Packaging, Negotiating, Translating: Transforming Knowledge into Practice
How does research based scientific knowledge become practice? And, more precisely, how does knowledge produced in one context become practice in another?
The project studies mediators as the pivot point between the production of (medical) knowledge and its use in practice, focusing on so seemingly disparate professions as veterinarian pathologists, midwives in parental education, and occupational health services providers. Through ethnographic fieldwork, i.e. observing and interviewing mediators and practitioners in order to capture their perspective of their work, as well as analyzing guidelines, the project provides knowledge on how organizational conditions and context affect how knowledge is translated between contexts and transformed into everyday practice. Results from the project will make it possible to both understand the provision of knowledge to society better on a theoretical level and, in consequence, to facilitate for it in practice. In addition, as scientific knowledge plays a central role in society today, suggesting ways to think about how it enters people's lives should be a significant contribution.
The project studies mediators as the pivot point between the production of (medical) knowledge and its use in practice, focusing on so seemingly disparate professions as veterinarian pathologists, midwives in parental education, and occupational health services providers. Through ethnographic fieldwork, i.e. observing and interviewing mediators and practitioners in order to capture their perspective of their work, as well as analyzing guidelines, the project provides knowledge on how organizational conditions and context affect how knowledge is translated between contexts and transformed into everyday practice. Results from the project will make it possible to both understand the provision of knowledge to society better on a theoretical level and, in consequence, to facilitate for it in practice. In addition, as scientific knowledge plays a central role in society today, suggesting ways to think about how it enters people's lives should be a significant contribution.
Final report
This project has analyzed the final step in knowledge provision in society, namely turning knowledge into practice and thus making it usable and useful. The main findings from this project revolve around the continuous work that the movement of knowledge between different epistemic cultures (Knorr Cetina 1999) requires.
The project set out to contribute to understanding and improving the long-term provision of knowledge to society by analyzing how knowledge is brought to users and integrated into their practices in forensics, antenatal care, and occupational health services. Its central research questions were:
• How is knowledge transformed or not transformed into practice in the three different fields? What kind of packaging, negotiating, and translating is required?
• How do mediators present knowledge as valid, relevant, and legitimate and thus acceptable and useful to practitioners?
• How do such factors as organizational conditions, feedback mechanisms between theory and practice, and professional and personal relationships affect the transformation of knowledge?
To answer these questions, we have studied the different ways in which knowledge is moved from one context to another in our three empirical fields.
In forensics, professionals with very different skills, competences, and foci move forensic evidence-to-be between them. What is more, because of the shared concern for legal security, they strive to move the evidence-to-be stably between them – i.e. without being changed or losing meaning or nuance. In antenatal care, midwives as medical professionals convey knowledge about pregnancy, birth, and infant care to laypersons, and laypersons from very different walks of life with very different approaches to parenthood. Like the members of the different professions in the criminal justice system, midwives strive to convey knowledge stably; unlike the criminal justice system, the voluntariness of antenatal care means that they also must make the knowledge attractive for parents-to-be to accept it. In occupational health services, the movement of knowledge embedded in the health care context is complicated by the “patient’s” employer being the health care provider’s customer and thus both commissioning and paying for the health care provider’s work. There, the triadic relationship between health care provider, patient/employee, and customer/employer shapes not only the provision of health care but also which knowledge can be conveyed.
We have analyzed this empirical material with the help of theory from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Anthropology, taking as our point of departure the notion of epistemic cultures (Knorr Cetina 1999); that is, the acknowledgment that different groups – originally, different scientific disciplines – produce and warrant knowledge in very different ways, leading to them also understanding the “same” knowledge differently. In all of our fields, these epistemic differences must be bridged, at least temporarily, for knowledge to be able to move from one context or epistemic culture to another.
This bridging – both how it is achieved or not achieved and which circumstances facilitate and complicate it – has been at the center of our attention. We have thought about this bridging with thoughts from infrastructure studies (e.g. Harvey et al 2016, Karasti and Blomberg 2018; for more, see Kruse 2021) and globalization studies (see e.g. Hylland Eriksen 2014). Infrastructures, especially in a globalized world – roads, railroads, water pipes, telephone connections, financial infrastructure – share a concern with the movement of knowledge: Both aim for stable movement from one context to another, and both must bridge differences – be it epistemic differences, topology, or borders. In terms of infrastructure studies, infrastructures must resolve “the tension between local and global” (Star and Ruhleder 1996: 114; italics in original).
