Introduction

As already indicated in the Introduction to this volume, the stimulus to this book was essentially a personal biographic concern with the developments in the relation between academics, research funders and the policy milieu. This concern was heightened by the quite concrete changes in the British university sector as the wider neoliberal ideology of the government came to permeate throughout the structures and values of the management of British academe. The retreat from knowledge as a public good, the rapid commercialisation of higher education, and the micro-management of individual academics within this regime all conspired to elevate my degree of anxiety that all was not well in this triangular relationship.

The aim of this chapter is quite modest. It is merely to raise in simple terms the problematic nature of the current relationships between research and policy. This does not aim for high theory or extensive empirical evidence, but aspires to point to the impact of the radical changes in the institutional environment on university-based researchers’ capacity to engage wholeheartedly in policy-related research. Given its personal biographic origin, this chapter is necessarily written very much from the perspective of a university-based researcher with an established commitment to developing social scientific research that will inform politics and policy around diversity, equality and multiethnic coexistence. Noting the very major ideological shifts in the political environment that frames both academe and ethnic relations in Britain, the argument developed here seeks to provoke a wider, and more honest, public debate about the capacity of social scientific research to contribute to the development of policies aimed at challenging racism and promoting equity in multiethnic Britain.

Most academics operate not only with immediate colleagues in their home department, but also within a community of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991), where they share common core values and modes of practice with a cohort of fellow professionals. These include not only immediate colleagues with common disciplinary, and possibly applied, concerns, but also a transnational web of contacts who form a supportive network of dialogue and collaboration (a dispersed, but possibly highly significant, epistemic community). Within such a community of practice there are mechanisms of support, and discipline, which consolidate shared convictions about the merit of their shared theoretical repertoire.