Knowledge Production Activities Research Articles

Knowledge-Production, Digitalization and the Appropriation of Surplus-Knowledge

ABSTRACT According to some commentators, the introduction of digital technologies into the sphere of knowledge-production and the consequent digitalization and computerization of this field have radically changed the nature of knowledge-producing activity and the produced knowledge. At the social level, such a change has allegedly caused the irrelevance of grand narratives and emergence of paralogies or the obsolescence of the labour theory of value, which in its turn signifies the end of capitalism. It is argued that such accounts simply disregard the social form of production of knowledge. The real revolutionary effect of digitalization, in resemblance to the introduction of machinery in large-scale industrial production, is intensification of knowledge-producing labour, which in its turn signifies the various forms of subsumption of knowledge-producing activity under capital and the appropriation of the commonly produced surplus-knowledge by it.

Mapping Higher Education Internationalisation as a Research Space via Natural Language Processing (NLP) Techniques

The productivity of a specific research field hinges on the periodic examination of both the knowledge produced and the knowledge production activities. By harnessing the strength of traditional bibliometric analyses and a variety of Natural language processing (NLP) techniques, this study portrayed a holistic landscape of higher education internationalisation (HEI) research that incorporated time and region through a spatial lens. The findings reveal the field's evolution into establishment, significant regional variations in research focus, and the expansion of networks for disseminating knowledge. These factors collectively contribute to a diverse ‘lived’ space of HEI research. However, the dominance of Western-centric key concepts, theories, and discourses highlights a homogenous ‘conceived’ space, pointing to an underlying tension between these spaces. Despite these challenges, opportunities for breakthroughs exist. Additionally, the study underscores the immense potential of NLP techniques in facilitating the exploration of how research fields evolve, further enriching our understanding of HEI.

Unruly bodies (of knowledge): influencing Irish abortion policy through evidence-based abortion activism

Abstract The involvement of grassroots activist groups in the production of knowledge used to challenge or inform abortion policy remains underexplored. Despite this, modes of abortion activism which incorporate knowledge production activities are increasingly common. In this article, we propose the term ‘evidence-based abortion activism’ to describe knowledge production activities by activist groups, which aim to influence abortion policy and provision and which advocate for the lived, embodied experiences of abortion-seekers as crucial forms of knowledge for policymaking. As a case study, we present research by the Abortion Rights Campaign (ARC) – a grassroots organization which campaigns for free, safe, and legal abortion across Ireland – analysing the experiences of those who have accessed or attempted to access abortion care in the Republic of Ireland since legal services were made available there in January 2019. This article explores one sub-section of ARC’s data, relating to the strikingly negative experiences of abortion-seekers attempting to access care between ten and twelve weeks in Irish hospitals: a thus far underexplored aspect of abortion experience in the Republic of Ireland. We argue that evidence-based abortion activism such as that carried out by ARC is important, not only because it provides a method for activists to attempt to influence abortion policy and provision but also because it creates space for forms of evidence which are epistemologically and politically ‘unruly’ in political debate and policy discussions. Specifically, ARC’s model of evidence-based abortion activism argues that the embodied testimonies of abortion-seekers themselves must be fully integrated and considered in policymaking to improve the material experience of abortion-seekers.

Digital representation strategies to reveal the cultural significance of Canadian Post-war Architecture

Considering the growing attention on the architecture of the second half of the 20th century and the rising issue of its documentation and interpretation, an operative methodology is presented to support knowledge production activities and conservation. Post-war architectural lexicon materialized spatial narratives from the ’50s up to the present. These spatial narratives can be visualized through analogic or digital drawing to gain in-depth knowledge and support interpretation and analysis. The proposed documentation strategy emphasizes the opportunities for digital representation in revealing and interpreting the post-war architectural lexicon. The potential advantages of employing digital survey and representation techniques for information visualization and management are being discussed in relation to the Strutt House, designed by Canadian architect James W. Strutt between 1951 and 1957. The study encompassed a thorough examination of primary and secondary sources, a comprehensive survey, and the experimentation with various modeling approaches in the SCAN to BIM procedure, with the final aim of comprehending the significance, purpose, and cultural value of documented characteristics. The adopted approach exploits the opportunities of geometric 3D modeling to visualize complex structures and semantic enrichment in an HBIM environment to support the knowledge, interpretation, and preservation of this outstanding example of Canadian Post-war architecture.

