Eric Mangez

Eric Mangez is Professor in Sociology, Faculté Ouverte de Politique Eonomique et Sociale (FOPES), and at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, University of Louvain, Belgium. He is also a senior researcher of CIRTES-UCL, an associate member of the GIRSEF at Louvain-La-Neuve and a visiting Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. His theoretical and empirical research expertise is in education(al) policy in the context of wider cultural, social and political change. His early works in sociology explored the sociology of curriculum and curricular policy. Such interest is articulated with the long standing issue of social inequalities in schooling. He has published several papers, monographs and a book on this issue. He is author of  Réformer les contenus d’enseignement (PUF, Paris, 2008). 

He is now specifically interested in the sociology of knowledge and the knowledge - policy relationship. His current work area deals with the role of knowledge in governing/governance. He is the co-director of a large FP6 Integrated project funded by the European Commission and dealing with "the role of knowledge in the construction and regulation of education and health policy across Europe". The international dimension of the project stimulates a dialogue among sociology, political sciences and history. Indeed, in order to understand how different countries / sectors / contexts / peoples relate to knowledge in their policy activities, it is necessary to capture what they owe to their past policy and politics. This work draws on a view of knowledge as socially embedded / constructed, in opposition to the traditionalview of knowledge as a set of disembodied, neutral, reified facts about the world. 'Knowledge' is not only about what we know, it is also about who we are and where we come from (it is a social construct). Such reflexive effort in relation to knowledge (a sociology of knowledge perspective) generates specific questions: Where do our ways of knowing come from? How do they change through the international circulation of ideas and policies? How do they affect us? This perspective then challenges the view according to which evidence-based (or knowledge-based) policies can function smoothly across borders and circulate easily through time and space.

Eric Mangez has published several papers, chapters in books and monographs. His most recent publications in English include “Global Knowledge-based Policy in Fragmented Societies: the case of curriculum reform in French-speaking Belgium”, European Journal of Education, 45(1), 60-73, 2010 ;  “The Status of PISA in the relationship between civil society and the educational sector in French-speaking Belgium” Sísifo. Educational Sciences Journal, (10), 15-26, 2010.  Eric Mangez teaches general sociology, method and political sociology at the University of Louvain.

Key words: social inequalities, education, education policy, public policy, knowledge

Together with my colleague Bernard Delvaux, and the international research project Knowandpol, we have organized a summer school on the role of knowledge in the construction of policy. The Knowledge and Policy Summer school was held in Brussels in Septembre 2001. The summer school has attracted PHD students from all over Europe and beyond (Australia, North America and South America and Africa). The summer school has addressed the following key questions and issues :

-           What is knowledge?

-           Forms of knowledge: embodied, encoded, enacted?

-           Researching the powerful, interviewing the elite

-           Does experience-based knowledge matter?

-           Knowledge and knowledge regimes

-           Knowledge, policy and the problem of comparison

-           Trends and changes in the knowledge – policy relationship

-           Knowledge based regulation tools

-           Public action, or the analysis of complexity

Session 1. What is knowledge?

Ordinary understandings of knowledge often view it as a mirror of reality. Knowledge then, as a mirror, is not affected by, nor does it affect the reality that it mirrors. A series of research findings emphasize the need to develop a different view of what knowledge is and how it works. Knowledge, it is argued, needs to be seen as a very “active” element in constructing the social. Quoting MacKenzie (2006) in his effort to understand the role of “financial models” in shaping the market, we may argue that knowledge works as “an engine not a camera”. We would suggest conceiving knowledge as a two-sided engine which rearticulates the past and constructs the future.

Session 2. Forms of knowledge: Embodied, encoded, enacted?

The session involves the conceptualization, operationalization and analysis of the nature and use of knowledge in public policy: this will comprise an articulation of the embodied/encoded/enacted framework set out in our international study of the work of WHO and a series of case studies exploring its use in different contexts.

Session 3. Interviewing the elite, researching the powerful

While researching the powerful with qualitative methodologies, one can distinguish between different “moments” in the process of interviewing: a moment of access, a scene of interaction and a scene of exit and conclusions. Any one of these three “moments” can be understood and analysed as a knowledge-related social interaction worthy of a reflexive analysis.

The scene of access includes all actions and interactions necessary to gain access to the field (getting in touch with an actor and presenting oneself, obtaining an appointment, sometimes being delayed, or rescheduled). How do such actions and possible difficulties inform us about the very object of our analysis?

The scene of interaction is the interview itself, which can be very informative beyond the words uttered and the ideas expressed. How is the scene set up and ordered? How does the interaction evolve – the tone of the participants, including signs of deference or authority, and so on?

The scene of exit and conclusions is related to the type of feedback that the researchers provide their informants with. It includes the reactions of the interviewees and possible negotiation about the content of the work. How are our analyses received by those they actually speak of, when the latter are powerful?

  Session 4. Does experience-based knowledge matter?

Experience-based knowledge is characterised by the fact that it is contextualised, not subject to disciplinary segmentation, and often circulates in the form of anecdotes and stories. For a long time it was regarded as of little value in politics. But nowadays, in different ways depending on the country and the sector, it is presented as an important resource for public action. Two types of arguments are used to support such discourse: axiological (with reference to the democratic ideal of participation by all), and instrumental (with reference to the greater efficacy of policies based on participation). The incorporation of experience-based knowledge in public action thus acquires a paradigmatic status in some countries and sectors, at least at the rhetorical level.

