Knowledge Mobilisation and Social Sciences


Book Description

The essays presented in this volume examine knowledge mobilisation and its relation to research impact and engagement. The social sciences matter because they can help us to understand and address the complex challenges confronting society. This is particularly true in an era of significant downward pressure on public expenditure, a consequence of the global fiscal crisis, when there is a striking need to ensure that policies are demonstrably effective and efficient. The impact agenda in the UK, reflected in parallel global debates, actively encourages the social sciences to make and demonstrate a difference; to justify and protect social science funding. This volume shows how knowledge mobilisation can be thought of systematically as a process, encompassing engagement, leading to the co-production and channelling of knowledge to make a difference in the economy and society. This book was originally published as a special issue of Contemporary Social Science.




Knowledge Mobilization in the Social Sciences and Humanities


Book Description

"This book takes the reader from the university lab to the playgrounds of communities. It shows how to integrate, move and use knowledge, an action journey within an identified action space that is called knowledge mobilization"--Jacket.




Theoretical and Methodological Approaches to Social Sciences and Knowledge Management


Book Description

This is a unique and groundbreaking collection of questions and answers coming from higher education institutions on diverse fields and across a wide spectrum of countries and cultures. It creates routes for further innovation, collaboration amidst the Sciences (both Natural and Social), the Humanities, and the private and public sectors of society. The chapters speak across sociocultural concerns, education, welfare and artistic sectors under the common desire for direct responses in more effective ways by means of interaction across societal structures.




Theoretical and Methodological Approaches to Social Sciences and Knowledge Management


Book Description

This is a unique and groundbreaking collection of questions and answers coming from higher education institutions on diverse fields and across a wide spectrum of countries and cultures. It creates routes for further innovation, collaboration amidst the Sciences (both Natural and Social), the Humanities, and the private and public sectors of society. The chapters speak across sociocultural concerns, education, welfare and artistic sectors under the common desire for direct responses in more effective ways by means of interaction across societal structures.




Knowledge Mobilization and Educational Research


Book Description

This volume is unique in bringing together these wide-ranging issues of knowledge mobilization in education. The volume editors critically analyse these complex issues and also describe various efforts of knowledge mobilization and their effects. While the contributors themselves speak from diverse material, occupational and theoretical locations.




Mobilizing Knowledge in Healthcare


Book Description

The research-practice gap is a persistent problem in healthcare - significant new knowledge is created but only some of it is shared and even less is used. As a consequence, many innovative ideas fail to change practice in healthcare settings. Academics, practitioners, and governments alike, agree that finding new ways of mobilizing knowledge is critical to reducing this gap. Yet knowledge mobilization is especially difficult in such a complex setting. This is because knowledge is essentially social and contextual in its very nature. Straightforward, linear 'transfer' models fail to work. This book provides an alternative 'knowledge mobilization' view, that examines in detail how knowledge is circulated and negotiated among those involved in healthcare, and how it is used to actually transform practice. Building on the collective scholarship of some of the most prominent academics in this area, the chapters explore the dynamics of knowledge mobilization, focusing on the challenges these pose for organization and management and how these challenges can be overcome.




The Impact of Research in Education


Book Description

Research by universities plays an increasingly important role in shaping education policy around the world yet there is much dissatisfaction with the ways that they share that work. This much-needed, original book analyses efforts and systems in nine countries to mobilize research knowledge, describing the various factors that support or inhibit that work. Beginning and concluding chapters offer analytical lenses for understanding these various elements across the cases. Together, this collection from a wide range of experienced contributors, provides an unprecedented international view of the way education research is produced and shared, and provides excellent signposts for improvement for researchers and those interested in more impact from research in education.




The Production of Knowledge


Book Description

A wide-ranging discussion of factors that impede the cumulation of knowledge in the social sciences, including problems of transparency, replication, and reliability. Rather than focusing on individual studies or methods, this book examines how collective institutions and practices have (often unintended) impacts on the production of knowledge.




The Structural Change of Knowledge and the Future of the Social Sciences


Book Description

This book is a compendium of pragmatism in the social sciences. While addressing several distinct spheres, it carries a common message: the future of the social sciences depends on a shared understanding of society based on the knowledge of various disciplines and transcending the currently forbidding borders between scientific knowledge and the other forms of knowledge. Looking back at the social science traditions this is nothing new. To ensure a fruitful future for the social sciences a paradigm shift is unavoidable. The consequence of the increase of knowledge in the last two centuries was the specialization of the sciences. The nineteenth century saw the separation of humanities and social sciences; the twentieth century is even characterized by specialization within the disciplines and the occurrence of competing schools of thought. This book tries to overcome the barriers that are built between and within the disciplines, and to counteract the unnecessary barriers created by the emergence of "schools of thoughts" that distrust each other and the social sciences as a whole. This book was originally published as a special issue of Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research.




Global Knowledge Production in the Social Sciences


Book Description

An innovative contribution to debates on the internationalization and globalization of the social sciences, this book pays particular attention to their theoretical and epistemological reconfiguration in the light of postcolonial critiques and critiques of Eurocentrism. Bringing together theoretical contributions and empirical case studies from around the world, including India, the Americas, South Africa, Australia and Europe, it engages in debates concerning public sociology and explores South-South research collaborations specific to the social sciences. Contributions transcend established critiques of Eurocentrism to make space for the idea of global social sciences and truly transnational research. Thematically arranged and both international and interdisciplinary in scope, this volume reflects the different theoretical and thematic backgrounds of the contributing authors, who enter into dialogue and debate with one another in the development of a more inclusive, more representative and more theoretically relevant stage for the social sciences. A rigorous critique of the contemporary state of the social sciences as well as an attempt to find another way of doing transnational sociology, Global Knowledge Production in the Social Sciences will appeal to scholars of sociology, political science and social theory with interests in the production of social scientific knowledge, postcolonialism and transnationalism in research.