Capability accumulation patterns across economic, innovation, and knowledge-production activities

The evolution of economic and innovation systems at the national scale is shaped by a complex dynamics related to the multi-layer network connecting countries to the activities in which they are proficient. Each layer represents a different domain, related to the production of knowledge and goods: scientific research, technology innovation, industrial production and trade. Nestedness, a footprint of a complex dynamics, emerges as a persistent feature across these multiple kinds of activities (i.e. network layers). We observe that, in the layers of innovation and trade, the competitiveness of countries correlates unambiguously with their diversification, while the science layer shows some peculiar features. The evolution of the scientific domain leads to an increasingly modular structure, in which the most developed countries become relatively less active in the less advanced scientific fields, where emerging countries acquire prominence. This observation is in line with a capability-based view of the evolution of economic systems, but with a slight twist. Indeed, while the accumulation of specific know-how and skills is a fundamental step towards development, resource constraints force countries to acquire competitiveness in the more complex research fields at the expense of more basic, albeit less visible (or more crowded) ones. This tendency towards a relatively specialized basket of capabilities leads to a trade-off between the need to diversify in order to evolve and the need to allocate resources efficiently. Collaborative patterns among developed countries reduce the necessity to be competitive in the less sophisticated research fields, freeing resources for the more complex ones.

Cascading innovation: R&D team design and performance implications of mobility

AbstractResearch SummaryGiven the high cost of external hiring and uncertainty related to performance benefits, how can organizations foster an environment that maximizes the post‐mobility performance of external hires and their collaborators? In this article, I posit that R&D team design is an important factor that could shape the post‐mobility performances of both groups. Building on the interfirm mobility, innovation, and teams literatures, I argue that technological knowledge diversity within teams and across teams could differently impact innovation performance. Analyzing 63,976 interfirm moves of engineers and scientists, I find that the post‐mobility performances of external hires and teammates are conditioned by team design. A high level of within‐team diversity improves the performances of both groups, while a high level of across‐team diversity hurts their innovation outcomes.Managerial SummaryIn the war for talent, firms often offer premium wages to source external hires. Yet there have been unclear expectations about the post‐mobility outcomes of these hires and the implications for team performance. To better assess the value of hiring, managers should look beyond the performance of external hires and also consider team member performance. In the context of knowledge production activities, external hires, on average, experience an improvement in innovation performance after they move. Working with an external hire reduces the productivity of immediate collaborators but leads to more breakthrough innovations with greater technological impact. Most importantly, the performances of external hires and their teammates can be further improved by effectively designing R&D teams. Recomposing teams such that a high level of diversity exists within a team but minimal divergence across teams creates an environment that appears to enhance post‐mobility innovation activities.

The Expertise of Patient Organisations: Making Patients’ Voices Heard

The article discusses how the Russian patient organisations work on making patients’ needs, experiences, and grievances visible, acknowledged and used by state health governing officials and other experts. First, we present a health governance knowledge hierarchy that reflects different value assigned by healthcare governance actors to different knowledges. At the bottom of the identified hierarchy are the 'lay' experiences of individual patients, whereas policy-­making knowledge ranks the highest. Each type of knowledge is distinguished from others with its own language, logic and, most importantly, material world and forms of action. We advance the two key arguments. First, patient organisations work to facilitate interaction between different actors and co-creation of health governance. Second, a crucial element of this work are organisational operational practices. Several major patient organisations are the key actors being recognised by state institutions. These organisations facilitate collaboration via project and event management, as well as aggregate 'lay' expertise-by-experience of their members and produce knowledge understandable and recognisable by decision-­making actors. Methodologically, the article is based on the descriptive coding of available textual data of the key policy documents, legislation, methodological materials and other documents produced by the Russian patient organisations, as well as online ethnography of project activities, patient surveys, schools of patients and other knowledge disseminating vocational training, public council meetings, and other patient community engagement with state officials. In conclusion, the article summarises how Russian patient organisations strive to make their participation in health governance possible. They do so via reliance on organisational operational skills in maintaining collaborations with other actors, as well as wider knowledge production activities.

Towards a feminist philosophy of engagements in health-related research.