This perspective has made it possible to develop a theoretical framework with which to capture the movement of knowledge. We have found that, like STS have shown for the production of knowledge (e.g. Latour and Woolgar 1979; Lynch 1985; Latour 1987), the movement of knowledge relies on continuous work: There is the work of continuously resolving tension between epistemic cultures through developing and establishing shared standards. There is alignment work (Kruse 2021) that resolves remaining tensions through (temporarily) aligning different epistemic cultures and thus complements and supports these standards. There is the emotion work (cf Hochschild 1983) of making knowledge attractive and desirable and of establishing relationships that make it possible to attempt the movement of knowledge. Much of this work takes place at temporal and/or spatial remove from the “actual” movement of knowledge, and much of it is invisible or unacknowledged.
Like infrastructures can materialize and reinforce existing inequalities (e.g. Hoag and Öhman, 2008; see also Larkin, 2013), this invisibility and unacknowledgedness, we have found, often align with already existing inequalities and power relationships. Power and inequalities affect, on the one hand, the movement of knowledge. They facilitate, hamper, or otherwise shape the movement of knowledge. On the other hand, we have also found that the movement of knowledge, and in particular how the knowledge that is to be moved is connected to other structures and relationships shapes power relations of its own. In other words, the movement of knowledge is not only embedded into relationships but also is shaped by and shapes these relationships and their power (im)balances.
Thus, the project shows how the movement of knowledge is deeply dependent on and shaped by continuous work and relationships, not all of them readily visible, and not all of them equal. Just like “our knowledge of nature is inextricably entangled with the infrastructure that we use to gather data about nature” (Parmiggiani and Monteiro, 2016: 32), knowledge is inextricably entangled with the arrangements, relationships, and practices that shape its movement. In other words, we argue that, in order to understand knowledge and how it is provided to society, it is important to attend to these arrangements, relationships, and practices – this project has developed the tools to do that also in other fields.
The project’s significance is threefold: Academically, it contributes to understanding knowledge and how it is provided for and translated to different part of society. Practically, the studies of the three fields provide our interlocutors with new and hopefully relevant perspectives on their work, which they will be able to use to reflect about and develop their knowledge practices. Societally, our research gives an interested public insight into the three fields as well as into how scientific knowledge, which plays a central role in society today, enters into people’s lives.
Thus, the results from this project make it possible to both understand the provision of knowledge to society better on a theoretical level and, in consequence, to facilitate for it in practice. Furthermore, its generalizable theoretical work on how scientific knowledge is brought into practice also facilitates long-term decisions on research development.
We have published our results in well-renowned scientific journals as well as presented them at a number of international conferences as well as seminars (see the separate publication list). We are still in the process of guest editing a Special Issue that revolves around alignment work and of finishing a book that discusses the movement of knowledge from an STS point of view.
Through the programme The Long-Term Provision of Knowledge, we have also presented our results to the Swedish Parliament, as well as at a conference aimed at practitioners and policymakers in the welfare system.
The Long-Term Provision of Knowledge has also given us many opportunities to broaden our theoretical horizons through working together with other projects in the programme. We have had shared workshops, arranged conference sessions together, and the Special Issue that we are editing involves scholars from another of the programme’s projects.
References
Harvey, P, Jensen, CB and Morita, A
2016 Infrastructures and social complexity. Routledge.
Hoag HJ and Öhman M
2008 “Turning Water into Power – Debates over the Development of Tanzania’s Rufiji River Basin, 1945-1985.” Technology and Culture 49: 624-651.
Hochschild, AR
1983 The Managed Heart. University of California Press.
Hylland Eriksen T
2014 Globalization – The Key Concepts. Second edition. Bloomsbury.
Karasti, H and Blomberg, J
2018 “Studying infrastructuring ethnographically.” Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 27(2), 233-265.
Larkin, B
2013 “The politics and poetics of infrastructure.” Annual review of anthropology, 42(1), 327-343.
