Sir Humphrey and the professors: what does Whitehall want from academics?
Sir Humphrey and the professors: what does Whitehall want from academics?
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汉弗莱爵士和教授们：白厅想从学术界得到什么？
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发表时间：
2014
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Carole Talbot
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作者：
C. Talbot;Carole Talbot
政策制定者希望从学者那里得到什么？高级公务员对学术研究和专业知识的可及性和实用性的看法的调查（公务员）决策者希望从学术界得到什么？这是一个看似简单的问题，你可能认为我们已经有了一个很好的答案。学术界代表了关于各种公共政策如何运作（或不运作）的想法、事实和理论的非常丰富的来源。大约有25，000到50，000名英国学者在与政策相关的领域工作？这代表了一个巨大的知识库，可以帮助决策者。尽管这种明显的情况，实际上很少有人确切地知道学术界和决策者如何互动。有一些研究项目探讨了这个问题，但这些大多是案例研究，很难概括。我们决定询问整个英国高级公务员制度（SCS）如何与学术研究和专业知识联系起来。我们邀请了所有4，000多名SCS成员填写我们的在线调查。大约8%的人作出了答复，性别平衡具有代表性，几乎涵盖所有政策领域，这是一个相当好的样本。此外，反应的变化表明，没有明显的自我选择偏见？肯定不是吗我们问了一系列关于他们如何获得和使用学术研究和专业知识以及这对政策制定有什么影响的问题。他们的回答有些是意料之中的，有些则是令人惊讶的，挑战了标准假设。总体而言，我们的调查给人的印象是，大多数高级公务员积极参与学术产出。然而，也很明显，有相当一部分人根本不与学术界打交道，而且许多人以相当有限的方式与学术界打交道。预消化？研究成果和学术专长。他们的偏好？初次接触？是简报或报告（79%），或媒体报道的学术成果的报纸和周刊（61%）或专业期刊（55%）。更令人惊讶的是，大多数（55%）还声称访问更多？经典？学术成果？的？黄金标准？同行评议的学术期刊文章吗对学术界和大学来说，另一个重要的发现是，高级公务员对一般专业知识的重视程度与他们对具体研究的重视程度一样，甚至更高。鉴于卓越研究框架和研究委员会的指导往往侧重于具体研究的直接影响，白厅的这一回应可能会提供一个受欢迎的纠正。当被问及哪些学科对他们最有用时，公共政策（63%），经济学（60%），公共管理（54%）和商业和管理（49%）的回答最多。这又是一个令人惊讶的，也是学术界感兴趣的，因为这四个中的两个？纪律？?公共政策和公共管理--在英国并不具备通常的学科装备。有几个本科和硕士课程，没有突出的学术协会或会议，只有几个英国的期刊。建立MPA的最新举措（公共管理硕士）和MPP（公共政策硕士）（特别是牛津和剑桥的学术界）表明，英国在这些领域取得了一些进展，但与其他大多数大型发达经济体相比，英国在这些领域的学术界还很不发达。高级公务员对学术界在政策制定过程中发挥作用也持令人惊讶的积极态度：信息和知识提供者（86%）;非正式顾问（67%）;正式顾问或参与者（62%）;以及为决策者提供培训和教育（63%）。后一项关于教育提供的调查结果，加上关于公共政策和公共行政学科的调查结果，这是否表明高等教育在为公务员决策者提供更先进的培训方面存在差距？最后，我们的调查提供了一些不足为奇的证据，证明伦敦、牛津和剑桥是白厅的学术专长来源。它还表明，某种形式的个人接触是学术界与公务员交流的重要组成部分。不过，我们的结果确实打破了一个小神话？受过牛桥教育的公务员倾向于向他们以前的导师寻求建议？只有11%的人声称通过这条途径获得学术专业知识。显然，这项调查只是学术界和白厅之间交流的一部分，还有许多其他问题需要探讨。但它提供了一些有用的？基线？关于高级公务员目前如何访问和使用学术界的数据。
Executive summaryWhat Do Policy-Makers Want From Academics?A Survey of Senior Civil Servants Views on the Accessibility and Utility of Academic Research and ExpertiseWhat do (civil service) policy-makers want from academics? A seemingly simple question, and one to which you would already think we had a pretty good answer.Academia represents a very rich source of ideas, facts and theories about how public policies of all sorts might work (or not). Somewhere around 25,000 to 50,000 UK academics work on specifically policy-relevant areas ? this represents a massive pool of knowledge that could help policy-makers.Despite this obvious situation, actually very little is known precisely about how academia and policy-makers interact. There are some research projects that have explored the issue, but these have mostly been case studies from which it is hard to generalize. We decided to ask the whole of the British Senior Civil Service (SCS) how they relate to academic research and expertise. We invited all 4,000+ members of the SCS to fill-in our on-line survey. About 8% responded, with a representative gender-balance and spread across nearly all policy areas, which is a reasonably good sample. Moreover the variations in responses suggest there was no obvious self-selection bias ? it certainly wasn?t only those positive about academic outputs that responded.We asked a series of questions about how they access and use academic research and expertise and what impact this has on policy-making. Some of their answers were expected, and some were surprises that challenged standard assumptions.Overall, the impression from our survey is that the majority of senior civil servants actively engage positively with academic outputs. However, it is also clear that a significant minority does not engage at all with academics and that many do so in fairly limited ways.Unsurprisingly perhaps, senior civil servants had a predilection for ?pre-digested? results of research and academic expertise. Their preference for ?first contact? was briefings or reports 79%), or media reports of academic outputs in newspapers and weeklies (61%) or professional journals (55%).Rather more surprisingly, a majority (55%) also claimed to be accessing the more ?classic? academic outputs ? the ?gold standard? of peer-reviewed academic journal articles ? far more than was expected (especially given restricted access of costly academic journals).Another key finding for academics and universities is that senior civil servants value general expertise as much, or more, than they do specific research. Given that the Research Excellence Framework and research councils guidance has tended to focus on the direct impact of specific pieces of research, this response from Whitehall might provide a welcome corrective.When asked about which academic disciplines are most useful to them, public policy (63%), economics (60%) public administration (54%) and business and management (49%) top the responses. This is again surprising, and interesting to academia, because two of those four ?disciplines? ? public policy and public administration - do not really have the usual paraphernalia of academic disciplines in the UK. There are few undergraduate and masters courses, no prominent academic associations or conferences and only a few UK based journals. Recent moves to establish MPA (Masters in Public Administration) and MPP (Masters in Public Policy) (notably for the latter at both Oxford and Cambridge) suggest some movement, but the UK is a long way from having well developed academic communities in these areas compared to most other large developed economies.Senior civil servants were also surprisingly positive about academics playing a role in the policy process: as information and knowledge providers (86%); informal advisers (67%); formal advisers or participants (62%); and as providers of training and education for policy-makers (63%).The latter finding about education provision, coupled with the findings about the public policy and public administration disciplines, suggest that there is a gap for higher education to provide more advanced training for policy-makers in the civil service?Finally our survey provides some unsurprising confirmation of the dominance of London, Oxford and Cambridge as sources of academic expertise for Whitehall. It also suggests that personal contact in some form is an important ingredient to academic-civil servant interchange. However our results do explode one small myth ? that Oxbridge educated civil servants tend to go back to their old tutors for advice ? only 11% claimed to access academic expertise through this route.The survey is clearly only a partial view of the interchange between academia and Whitehall and there are many other issues to explore. It does however provide some useful ?baseline? data about how senior civil servants currently access and use academia.