Engagement with publics, patients, and stakeholders is an important part of the health research environment today,and different modalities of 'engaged' health research have proliferated in recent years. Yet, th ere is no consensus on what, exactly, 'engaging' means, what it should look like, and what the aims, justifications, or motivations for it should be. In this paper, we set out what we see as important, outstanding challenges around the practice and theory of engaging and consider the tensions and possibilities that the diverse landscape of engaging evokes. We examine the roots, present modalities and institutional frameworks that have been erected around engaging, including how they shape and delimit how engagements are framed, enacted, and justified. We inspect the related issue of knowledge production within and through engagements, addressing whether engagements can, or should, be framed as knowledge producing activities. We then unpack the question of how engagements are or could be valued and evaluated, emphasising the plural ways in which 'value' can be conceptualised and generated. We conclude by calling for a philosophy of engagements that can capture the diversity of related practices, concepts and justifications around engagements, and account for the plurality of knowledges and value that engagements engender, while remaining flexible and attentive to the structural conditions under which engagements occur. Such philosophy should be a feminist one, informed by feminist epistemological and methodological approaches to equitable modes of research participation, knowledge production, and valuing. Especially, translating feminist tools of reflexivity and positionalityinto the sphere of engagements can enable a synergy of empirical, epistemic and normative considerations in developing accounts of engaging in both theory and praxis. Modestly, here, we hope to carve out the starting points for this work.

Teachers’ professional transformation in teacher-researcher collaborative didactic development projects in Sweden and Finland

ABSTRACT To what extent can teachers’ involvement in knowledge-producing activities be enhanced through collaboration with researchers? This article reports on two teacher-researcher collaborative didactic development projects in Sweden and Finland. By using the theory of practice architectures, the aim is to explore how teachers’ knowledge contribution and participation may be transformed through collaboration in two action research-based projects. Even though the practices of collaboration are different, one aiming for book production and the other for didactic development in the classroom, the findings regarding the teachers’ professional transformation seem to have similarities. The norms of how teachers initially understand themselves are transformed through the collaboration. The teachers start out by stating that they feel unsure of their own capacity, but through collaboration they start to see themselves as knowledge producers when they understand the value of their contribution of knowing-in-action. The teachers’ professional transformation is made possible through time given and the set-up of collaboration through dialogues. As the teachers develop agency in the collaborative process of producing knowledge with the researchers, the relationships of power and solidarity change. The findings contribute to the research field emphasising teachers’ important role in knowledge production and practice development processes.

The Research Interview: A Performative Reinterpretation

The shift from positivistic to interpretive and critical paradigms within qualitative research entails a certain messiness in its methodology and analyses. This aligns with an entailed abandonment of objectives to arrive at absolute truth. I argue in this article that the same levels of messiness and uncertainty should apply to the definition and characterizations of perhaps the primary knowledge-producing activity within qualitative inquiry, the research interview. Untethering this concept from unnecessary delimitation might, or so I argue, allow for fresh perspectives concerning its uses and analyses, revealing less positivistically “loaded” deployment strategies and opening up vast vistas for future research.

Towards a feminist philosophy of engagements in health-related research

Engagement with publics, patients, and stakeholders is an important part of the health research environment in the UK and beyond today, and different ‘engaged’ health research modalities have proliferated in recent years. Yet, the conceptual landscape currently surrounding engagement is contested. There is no consensus on what, exactly, ‘engaging’ means, what it should look like, and what the aims, justifications, or motivations for it should be. In this paper, we set out what we see as important, outstanding challenges around the practice and theory of engaging and consider the tensions and possibilities that the diverse landscape of engaging evokes. We examine the roots, present modalities and institutional frameworks that have been erected around engaging, including how they shape and delimit how engagements are framed, enacted, and justified. We inspect the related issue of knowledge production within and through engagements, addressing whether engagements can, or should, be framed as knowledge producing activities. We then unpack the question of how engagements are or could be valued and evaluated, emphasising the plural ways in which ‘value’ can be conceptualised and generated. We conclude by calling for a philosophy of engagements that can capture the diversity of related practices, concepts and justifications around engagements, and account for the plurality of knowledges and kinds of value that engagements engender, while remaining flexible and attentive to the structural conditions under which engagements occur. Such philosophy should be a feminist one, informed by feminist epistemological and methodological approaches to equitable modes of research participation, knowledge production, and valuing. This will enable a synergy of empirical, epistemic, and normative considerations in developing accounts of engaging in both theory and praxis. Modestly, here, we hope to carve out the starting points for this work.

