THE PRODUCTION, MEDIATION AND USE OF KNOWLEDGE IN DIFFERENT SECTORS
7) Institutionalisation
This is perhaps the most complex process, for it involves the knowledge or practice moving from being an innovation to becoming a sustained, rou-tine practice that is accepted as “normal”. An innovation is not institution-alised until it endures beyond the time/presence of those who originally adopted it.
… second, because they do not in practice proceed sequentially, but there is feedback from one to another, suggesting an interactive rather than a linear model.
The second problem with the linear model is that these seven processes tend to be seen as stages. Not all the processes are necessarily involved in all cases of dissemination and application, nor do they by any means always fol-low in a neat sequence. In the linear model the processes take a logical order;
in practice, feedback loops and overlaps between the processes yield a dif-ferent sequence. Indeed, as von Hippel demonstrated in the 1970s, users may play a key, or even dominant, role in shaping innovation (summarised in von Hippel, 1988). So a more appropriate model is non-linear – interactive
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(Lundvall, 1988) or iterative, “in which interdependence and interaction between the elements in the system is one of the most important characteristics”
(Edquist, 1997). In these models (Figure 2), the three basic processes can influ-ence one another and different actors contribute to these interactions at various points in time. The terminology “production, mediation and use” of knowledge in this chapter should not be interpreted as a commitment to linearity.
Indeed, this chapter will demonstrate how non-linear models have become important in each of the three sectors. The issues in, and models of, the production, mediation and dissemination of knowledge in each of the three sectors are now examined in turn, beginning with teaching. The sectors are then compared and contrasted in order to illuminate developments in the professions in the knowledge economy, with special reference to education.
Knowledge in the education sector
Knowledge about teaching is obscure and disputed; there is thus no consensus about how teachers should be trained or about the role of educational research.
It is perhaps one of the great ironies of the teaching profession that whilst formal education is patently a knowledge-intensive activity, the nature of the knowledge-base of those charged with responsibility for it is both obscure and a constant subject of debate. This has two important consequences. First, there is lack of agreement within and between countries about the content, structure and length of initial teacher training and the continuing professional development of teachers. Secondly, the direction, quality and value of research and development in education is increasingly questioned.
Specialised teachers tend to be trained in their speciality;
generalists
in the “foundation”
disciplines of education…
Where the content of the teacher’s knowledge is highly specialised, namely in upper secondary and higher education, professional competence is com-monly held to lie in mastery of that specialised subject. At least until recently, little attention has been given to the university teacher’s teaching skills – indeed, there is normally no need for a university teacher to obtain a qualifica-tion as a teacher. When the content of the teacher’s knowledge has a relatively small specialised element, as with early years teachers, where the content has been traditionally defined as basic literacy and numeracy plus elementary social skills, the training has focused on pedagogy rather than curriculum content. For such teachers, some form of qualification is regarded as essential, but much of the content of training has in the last thirty years consisted of the study of the
Figure 2. An interactive model
Knowledge application Knowledge
mediation
Knowledge production
Figure 2. An interactive model
Knowledge application Knowledge
mediation
Knowledge production
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disciplines that inform professional practice – psychology, sociology, philoso-phy, usually called the foundation disciplines of education.
… which are not based on the study of education itself…
The academic study of education, and associated educational research, has thus been deeply informed by these disciplines, most of whose content did not arise from the study of educational phenomena or problems, but from the concepts, theories and research that preoccupy the “mainstream” practi-tioners of these three disciplines. Psychologists are more interested in learn-ing and memory than in formal education; sociologists have studied many types of organisation, only a minority of which are schools and universities; and whilst an important branch of philosophy is epistemology, only parts of it deal with children’s knowledge, its nature and acquisition.
… and multi-disciplinary study does not tend to lead to an integrated cross-disciplinary framework for studying education.
University Schools of Education, like other professional schools (architec-ture, medicine, engineering, social work, social administration), deal with a field of study rather than a single discipline and the academic staff come from different disciplines leading to an absence of a single overarching discipline or a shared conceptual framework. Though it is sometimes argued that this produces an inter-disciplinary context for the promotion of novel approaches to the phenom-ena in the field of study, the more common situation is one of multi-disciplinarity with relatively low levels of interaction or integration among academic staff from different disciplinary backgrounds, and as a consequence there is a rela-tively low level of intellectual and social integration among the academic staff.