Latour, B
1987 Science in Action – How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Harvard University Press.
Latour, B and Woolgar, S
1979 Laboratory Life — The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Lynch, M
1985 Art and artifact in laboratory science – A study of shop work and shop talk in a research laboratory. Routledge.
Knorr Cetina, KD
1999 Epistemic Cultures – How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Harvard University Press.
Kruse, C
2021 “Attaining the Stable Movement of Knowledge Objects through the Swedish Criminal Justice System: Thinking with Infrastructure.” Science and Technology Studies 34(1): 2-18.
Parmiggiani E and Monteiro E
2016 “A measure of ‘environmental happiness’: Infrastructuring environmental risk in oil and gas off shore operations.” Science & Technology Studies 29(1): 30-51.
Star SL and Ruhleder K
1996 “Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces.” Information Systems Research 7(1): 111-134.
The project set out to contribute to understanding and improving the long-term provision of knowledge to society by analyzing how knowledge is brought to users and integrated into their practices in forensics, antenatal care, and occupational health services. Its central research questions were:
• How is knowledge transformed or not transformed into practice in the three different fields? What kind of packaging, negotiating, and translating is required?
• How do mediators present knowledge as valid, relevant, and legitimate and thus acceptable and useful to practitioners?
• How do such factors as organizational conditions, feedback mechanisms between theory and practice, and professional and personal relationships affect the transformation of knowledge?
To answer these questions, we have studied the different ways in which knowledge is moved from one context to another in our three empirical fields.
In forensics, professionals with very different skills, competences, and foci move forensic evidence-to-be between them. What is more, because of the shared concern for legal security, they strive to move the evidence-to-be stably between them – i.e. without being changed or losing meaning or nuance. In antenatal care, midwives as medical professionals convey knowledge about pregnancy, birth, and infant care to laypersons, and laypersons from very different walks of life with very different approaches to parenthood. Like the members of the different professions in the criminal justice system, midwives strive to convey knowledge stably; unlike the criminal justice system, the voluntariness of antenatal care means that they also must make the knowledge attractive for parents-to-be to accept it. In occupational health services, the movement of knowledge embedded in the health care context is complicated by the “patient’s” employer being the health care provider’s customer and thus both commissioning and paying for the health care provider’s work. There, the triadic relationship between health care provider, patient/employee, and customer/employer shapes not only the provision of health care but also which knowledge can be conveyed.
We have analyzed this empirical material with the help of theory from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Anthropology, taking as our point of departure the notion of epistemic cultures (Knorr Cetina 1999); that is, the acknowledgment that different groups – originally, different scientific disciplines – produce and warrant knowledge in very different ways, leading to them also understanding the “same” knowledge differently. In all of our fields, these epistemic differences must be bridged, at least temporarily, for knowledge to be able to move from one context or epistemic culture to another.
This bridging – both how it is achieved or not achieved and which circumstances facilitate and complicate it – has been at the center of our attention. We have thought about this bridging with thoughts from infrastructure studies (e.g. Harvey et al 2016, Karasti and Blomberg 2018; for more, see Kruse 2021) and globalization studies (see e.g. Hylland Eriksen 2014). Infrastructures, especially in a globalized world – roads, railroads, water pipes, telephone connections, financial infrastructure – share a concern with the movement of knowledge: Both aim for stable movement from one context to another, and both must bridge differences – be it epistemic differences, topology, or borders. In terms of infrastructure studies, infrastructures must resolve “the tension between local and global” (Star and Ruhleder 1996: 114; italics in original).
This perspective has made it possible to develop a theoretical framework with which to capture the movement of knowledge. We have found that, like STS have shown for the production of knowledge (e.g. Latour and Woolgar 1979; Lynch 1985; Latour 1987), the movement of knowledge relies on continuous work: There is the work of continuously resolving tension between epistemic cultures through developing and establishing shared standards. There is alignment work (Kruse 2021) that resolves remaining tensions through (temporarily) aligning different epistemic cultures and thus complements and supports these standards. There is the emotion work (cf Hochschild 1983) of making knowledge attractive and desirable and of establishing relationships that make it possible to attempt the movement of knowledge. Much of this work takes place at temporal and/or spatial remove from the “actual” movement of knowledge, and much of it is invisible or unacknowledged.