Students matter: the role of doctoral students in university–industry collaborations

ABSTRACT Universities are the main knowledge-producing institutions, combining learning and research activities. Companies, in turn, play a role in the application of knowledge. In between, we find university–industry collaborations assuming various forms and stretching across different areas. One of the areas in which this cooperation takes place is doctoral education. The aim of this article is to discuss the role played by doctoral students, through their research, in the enhancement of university–industry collaborations, as they can be a vehicle of connection between academia and companies, but also because they can positively influence knowledge transfer and knowledge sharing. The discussion is framed by public policy initiatives formally promoting relationships between universities and companies in Portugal. We analyse the factors that contribute to make doctoral students important actors in creating and strengthening the cooperation between universities and companies and assess how their role varies between the scientific and economic environments. Our analysis is based on a survey conducted with doctoral programme directors in Portugal during the 2016/2017 academic year. From the main findings of the research, we highlight that doctoral students’ research is a central element in university–industry collaboration, including in knowledge transfer, and that the more diverse the role of universities and companies, the more heterogeneous and important is the role of doctoral students.

Non-disabled Space Invaders! A Study Critically Exploring the Scholarly Reporting of Research Attributes for Persons With and Without Disability

Social justice requires that the “nothing about us without us” disability inclusion mantra not be rejected or watered down in knowledge production activities. Appreciating the need for a greater representation of disability in these activities, this investigative study aims to (a) determine if there is a statistically significant difference in the median research attribute reporting scores between articles whose content refers to the term “researchers with lived experience” and articles whose content refers to “non-disabled researchers,” and (b) to critically discuss how the scholarly literature reports on the attributes of researchers with and without disability. Enabling this exploration, this study has applied the Mann-Whitney U test and thematic analysis to a purposive sample of 20 articles that were retrieved from a Scopus database search. Findings reveal that the median score of reported research attributes was statistically significantly higher in the group of articles whose content referred to the term researchers with lived experience than in the articles that referred to non-disabled researchers. Results also highlight attributes of empathy, ability, rigor and activism that are reportedly shared across the two groups of articles. Crucially, attention is given to a theme reported as unique to the researchers with disability group. This is the attribute of having firsthand knowledge of disability (i.e., lived experience). The study concludes by recognising that lived experience, when incorporated throughout the research process, can help to redress deficiencies that might otherwise be present.

“Nedir?” ve “Nereden/Nasıl Anlarız?” Sorularından Performatif Felsefenin Ürettiği “Devinen Bilgi”ye Doğru

Devinen bilgi kavramının araştırılması performatif felsefe araştırma alanı içerisinde verimli olabilecek bir alan açmaktadır. Bu bağlamda, felsefe yapma biçimi için önemli bulduğum üç soru tipini hem ayrı ayrı hem de ilişkileri içerisinde araştırmaya çalışacağım. İlk olarak felsefenin geleneksel olarak kabul edilen “nedir?” soru tipine ilişkin yorumlamamdan yola çıkacak, sonrasında ise nasıl’ın bilgisinden farklı olarak sorduğum “nereden/nasıl anlarız?” soru tipinin Bergsoncu sezgiden zekâya giden yöntemle nasıl pratiğe dönüştürülebileceği üzerinde duracağım. Nedir’li soruların deneyimin içinden ve süreç içerisinde sorulmalarının önemini vurgulayacak ve bizi deneyimin kendisi içerisine yerleştiren “nereden/nasıl anlarız?” soru tipinin “olma haline nasıl geçeriz?” soru tipine nasıl zemin hazırladığını araştıracağım. Nedenleri ve sonuçları tam olarak belirleyip bilemeyeceğimiz, “olma halleri”ne geçebilmek için yaratılan performatif ortamlar aracılığıyla olanakların deneylenmesi sonucu üretilen devinen bir bilgi türünden söz edeceğim. Felsefeye performatiflik içerisinden yaklaştığımızda ve yaratılan olma halleri’ni felsefe yapma biçiminin temeline koyduğumuzda, felsefenin birarada-üretilen bilgi için ortamlar yaratan bir pratiğe dönüştüğünü göstermeye çalışacağım.