Schools of Education tend to be staffed on the one hand by teaching specialists with experience of practice…
Although Schools of Education vary considerably in size, composition and function, in most there are two relatively distinctive groups or cultures. In the first, the orientation is to teacher education, usually to initial teacher training in particular but also to courses and higher degrees directed mainly at practis-ing teachers. The background of these academic staff is lengthy and distin-guished professional service in schools, with relatively little experience of the foundation disciplines of education (psychology, sociology, philosophy and history) or educational research. They think of themselves primarily as “educa-tors”, as teachers of teachers, a continuing part of the teaching profession, though based in higher education. They justify their existence in terms of their contribution to the improvement of the quality of teaching in schools and they write for professional journals read by practising teachers.
… and on the other by academic psychologists, sociologists and others in “foundation disciplines”…
The background of staff in the second group is likely to be in a foundation discipline, and sometimes without practical experience as a schoolteacher.
Their social identity revolves around their specialist discipline and they think of themselves as academics and researchers as well as (and sometimes rather than) teachers of teachers. They justify their existence in terms of their schol-arly achievements rather than their direct contribution to improving the quality of teaching in schools. They may write sometimes for professional journals, but see their most important writing as papers at academic conferences and arti-cles in scholarly books and journals.
… with optimism from the 1960s that the latter group could apply theoretical social science to education…
Thirty years ago there was considerable optimism about the potential of applying the social sciences to educational phenomena and problems and con-fidence that a science of teaching was being created. As the qualifications of teachers in primary education were raised, it was these subjects, not the subjects of the school curriculum, that were to provide the knowledge-base of teachers for subsequent application in the practice of teaching. Apprenticeship schemes moved into disfavour, since experienced practitioners in schools were unfamiliar with the theory and so could not help novices to apply it to innovative practice.
Old teachers, in short, could not be trusted with the training of new teachers.
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… but in practice the irrelevance to every day teaching brought theories into disrepute…
Not surprisingly, perhaps, many trainee teachers have questioned the relevance of this “theory” to their professional practice. For most found the theory they learned in initial training very difficult to apply in practice. To sur-vive as new teachers, they adapted to the working culture of experienced teachers. “Theory” soon came to have negative connotations: research was seen by many teachers as largely incomprehensible and irrelevant to the solu-tion of their day-to-day problems.
… while at the same time political demands for educational improvement grew…
It is precisely this tension between theory and practice in teacher educa-tion, and between educational research and educational improvement, which has been highlighted by changing policy demands on the profession. For concurrently with the growth of the academic study of, and research into, edu-cation has been increasing political and public concern over eduedu-cational
“standards” – the levels of students’ academic achievement and what reforms might be needed to improve the quality of educational provision. There have been two main consequences.
… with the result that, first, policy has made initial training more practice-based…
First, there has been a strong movement, led by politicians and policy makers, not university-based teacher educationists, towards increasing the extent to which both initial teacher training (as well as the continuing profes-sional development) should be school-based and shaped by experienced teachers. It is, in effect, a rehabilitation of the professional apprenticeship, which brings the training of teachers more into line with that of doctors and engineers. University-based educationists, who prefer to speak of teacher edu-cation rather than teacher training, construe these moves as the de-profession-alisation of teachers.
… and second, educational research is being at least reassessed, and at most derided as useless…
Secondly, educational research has come under very close scrutiny in sev-eral countries (McGaw et al., 1992; OECD, 1995; Kloprogge et al., 1995; Nisbet, 1995; OECD, 1995; Hargreaves, 1996; Hegarty, 1997; Hillage et al., 1998; Rudduck and McIntyre, 1998). Although all these reviews note the high quality of the best educational research, and although educational research has been more valued and used in some countries, such as Sweden, than in others, the overall tone is critical, as indicated in the following comments:
It is widely recognised that there are large lacunae between researchers and practitioners in education (OECD, 1995).
If the purpose of educational research is (…) to inform educational deci-sions and educational actions, then our overall conclusion is that the actions and decisions of policy-makers and practitioners are insufficiently informed by research (…). The lack of an effective dialogue and under-standing between researchers, policy-makers and practitioners is illus-trated by the fact that while most of the researchers felt that the balance of the research agenda was too skewed towards policy and practice, the practitioners and policy-makers thought the opposite (Hillage et al., 1998).
Educational research has not fulfilled its role in the effort to improve schools, perhaps because it runs into too much scepticism from practitio-ners and policy makers (Assistant Secretary for Educational Research and Improvement, US Department of Education in Finn, 1988).
