2020/01/23 by Kate Williams · 17 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · Decision Sciences · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Business #Computer science #Economics #Evaluation and Performance Assessment #Intellectual capital #Knowledge management #Liminality #Management and Organizational Studies #Negotiation #Order (exchange) #Political science #Position (finance) #Process (computing) #Production (economics) #Psychology #Public Policy and Administration Research #Public relations #Relation (database) #Relational view #Social science #Sociology #Space (punctuation) #Symbolic capital #The Symbolic
paper · open access · doi:10.1177/0038026119900116
published in The Sociological Review 68(5), 1070-1091 (SAGE Publishing)
openalex publication_date 2020/01/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
The process of knowledge production involves negotiating several social worlds, whereby actors engage in positioning and repositioning to situate their intellectual labour and gain symbolic resources. This article considers the strategic positioning of policy research actors using interview and document data. It sets out the ways in which individual and institutional actors negotiate and situate their intellectual practice in order to gain capital from a range of relevant fields. The article considers how organisations position themselves in relation to other institutions, and how individual researchers position themselves vis-a-vis their own organisations and others in the hybrid space between more established fields. It demonstrates how identities are constructed in a relational way via comparison and juxtaposition in the liminal space of international development. In doing so, it directs attention to the strategic practices involved in the production of meaningful intellectual interventions.