Atlas of an Empire: Photographic Narrations and the Visual Struggle for Mozambique

This article engages with the historiography of the Portuguese empire with reference to Mozambique. It explores the impact of visual archives on existing debates and asks what difference photographs make to our interpretation and understanding of this colonial past. Deprived of their 'historical rights' by the requirements of the Berlin treaties that insisted on 'effective occupation', the Portuguese started to employ a complex of knowledge-producing activities in which photography was crucially involved. This article examines different photographic moments before and during the 'Pacification Campaign' that assured Portugal's authority over the Gaza Empire in southern Mozambique in the 1890s, by official, commercial and missionary photographers. It identifies controversies over the small number of portraits of the Gaza king Ngungunyane that took on distinctive and disputed 'other lives' after their initial production. The realisation of how one image might be disassembled to generate others becomes an exercise - in visual terms - of rethinking colonial violence. A critical engagement with the slippages and repositionings around photographs, and the errors or disputes in various captions, allows for a better understanding of the production of both silence and particular narratives in the archives and popular history. The demonstration of these other lives matters because it stimulates awareness of what is seen, what is made visible, and addresses the desire to look beyond the image to find others in a continuous interrogation of photographic excess.

Patent portfolio analysis of cities: statistics and maps of technological inventiveness

ABSTRACTCities can be considered as engines of the knowledge-based economy, because they are the primary sites of knowledge production activities that subsequently shape the rate and direction of technological change and economic growth. Patents provide rich information to analyse the knowledge specialization of specific places, such as technological details and information on inventors and entities involved. The technology codes attributed at the level of individual patent documents can be used to indicate the diversity and scope of the knowledge claims underlying a specific invention. In this study we introduce tools for portfolio analysis in terms of patents that provide insights into the technological specialization of cities. The mapping and analysis of patent portfolios of cities exploits data derived from the Unites States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and dedicated tools (at https://leydesdorff.net/software/patents/). The results allow policy makers and other stakeholders to identify promising areas of further knowledge development, including smart specialization strategies.

Quintuple helix structure of Sino-Korean research collaboration in science

The Triple Helix Model has been used for science-mapping in research collaboration since the 1980s. As knowledge-producing activities have rapidly expanded and become interrelated, the triple helix framework is limited in uncovering a broader range of stakeholders and multilateral collaborative activities. In this vein, the present study employs the N-tuple Helix Model as a suitable alternative to analyze the structure of scientific collaboration networks beyond university---industry---government (UIG) relations. The networks of N-tuple Helix relations embedded in Sino-Korean research collaboration are examined in terms of five actors, such as universities, industries, governments, hospitals, and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). The results found that the quintuple helical network exists in Sino-Korean research collaboration. While traditional UIG actors play a pivotal role, hospital and NGO sectors emerge as new drivers for knowledge production and innovation. Each sector is significantly associated with the others and plays distinctive roles and functions. The overall findings provide new insight into a possible change in the traditional Triple Helix framework by demonstrating an alternative "five-helix model" of innovation as a new evolving structure and new dynamic of international collaboration in science.

¿Cómo y con qué propósitos leer para aprender en historia? Sentidos contrastantes adjudicados a la lectura en la formación docente

