Organizing for Policy Impact in Communication: A Social Network Analysis

Abstract

Policy impact is the ultimate goal of policy research. Different kinds of organizational forms to enable/enhance policy impact have emerged. It is useful to evaluate such organizational forms periodically. The ‘organizations’ enabling the taking of research to policy can range from very loose forms through tightly networked associations of researchers to actual organizations such as think tanks.The Telecommunication Policy Research Conference, since renamed the Research Conference on Communication, Information and Internet Policy (TPRC) and the European Communication Policy Research (EuroCPR) are two organizations that pioneered the idea of organizing for policy impact in the sphere of communication policy. Communication Policy Research south (CPRsouth), the Asian counterpart of TPRC and EuroCPR, was established seven years ago. The purpose of the present paper is to compare and contrast the three organizations and situate the findings in the literature to understand how to make research-to-policy initiatives work better.When researchers and/or practitioners organize themselves into collectives they form knowledge networks. In this study we use descriptive statistics to understand the composition of these collectives and social network analysis tools to visualize and quantify network properties such as the degree of connectedness.Surprisingly, the composition and the connectedness of the three conferences were relatively similar despite their differences in age, size, geographical focus and form. For example, all three conferences were attended by participants with multiple disciplinary origins and/or interests. About 50 percent of participants came from social science disciplines other than economics. Other disciplines represented are computer science/engineering, commerce/economics and law. Non-academic representation averaged at around 20% in all three conferences.Co-authorships were largely contained within organizational boundaries. Citations patterns were similar to patterns generally observed for other scholarly research networks where a core academic group is surrounded by a larger group of peripheral participants. What seems distinctive about the three conferences is the convergence around regionally specific policy issues. For example, broadband and Internet are dominant among the topics addressed at TPRC, Internet and content at EuroCPR and mobiles at CPRsouth.