This workshop aims to explore the issues (of definition and also of concrete uses) raised by experience-based knowledge in the framework of public action. Beyond the effort to clarify this polysemic term, attention will be focused on how this type of knowledge makes itself heard and the questions of power that inevitably arise once it is mobilised.

Session 5. Knowledge and knowledge regimes

Various processes increase the circulation of knowledge and (policy) ideas across Europe and beyond. Ideas however do not spread like a virus: they are recontextualized in different cultural, political and administrative settings. Understanding knowledge as a social construct means that it is constructed and reconstructed by social groups who are themselves situated in a context marked by its own past. The notion of contextuality of knowledge means that knowledge is not only about “what you know”; it is also about “who you are”, as a community (even a transnational community) or as an individual (who may be an international expert). The contextuality of knowledge and notions such as “community-based knowledge” or “local knowledge culture” must be considered simultaneously for a plurality of “levels”, “contexts”, “spaces” or “communities”, whether they be the national context, the level of a sector, the level of a community of users, or that of a given group of professionals, the “spaces” invested and created by a transnational community or the level of Europe for example.

The main hypothesis we wish to explore in this session is that such different spaces might develop different views on knowledge and therefore generate different “knowledge regimes”. The knowledge regime hypothesis should not be understood as a strictly cognitive hypothesis. Its point is rather to identify possible relations between political and institutional arrangements, cultural traditions and knowledge utilization.

 
Session 6. Knowledge, policy and the problem of comparison

Classical comparison draws on a set of assumptions. It assumes that time is linear and space geographical; that the “units” of comparison “exist” – that they exist as such “before” the comparison starts – that the “units” are not affected by the comparison – that the person who compares is not affected by the “units” that are being compared. There are however good grounds to be wary of each of these assumptions.

Such a critique of comparison raises questions for research and governance.

The first concerns the role of comparison in research. It questions in particular the construction of knowledge in and through international (comparative) research projects. Such projects bring together a variety of traditions, each of which carries its own understanding of knowledge and its own ways of knowing. How can they produce knowledge together? What kind of methodological issues does this raise? If knowledge is socially constructed, how can one think of (international) comparison?

The second issue concerns the role of comparison in governing. If comparison works as a mode of governance, which potentially affects the reality that it compares, then its governing potential needs to be investigated. Comparative knowledge in particular tends to function as a means of governance, affecting the “units” that are being compared, transforming them in particular by shaping the way people think of – and hence govern – themselves.

Session 7. Trends and changes in the knowledge – policy relationship

Various factors have significantly changed the relationships between knowledge and policy: more knowledge is being produced, the forms of knowledge are diversifying, and there is greater international circulation of knowledge. What is referred to as ‘the knowledge society’ is in fact a society of knowledges. In Europe, information and expertise are now more widely available and more widely distributed than ever before. At the same time, expectations of transparency and public accountability have increased. Knowledge is both contested and a means of contestation: it has become both vehicle and substance of politics. Such a trend towards what we may call post-bureaucracy generates various changes. The nature of knowledge itself is changing. It is now used for governing. The new role of knowledge in policy / politics also calls for a new type of actor: reflexive, accountable, creative.

Session 8. Knowledge based regulation tools

Knowledge is increasingly used in the area of regulation. Indicators, evaluations, audits, best practices, evidence-based practices, etc are on the increase. They tend to replace normative or incentives-based regulation of a more conventional variety. Several phenomena explain this trend. First, it is growing more difficult to convince people that intervention through norms that target a given factor will have the expected impact. Second, there is a widespread perception that regulation through norms or rules is less appropriate in social systems characterized by very broad and increasingly dense interdependencies. The development of instruments of knowledge-based regulation also stems from the policies of actors who have no legal or financial instruments of intervention, and whose knowledge therefore constitutes one of their main means of action. These organizations – such as WHO and the OECD – sometimes serve as “evaluative third-parties” positioned between users and producers, between citizens and policy-makers, and sometimes even change the nature of these parties’ interactions.

The strength of these instruments of regulation is their ability to conceal normative proclivities behind cognitive factors, which are portrayed as value-free or ideology-free, whence the term by which they are sometimes known: ‘soft governance’. Nonetheless, these instruments in fact give the targeted actors greater leeway, serve as a vehicle for knowledge that is always open to criticism; to be sure, the same knowledge can often be mobilized to support opposing arguments. Thus, these instruments of regulation, which are supposed to compensate for the relative inefficiency of more conventional instruments, in fact only partially compensate for the weaknesses of the latter.
 

Session 9. Public action, or the analysis of complexity

It has now quite generally understood that public policies are not as linear and state-centred as used to be supposed and that attention has to be paid to the multiplicity and diversity of the actors, the composite character of the public actor, the attenuation of hierarchical relations between actors, the relativising of the impact of the moment of political decision-making, the non-linearity of the processes and the fragmentation and flexibility of public action.

Such options require the researcher to shift and enlarge his/her field of investigation. But approaches in terms of public action are not accompanied by a unified theory capable of addressing this expanded, more complex field. Moreover, this expansion raises methodological questions that are particularly acute when one examines the role of knowledge in such processes. The aim of the workshop is to discuss such issues, particularly in the light of the thinking and practices developed in the course of KNOWandPOL research.