Schools in the Netherlands hardly play a role in setting the research agenda (…). There is no lack of magazines and periodicals that regularly write about research. On the other hand, according to some surveys, only a small minority of teachers actually read educational periodicals (…) (Kloprogge et al., 1995).
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We now have a virtual catalogue of reasons for this perceived lack of use-fulness of educational research. The reasons hypothesised for the appar-ent failure of research to influence teaching can be grouped into four general hypotheses: a) The research itself is not sufficiently persuasive or authoritative; the quality of educational studies has not been high enough to provide compelling, unambiguous or authoritative results to practitio-ners; b) The research has not been relevant to practice. It has not been suf-ficiently practical, it has not addressed teachers’ questions, nor has it adequately acknowledged their constraints; c) Ideas from research have not been accessible to teachers; d)The education system is itself intractable and unable to change, or it is conversely inherently unstable, overly sus-ceptible to fads, and consequently unable to engage in systematic change. Either of these characteristics (…) render it incapable of respond-ing reliably to research (Kennedy, 1997).
… but agreement that there is a problem is not matched by consensus on a solution.
Evidently we see here a collapse of the earlier optimism that there could be a science of teaching or that education policy would be research-based (to take the strong form) or alternatively that both practitioners and policy makers would commonly be helped in finding solutions to their problems by social sci-ence and educational research associated with it (to take the weaker form).
That something has gone wrong is conceded by most. Exactly what has gone wrong and what should be done to improve matters continues to be hotly debated.
One difficulty is that teachers lack a clear scientific knowledge base, and rely largely on personal experience…
While this debate continues, however, it is undeniable that the knowl-edge-base of teachers is very unlike that of either engineers or doctors and nurses, in that there is neither a corpus of scientific knowledge to underpin it nor a body of research evidence about “what works” to inform it (for an elabo-ration, see Hargreaves in Part II). The teacher’s knowledge-base is acquired largely through personal experience of working on one’s own in the classroom, aided by discussion with colleagues. Things have purportedly changed little since those two noted and unsurpassed observers of classroom teachers reported a generation ago that:
One of the most notable features of teacher talk is the absence of a tech-nical vocabulary. Unlike professional encounters between doctors, law-yers, garage mechanics and astrophysicists, when teachers talk together almost any reasonably intelligent adult can listen in and comprehend what is being said (…). [This] absence of technical terms is related to another characteristic of teacher talk: its conceptual simplicity. Not only do teachers avoid elaborate words, they also seem to shun elaborate ideas (…). This is the tendency to approach educational affairs intuitively rather than rationally. When called upon to justify their professional decisions, for example, my informants often declared that their classroom behaviour was based more on impulse and feeling than on reflection and thought (Jackson, 1968).
or that:
Individual [teachers] must resolve recurrent problems largely unaided by systematic, relevant knowledge (…). Teaching has not been subjected to the sustained, empirical and practice-oriented inquiry into problems and alternatives which we find in university-based professions. It has been permitted to remain evanescent; there is no equivalent to the recording found in surgical cases, law cases and physical models of engineering and architectural achievement. Such records, coupled with commentaries and
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critiques of highly trained professors, allow new generations to pick up where earlier ones finished (…). [T]o an astonishing degree the beginner in teaching must start afresh, uninformed about prior solutions and alter-native approaches to recurring practical problems. What student [teach-ers] learn about teaching, then, is intuitive and imitative rather than explicit and analytical; it is based on individual personalities rather than pedagogical principles (…). One’s personal predispositions are not only relevant but, in fact, stand at the core of becoming a teacher (Lortie, 1975).
… although increasingly
they are given materials to influence their work, but it is unclear how far these transform shared knowledge into changed practice…
At the same time, most teachers have, especially in recent years, been the target of much material from ministries, advisory bodies, academics and colleagues that relates to their professional activities. All these are sources of mediation from research and from advances in the social sciences that influence the way both professional problems and their possible solution are conceptual-ised. To what extent, in what way and with what effect (beneficial or otherwise) such mediations operate remains a mystery. It seems likely that much of this is not absorbed by many teachers, or is retained by them at the level of rhetoric or espoused theory but fails to penetrate everyday professional practice. The art of teaching probably remains largely self-taught through individual trial-and-error learning in the busy but professionally isolated world of the classroom where there is relatively little opportunity for reflection. In consequence the teacher’s knowledge-base is unusually rich in personal, tacit know-how but impoverished in terms of shared, codified knowledge.
