Articulating Research and Expert Activities

Abstract

Literature in science studies and policy studies has paid much attention to the way scientific expertise should be organised in order to be helpful for political decision-making. But less attention was paid to the way scholars in practice invest – or not – in technical support, advice or expertise activities. Drawing on the case of the emerging research field on biodiversity, we want to show that scholars’ investment in technical support, advice or expertise towards managers and deciders is related to the strategies researchers develop to articulate these activities with the rest of their research work. We draw on the notion of articulation developed by Fujimura (1987). We will firstly describe the specific case of the field of biodiversity studies ; we will then highlight two types of conditions influencing the scholars’ investment in expertise activities, at the level of the organization of research work and at the level of its development (publications). At the organizational level, expertise activities have to be compatible with time and staff management and with the practical conduct of empirical investigations. At the level of development, expertise activities have to accompany scholars’ ability to develop research results by publishing. These results contradict the idea that seniority or individual convictions are the main parameters explaining scholars’ investment in expertise : instead, they stress the importance of academic organisational logics and professional norms.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 33 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.