The role of knowledge and evidence in policy formation across Europe, Keynote speech addressed at the Korean Education Research association: The educational innovations for the 21st century, Seoul, 29-30 Octobre 2010, Hanyang University, Séoul, South Koreal.

The world of education (policy) is a world where policy ideas and innovations are supposed to circulate quickly across boundaries. It is also a world where actors (nations, groups, schools, individuals,…) look at each other, compare themselves to one another and are continuously being compared to others. In a situation where every actor is looking for new ideas and comparing itself to others as well as being compared, what kind of “comparison” should researchers make? Should they compare? Or should they rather understand the process through which actors compare themselves to others and are being compared to others, and ultimately redefine / re-invent who they are... We tackle the issue of innovation from the perspective of a sociology of knowledge. An innovation necessarily draws on a form of knowledge, a way of knowing and a representation of the relationship between knowledge and action. While exploring the knowledge question from a sociological perspective, a first difficulty relates to its relationship with the “social”. How does knowledge relate to the social, the contextual? How does it relate to the community and the context of its elaboration? Sociologists tend to see most of the phenomena they study as “social constructs”. By this they usually mean that the phenomena in question are marked and shaped by the social processes and conditions of their construction. We draw on a view of knowledge as socially embedded / constructed, in opposition to “the ‘traditional’ view of knowledge as a set of disembodied, neutral, reified facts about the world” (Hellstrom and Raman, 2001, 139). But what does it really mean for knowledge to be a “social construct”? And if it is socially constructed, can it be globally meaningful? There is a first important statement that needs to be made about the contextuality of knowledge. Understanding knowledge as a social construct means that it is constructed by social groups who can themselves be located in a context marked by its own past and by its positions vis-a-vis other actors and contexts. The same holds for knowledge about knowledge, that is: for our understanding of what knowledge is. Emphasizing the contextuality of knowledge thus does not mean that the possibility of its circulation should be denied, but it does direct our attention to the conditions and difficulties of its circulation and communication. It forbids conceiving knowledge transfer as a non-problematic process. The process of ‘translation’ (Freeman, 2009) - or the capacity to standardize or synthesize knowledge across these divisions and various contexts - is a complex process. It forces us to wonder whether there are types and forms of knowledge which are more amenable to transfer than others. The notion of contextuality also means that knowledge is not only about “what you know”; it is also about “who you are”, as a community (be it a transnational community) or as an individual (be it an international expert). There is something ‘personal’ and historical (Lawn et al. 2010) about knowledge. Interactions among people with various backgrounds and ‘knowledges’ are therefore likely to affect not only what they know but also who they are. Thus in order to understand how a community relates to knowledge, one needs to develop a profound genuine understanding of the community in question, comprehending who they are and where they come from, as well as how they relate to others and evolve through interactions. Even longstanding neighbours such as Belgians and French relate to knowledge in highly distinct and specific ways. Similarly, there are differences in the way knowledge is deployed and thought of in different policy sectors such as education and health, or between different communities, such a community of users or a professional group.