What are 'Think Tanks'? Revisiting the Dilemma of the Definition

Abstract

Think tanks' (TTs) are 'sui generis' organizations that have been proliferating, playing more and more the role of very relevant actors on the political scene in clashes over interests, preferences and ideas for the formation of public policies. The definition of 'think tank', however, creates a conceptual gap that causes serious limitations on the development of this field of study. Excessive generality or inflexibility in the use of the concept raises questions about the validity of the category. Either way, the 'trade offs' of the conceptual choices have delineated a not very useful concept of think tank to both intercontextual and inter-organizational comparability and to differentiate think thanks from overlapping organizations. The article revisits some of these dilemmas. To do so, the treatment in the specialized literature of the analytic category, highlighting both the insensitivity of the traditional North American matrix to different national contexts and its obsolescence to the changes in the context of TTs' action, including their own context of origin, is explained. In shedding light on promising conceptual contributions, the main contribution of the present article is the proposal of the radial structuring of the concept of think tanks as 'boundary spanners', as advanced by Medvetz, and of corresponding indicators to deal with the large variation in the substantive properties of the operationalization of the adopted concept. Thus, the aim is to reduce non-specificities in the analytic category and the dissent of its social significance, which demands less abstraction facing the exploratory state of the field of study.

“Express yourself!”

“…O crescimento de universidades privadas, muitas de origem confessional, cursos de empreendedorismo oferecidos por instituições consagradas e até mesmo thinktanks poderosos que vêm transformado a noção de intelectual público com ruidosos vídeos no youtube, têm sido objeto de pesquisas importantes (SHARON, 2001;COLLINI, 2017;HAUCK, 2017;HOFSTADTER, 2012, SMITH, 1991, HAUCK, 2017, STAHL, 2016. No caso do Brasil, essa literatura também vem se incrementando (ITO e SECCHI, 2016, MICHETTI, 2017, ONOFRE, 2018.…”

Brazilian think tanks and the rise of austerity discourse

“…Four think tanks are selected in this article in order to illustrate think tanks' capacity of carrying communicative and coordinative discourse. The main concern in the case selection, thus, is their role as providers of political economy knowledge through a distinctive set of strategies (Hauck, 2017). Therefore, all four are mainly dedicated to economic issues; they are representative of diverse perspectives, and they have a systematic online publication production as well as an academic profile.…”

A teoria da dependência e o papel das organizações econômicas educacionais: reflexos nos ambientes educacionais

“…1 Instituições de formação de opinião pública de iniciativas de mobilização e ações coordenadas possibilitam a investigação e interpretação de que estas organizações tem o potencial de atuarem como movimentos sociais regressivos, na defesa de agenda política com elementos liberais e conservadores. (Barbosa, 2016), (Hauck, 2017), (Mendes;Peroni, 2020), (Carlotto, 2018). 2 Pode-se definir um Policy Maker como um formulação de ideias ou planos que são usados por uma organização ou governo como base para a tomada de decisões.…”