The characteristics of the research knowledge

Research needs to display certain characteristics if it is to be relevant to non-academic decision-making. The factors in the decision-making context that make for effective research interventions have been discussed above. Issues of access to research knowledge are discussed in the next sec tion. In this section, the focus is upon the features of the research itself that can lead to its being taken up in decision-making.

Clark and colleagues again provide a useful overview. They strip their findings down to three characteristics that 'seem to be most important in distinguishing effective assessments': saliency, credibility and legitimacy, defined as follows:

• Saliency is meant to capture the perceived relevance or value of the assessment to particular (non-academic) groups' who might use it to promote policy change (Clark 1999: p5, my brackets)
  
  
• Credibility is meant to capture the perceived authoritativeness or believability of the technical dimensions of the assessment process to particular constituencies, largely in the scientific community'
  
  
• Legitimacy 'is meant to capture the perceived fairness and openness of the assessment process to particular constituencies, largely in the political community'.

The authors go on to note that 'these distinguishing characteristics are little more than formalized common sense. Yet the disturbingly high ratio of ineffective to effective assessments out in the world suggests that formalizing common sense may have some value'.

Many assessments are ineffective due to inadequate attention to one or other of these criteria. For example, the authors note that saliency can be undermined by assuming that 'the questions important to the scientific community are the same as those important to the policy community', or because research results are delivered too slowly to be of any use in policy processes that are evolving quickly.

Research also varies greatly in its subject focus and organisation. These factors are further ingredients in determining its potential for influence. For example, research in fields such as engineering and management studies tends to be closely linked to professional practice, whereas research in particle physics may not have an immediately obvious user community. Likewise, natural science is often assumed to have been much more productive in its practical outcomes than social science, but authors such as Giddens and Keynes have challenged this notion.

As Keynes wrote in his General Theory: 'the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else… I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas' (quoted in Webber 1991).

Similarly, Giddens notes that the social sciences are in a subject-subject relationship with their object of study. Not only does this mean that social scientists usually have to interact with their objects of study in order to carry out their research, but it also implies that the social world can be transformed by the work of the social sciences by learning from them and changing actions accordingly. This is what Giddens calls the 'double hermeneutic', which he defines as: 'a mutual interpretative interplay between social science and those whose activities compose its subject matter' (Giddens 1984: xxxii and 348). Sayer has a simpler way of explaining this: 'social phenomena can be changed intrinsically by learning and adjusting to the subject's understanding' (Sayer 1992: 28-29). The implication of this is that social science is embedded in its subject matter - society - and is therefore unavoidably involved in interaction with it.

Giddens summarises the difference between the natural and social sciences thus: 'unlike in natural science, in the social sciences there is no way of keeping the conceptual apparatus of the observer - whether in sociology, political science or economics - free from appropriation by lay actors. The concepts and theories invented by social scientists, in other words, circulate in and out of the social world they are coined to analyse. The best and most original ideas in the social sciences, if they have any purchase on the reality it is their business to capture, tend to become appropriated and utilized by social actors themselves (Giddens 1987: 19).

As a result of this relationship, Giddens claims that 'the achievements of the social sciences tend to become submerged from view by their very success. On the other hand, exactly because of this we can in all seriousness make the claim that the social sciences have influenced 'their' world - the universe of human social activity - much more strongly than the natural sciences have influenced 'theirs'. The social sciences have been reflexively involved in a most basic way with those very transformations of modernity which give them their main subject-matter' (Giddens 1987: 21). I have explored this issue on greater details elsewhere (Scott 2001a).

Such general statements may outline some of the broad features of knowledge production in different fields that can lead to practical impact. However, they tell us little about why some pieces of research are more immediately or more broadly influential than others. The contributions reviewed so far have hinted that this is something to do with the character and intensity of the interactions between researchers and decision-makers. This is the final of the three determinants of effective research interventions.