… and in the confusion teachers still rely on personal tacit knowledge, but fell attacked.
It is little wonder, then, that the pressure of reforms directed at rapid pro-fessional improvement and the raising of students’ measured achievements is widely interpreted by teachers as threatening and demoralising, because the ways in which demands for higher standards of teaching and learning could, even in principle, be achieved are far from clear to them. Frustrated policy makers look outside educational circles – teachers, educational administra-tors, and the university-based educationists and teacher trainers – for radical ideas about what is to be done.
What is the situation in other sectors? Do they provide clues to better ways of working in education?
Knowledge in the health sector
Health is a big sector confronted by big issues…
The health sector is large, accounting for between 6-12% of GDP across OECD countries (as against 4-8% for the education sector). Though use of health services varies between nations (see Kervasdoué in Part II), public expectations of them have everywhere risen dramatically since 1950 and the trend is still upwards. Fresh demands arise from the appearance of new drugs and the invention of new technology, from advances in prevention and diagno-sis as well as therapy, and from new categories of demand, such as care of the elderly. What were once seen as social or educational problems easily become
“medicalised”, as the development of Viagra or concern with conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) illustrate. At the political level the major issues of policy relate to:
– The proportion of national wealth to be devoted to health.
– The allocation of resources within segments of overall health provision.
– The determination of priorities.
– The balance between preventive and therapeutic medicine.
– The balance between private and public provision and financing.
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– The creation of structures and mechanisms to maximise efficiency.
– The education and training of health personnel, including administrative staff.
– National differences in all the above.
All these areas are potentially focal points for knowledge creation and innovation: they are also potentially points of considerable conflict, especially between policy makers and those involved in service delivery.
… characterised by many actors whose relationships shape knowledge production and use, particularly as patients’ knowledge and decisions grow in importance.
As in the case of engineering, the health sector includes a range of key actors. Bauer’s “7-p” model (see his article in Part II) identifies seven principal actors – patients, providers, practitioners, payers, purchasers, pharmaceutical industry, professors. The interactions among these actors shape what counts as relevant knowledge as well as how it is produced, mediated and used. The widely felt need to restrain the escalating growth of public spending on health, for instance, stimulates the production of new knowledge about health care management and how that is best used, though this risks an increase in tension between managers (bureaucrats) and professionals (doctors and nurses).
Whilst patients have traditionally been passive receivers of medical knowl-edge in the form of instruction and treatment by doctors and nurses, the wider dissemination of medical and clinical knowledge among patients can lead par-ticular groups or individuals to inform themselves and to take issue with the professional practitioners (Epstein, 1996). Indeed, as the public becomes bet-ter informed through popular medical books, newspaper articles and televi-sion plays about hospitals, a new distribution of knowledge, and thus of power, is reflected in physicians’ changing relationships with patients, which become arenas for negotiation, rather than direction, over both diagnosis and treat-ment. Increasingly patients make the decisions, based on advice from medical staff, part of whose role is to supply the evidence relevant to any decision or choice. Judging the levels of education and anxiety in the patient becomes an important professional skill in such negotiations with patients, especially where the patient’s consent too complicated or unpleasant forms of investiga-tion or treatment are involved.
Medical knowledge draws from many disciplines, and despite huge growth continues to have major gaps.
The sources of new knowledge in medicine are exceedingly wide. One source comes from basic research in mainstream science departments in uni-versities, and the potential medical applications may not be recognised imme-diately. Another source lies in physics and engineering, rather than biology or chemistry, since the reliance on technological – and now nano-technological – developments for diagnosis and treatment increases steadily. Both Aids and BSE/Kreuzfeld-Jacob disease draw public attention to the existence of large pools of ignorance despite the huge advances in medical knowledge and skill, ones which can be remedied only by scientists coming from a range of back-grounds collaborating to generate new knowledge and means of applying it rapidly and effectively.
Pharmaceutical companies’ research role is growing relative to public research, but in some fields improvements in processes are more important than new drugs.
The power of the pharmaceutical industry has grown enormously. The larger companies can invest lavishly in basic research, either in-house or in uni-versity departments, since the potential returns on investment in some areas are exceptionally high in global markets. Although public investment in medi-cal research remains strong, its relative importance is in decline and the research role of many medical practitioners may amount to relatively low-level participation in drug trials. Yet this does not by any means apply to all of the fifty or more recognised specialities (plus as many para-medical occupations), some of which are less influenced by the pharmaceutical industry than others.