the "common core of knowledge and skills at the end of compulsory education" to address the issues of the public policy process, referring here to the notion of "scène", and the circulation of knowledge between these different scènes. 

The « common core » is a complex French education policy decision and one that is sufficiently "fleshed out" for analysis. In fact, the decision-making process started from political circles in 2003 and ended up in 2006 ; however, the "common core" was the object of more than one thousand dispatches from 2000 to 2006 by the AEF (Agence Education Formation - a French news agency specialised in  Education and training); this decision has also given way to a Law as well and as an Application Decree, an exceptional co-occurrence in French education policy.

Since this has seemed to be a particularly difficult decision to make (it took three decades indeed), the institution created in the meantime a great number of think tanks, commissions and planning groups with a wide range of statuses and varying outcomes that were so many types of scènes, which in retrospect are quite informative in terms of the choices that were at stake, for example regarding the knowledge used. Moreover, one can wonder to which extent the decision of the « common core » transformed/challenged the decision process by introducing new forms of governance in the field of education in France.

We have chosen to focus here on four main scenes involved in the decision-making process of the "common core", different by their position in the policy system, by their make up and also by the role they played with regard to the knowledge at hand : we make a first distinction between the scènes that were productive, in the sense they contributed to the "march towards the core" and the ones that had been for years rather fruitless or obstructive, this distinction being closely linked with the type of knowledge they were mobilizing and conveying.

• As to fruitless scènes, we have in mind those, like the Bourdieu-Gros Commission or the Conseil National des Programmes (CNP) that were dominated by content-based and often disciplines-based knowledge.
• As advocating scènes some appear as having been obstructive: the case of the Ministry of Education, and of most of the corporate bodies that belong to its sphere of influence: they stood firmly, although not always openly against the decision of the "common core". Others have on the opposite been active in favour of the "common core", as the Parliament was, and the informative Parliamentary mission called from the name of its Chairman Périssol Mission.
• Nothing would have happened without some coordinating scenes: in the case in point the Government played an arbitration role during all the decision-making process on the core, as well as the Haut-Conseil de l'Education (HCE), gathering people appointed by various political institutions.
• Specific was the role of a scène that can be called a merging one: the Thélot Commission (created by the President de la République) played a major role in the decision of instituting the core. Formed by a variety of actors, incorporating different types of knowledge, the Thélot Commission acted as a catalyst :  as such it both had the merit to say that the traditional actors from inside the educational institution were not in a position to propose a solution and not to define the "common core" itself.

We will analyse in this paper the role played by these different scènes in the decision-making process in order to understand which type of "knowledge" influenced the "common core", and to which extent this decision transformed or not the government model.

Roger-François Gauthier, Inspection générale de l'administration de l'éducation nationale et de la recherche, Consultant à l'UNESCO, roger-francois.gauthier@education.gouv.fr

Margaux le Gouvello, Observatoire sociologique du changement (OSC) (CNRS/Sciences-Po), margaux.legouvcello@sciences-po.org

Eszter Neumann (Eötvös Loránd University)

By looking at the case of the Hungarian expert board, the Round Table for Education and Child Opportunities, the paper discusses the meeting of actors coming from different cognitive worlds, various scientific disciplines and political positions. The analysis highlights the recent fabrication of a new scene, a stage where alternative policy paradigms got publicly pronounced and where novel forms of institutionalized expertise got constructed in the Hungarian education policy field. Dividing lines between argumentations and different logics of discourses concerning the public action on educational assessment and equal opportunities are scarcely enacted publicly, nor are performed as conflicting discursive positions. This scene offers an opportunity to study enacted, suppressed or reconciled differences between approaches concerning these public actions as well as the dynamics of how epistemologies relate to each other. In the following analysis, we will separate the positions of the negotiating partners, of the ignored outsiders, and also attempt to reconstruct the dividing lines between the discursive logics that were staged as if in alliance at the scene.

The scene gave space to a shift in the content and objectives of scientific argumentation as such in the policy-making process in Hungary: while previously experts argued for decentralized governance, here the scientific bases of a stronger state are laid, a state which governs through aligned liberal technologies of conduct. As a deliberative scene, it is an interpellation to what expertise previously meant in twofold way. First, ever since the end of the eighties when radical decentralization was carried out in public education, educational experts restrained themselves from urging comprehensive reform initiatives, or more precisely, top-down reform initiatives. Secondly, the composition of the expert board illustrates the recent recomposition of disciplines relevant to educational policy making: in this sense, this is the stage where territories get secured for alternative disciplinary knowledges of policy-expertise. Eventually, an alternative vision of social engineering is offered that is framed by the scientific promise of rational governance, and that assembles technologies of governance from technical solutions borrowed from the toolbox of New Public Management and from inscription devices offering the calculability of governmental intervention (Rose&Miller 1992, Maasen&Weingart 2005:2). The proposal for comprehensive reform that ultimately integrates education into the grand narrative of economic competitiveness is in itself an interpellation to the previous conceptualizations of education. 

Eszter Neumann, Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Budapest, Hungary, neumann.eszter@gmail.com

Bernard Delvaux, Girsef-Université catholique de Louvain,

Processes of knowledge circulation, transformation and hybridization don't be the same in coordinating scenes (Parliament,...), advocating scenes (trade union,...), front line scenes (school,...), or merging scenes. Those merging scenes can be defined as scenes where there is a meeting between actors coming from various scenes and worlds, and bringing different types of knowledge. Those scenes without official function of coordination nevertheless play an important role in the course of public action.

In addition to traditional merging scenes such as media, there are now new and more interactive merging scenes, and especially consultation devices. The dissemination of this kind of scene is partly linked to the transformation of the government model. Various kinds of actors are contributing to the creation of such scenes, which affect not only processes of knowledge circulation, transformation and hybridization, but also processes of consensus building, decision making and regulation.

My communication will be built on the basis of the previous communications and of theoretical background. The aim is to provide a transversal analysis trying to define which are the convergences and the differences between the case studies, and how they can be understood. My analysis will be focused not only on the nature of the devices, the processes taking place in those devices or their impact, but also on the conceptual and theoretical references used by the researchers.

Bernard Delvaux, Girsef-Université catholique de Louvain, Grsef, groupe interdisciplinaire de recherche sur la socialisation, l'éducation et la formation, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, Bernard.delvaux@uclouvain.be