Like infrastructures can materialize and reinforce existing inequalities (e.g. Hoag and Öhman, 2008; see also Larkin, 2013), this invisibility and unacknowledgedness, we have found, often align with already existing inequalities and power relationships. Power and inequalities affect, on the one hand, the movement of knowledge. They facilitate, hamper, or otherwise shape the movement of knowledge. On the other hand, we have also found that the movement of knowledge, and in particular how the knowledge that is to be moved is connected to other structures and relationships shapes power relations of its own. In other words, the movement of knowledge is not only embedded into relationships but also is shaped by and shapes these relationships and their power (im)balances.
Thus, the project shows how the movement of knowledge is deeply dependent on and shaped by continuous work and relationships, not all of them readily visible, and not all of them equal. Just like “our knowledge of nature is inextricably entangled with the infrastructure that we use to gather data about nature” (Parmiggiani and Monteiro, 2016: 32), knowledge is inextricably entangled with the arrangements, relationships, and practices that shape its movement. In other words, we argue that, in order to understand knowledge and how it is provided to society, it is important to attend to these arrangements, relationships, and practices – this project has developed the tools to do that also in other fields.
The project’s significance is threefold: Academically, it contributes to understanding knowledge and how it is provided for and translated to different part of society. Practically, the studies of the three fields provide our interlocutors with new and hopefully relevant perspectives on their work, which they will be able to use to reflect about and develop their knowledge practices. Societally, our research gives an interested public insight into the three fields as well as into how scientific knowledge, which plays a central role in society today, enters into people’s lives.
Thus, the results from this project make it possible to both understand the provision of knowledge to society better on a theoretical level and, in consequence, to facilitate for it in practice. Furthermore, its generalizable theoretical work on how scientific knowledge is brought into practice also facilitates long-term decisions on research development.
We have published our results in well-renowned scientific journals as well as presented them at a number of international conferences as well as seminars (see the separate publication list). We are still in the process of guest editing a Special Issue that revolves around alignment work and of finishing a book that discusses the movement of knowledge from an STS point of view.
Through the programme The Long-Term Provision of Knowledge, we have also presented our results to the Swedish Parliament, as well as at a conference aimed at practitioners and policymakers in the welfare system.
The Long-Term Provision of Knowledge has also given us many opportunities to broaden our theoretical horizons through working together with other projects in the programme. We have had shared workshops, arranged conference sessions together, and the Special Issue that we are editing involves scholars from another of the programme’s projects.
References
Harvey, P, Jensen, CB and Morita, A
2016 Infrastructures and social complexity. Routledge.
Hoag HJ and Öhman M
2008 “Turning Water into Power – Debates over the Development of Tanzania’s Rufiji River Basin, 1945-1985.” Technology and Culture 49: 624-651.
Hochschild, AR
1983 The Managed Heart. University of California Press.
Hylland Eriksen T
2014 Globalization – The Key Concepts. Second edition. Bloomsbury.
Karasti, H and Blomberg, J
2018 “Studying infrastructuring ethnographically.” Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 27(2), 233-265.
Larkin, B
2013 “The politics and poetics of infrastructure.” Annual review of anthropology, 42(1), 327-343.
Latour, B
1987 Science in Action – How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Harvard University Press.
Latour, B and Woolgar, S
1979 Laboratory Life — The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Lynch, M
1985 Art and artifact in laboratory science – A study of shop work and shop talk in a research laboratory. Routledge.
Knorr Cetina, KD
1999 Epistemic Cultures – How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Harvard University Press.
Kruse, C
2021 “Attaining the Stable Movement of Knowledge Objects through the Swedish Criminal Justice System: Thinking with Infrastructure.” Science and Technology Studies 34(1): 2-18.
Parmiggiani E and Monteiro E
2016 “A measure of ‘environmental happiness’: Infrastructuring environmental risk in oil and gas off shore operations.” Science & Technology Studies 29(1): 30-51.
Star SL and Ruhleder K
1996 “Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces.” Information Systems Research 7(1): 111-134.