Providing Science Advice: An Ethnography of the Council of Canadian Academies’ Boundary Work of Recontextualizing Expert-Produced Scientific Knowledge for Canadian Government Policy-Makers

Abstract

My study is an ethnographic account of the collaborative discursive activity of the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA), a non-profit advisory organization that contracts with government clients to perform "boundary work" which includes taking expert-produced scientific knowledge and transforming and re-purposing this knowledge into a science-based discourse that is accessible and useful for government policy-makers. The CCA works at armslength from its government clients in producing science-related information for policy-makers, an activity that draws on the expertise of a multidisciplinary panel of invited outside experts and the CCA staff. Using data collected at the CCA between 2013 and 2018, I explore the organization's culture, with a focus on its cultural constructs and tools. More specifically, its representations of key entities such as "science", "evidence", and "expertise". Concentrating my analysis on a 2017 CCA report produced for Transport Canada titled Older Canadians on the Move, I unpack the McKelvey, 2018; Hutchings & Stenseth, 2016; OECD, 2015). One approach used in providing science-informed advice to governments is through an advisory body closely connected with a national academy of science. Such an advisory body functions as an intermediary, nongovernment organization (NGO) mandated to interpret expert-produced scientific knowledge and communicate the relevant meaning of this expert-produced knowledge for use by government policy-makers in a form that is accessible and useful to them (Gluckman, 2014). Two well-known examples of such organizations are the National Academies of Science in the United States' National Research Council and the Royal Society in England's Science Policy Expert Advisory Committee. In Canada, the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA) performs this role by providing science-based advice to Canadian government policy-makers in the form of advisory reports, a kind of "boundary object" (Star & Gruesemer, 1989)-that is, an artefact, such as a report, that crosses the boundary of science or policy and is useable in either domain without becoming something entirely new. Government policy-making is a multi-faceted, solutions-oriented practice in which policy-makers attempt to resolve societal issues (Cairney, 2016; Tehara, 2010; Theodoulou, 2013). In Canada, as elsewhere, policy-making is a political process involving elected and unelected officials in national, provincial, and municipal institutions. At the federal level, Canadian policy is enacted through an Act of Parliament, which involves a process of deliberation among elected Members of Parliament sitting in the House of Commons and unelected Senators in the House of the Senate (Bejermi, 2010). Policy-making is an activity in which policy-makers use this knowledge to identify and choose between alternative ends and means while weighing competing factors such as public values, cost, efficiency, security, and liberty (Douglas, 2009; Dunn, 2013). One way that researchers have sought to understand the relationship between...

The Discursive Boundary Work of Recontextualizing Science for Policy: Opening the Black Box of an Organization’s Genre System and Intermediary Genre Sets

“…The study reported here is an ethnography-based analysis of the CCA's discursive boundary work through the genre system it uses to produce the boundary object of an expert panel report. All research took place undera research agreement between the CCA and me and was reviewed and approved by my university's Research Ethics Board (#105296) as part of a 5-year discourse-oriented interpretive ethnography (Falconer, 2019), which followed an emergent design (Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2008).…”

“…Since CALM is a meta-genre, it outlines the expected texts to be produced throughout an assessment. Within CALM, there appear to be 113 texts routinely produced during any given assessment process, 54 of which appear to be used to recontextualize science (Falconer, 2019). The CCA assessment team writes all the texts produced through the activities involved in recontextualizing science.…”

“…Advisory reports are a multifaceted type of knowledge-exchange activity often used to give policy makers evidence-based advice via a report. Such advisory reports have been studied, including the ways knowledge is shared via science communication practices (Falconer, 2019(Falconer, , 2023Orpin, 2019). We can now add this study to our understanding of boundary objects and advisory reports as they are developed through the discursive boundary work of an organization sitting between the domains of science and policy.…”

Unshared Realities: A Rhetorical, Double-Empathy Perspective on Autistic University Students’ Lived Experiences of Academic Acculturation

“…As mentioned above, I have positioned myself as a knowledge broker working at several boundaries (Falconer, 2023;Wenger, 1998):…”

“…In fact, using terminology borrowed from Falconer (2023) and Wenger (1998) all researchers who study autism. Unfortunately, not all nonautistic researchers equitably include autistic researchers or even members of the autistic community in their research, except as study participants with little or no role in the research design and work.…”