Currently, contributions of socio-rethorical research, specific teaching and applied linguistics have shown extensively that learning contents in a discipline implies the gradual appropriation of particular ways of thinking and reading in a certain field of knowledge. Nevertheless, it is not clear yet in which way/s the relationship between how to read and how to learn to (re)construct the content of a particular discipline take place in a classroom. Drawing from this situation, the purpose of this study was to identify and analyze how and with which meanings, teachers and students connect learning history contents with characteristic ways of reading in History. For that purpose, we observed and recorded all classes that took place during the second semester of a scholar year in three courses of a History pre-service teachers’ program imparted in Buenos Aires. Simultaneously, in-depth interviews to students and educators were conducted. The qualitative analysis of the collected data shows that participants report reading modes similar to those that, according to various studies, experts in History report. In this article, we analyze particularly two of the most frequent ways of reading that students reported in the interviews: 1) read to analyze the historical perspective or historiographical work of authors; and 2) read to understand processes versus read to memorize dates and events. Results show that students can ascribe to these ways of readin, a disciplinary sense –seeking to perform them on their own– or an arbitrary sense –trying to reproduce/imitate the professor’s own interpretations about texts they do not fully undestand–. The attribution of a disciplinary or arbitrary sense seems closely related on whether the aforementioned ways of reading in History are contextualized and put into play in dialogic or monologic teaching and learning class-environments. Since many educational policies emphasize the importance to prepare “teachers as researchers”, showing the necessary interpenetration of instruction and knowledge production activities, our study contributes to the discussion about how pedagogical practices can promote or hinder History pre-service teachers’ disposition to read, study and learn about what they read, positioning themselves as legitimate interpreters and (re)constructors of the disciplinary content knowledge they will teach in the future, instead of just as reproducers of other’s interpretations.

Literature Discussions as Mangles of Practice: Sociological Theories of Emergence and/in Dialogic Learning Events

In this report, we argue that some of the most productive and edifying kinds of literature discussions among certain ages/grade levels may be best understood as “mangles of practice” (Pickering, 1995). Mangles of practice involve the coalescence of planned and contingent forces, and they produce emergent or self-organizing transformations of ongoing social activities, as well as unpredictable outcomes or products. Indeed, the discussions we studied had these characteristics. They often involved both planned and contingent actions and reactions by individual, social, cultural, and material agents and agencies. As such, they were emergent phenomena about which we could seldom predict what precise collections, collisions, and collusions of actions and reactions would occur within them or what the effects of these collections, collisions, and collusions would be. In spite of (or more likely because of) their unpredictability, these discussions were extremely dynamic knowledge-producing activities. Given this social fact, we think our findings contribute significantly to understanding the lineaments and potentials of dialogic pedagogy, which deepens students’ learning and development. More specifically, when teachers successfully prompt and engage students in more robustly dialogic talk that promotes text-to-life connections, life-to text connections, linkages to non-school knowledge (like that of popular culture), etc., then students often reap a wide variety of benefits with respect to their abilities to engage in genuine inquiry, to reason and argue for particular interpretations, to evaluate complex human actions and decisions, and to develop principled social, cultural, and moral equipment for living their own lives.

The Evolution of the Biotechnology Sector in Austria. Evidence Using Patents Over the Time Period 1990-2010

Today it is widely recognized that biotechnology is one of the key sectors of the emerging knowledge based economy (see, e.g., Trippl and Todtling 2007). Revenues and turnovers from biotechnology applications – here defined to include all applications of science and technology to living organisms, as well as parts, products and models thereof – have increased considerably, in particular over the last two decades. A specific property of the biotechnology industry is its knowledge-intensive character. Thus, the biotechnology sector is highly localized in geographical space, stressing the importance of knowledge interactions at the local level, most often within in local clusters. Until late 1990s, Austria has often been considered to be lagging concerning the evolution of the biotechnology sector and its contribution to overall macro-economic development. This has also been recognized by the Austrian economic policy as well as Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) policy that has put the commercialization and development of biotechnology on the top of their agenda after millennium. The initiative “LISA-Life Science Austria” is the most prominent example in this context, promoting the foundation of new companies in biotechnology and the formation of networks between the industry and the science sector in this field. Based on these policy efforts, several biotech clusters have appeared in the meantime, most prominently the Vienna biotech cluster mainly focusing on medical biotechnology (red biotechnology). The focus of this chapter is on the development of the Austrian biotechnology sector over the past two decades. The objective is to describe the development of the sector from a quantitative perspective, using patents as main indicator to track knowledge production activities. We identify relevant patents from the PATSTAT database of the OECD which enables us to systematically trace knowledge production in the Austrian biotechnology sector between 1990 and 2010, disaggregated by different, detailed technological fields and regions. Furthermore, determinants of knowledge production activities at the firm level are tested by means of a panel econometrics, relating knowledge production activities of Austrian biotechnology actors to relevant actor-specific characteristics, such as R&D expenditures. The results will provide a systematic insight into the evolution of the Austrian biotechnology sector, tracing the development across different technological fields and identifying determinants of the observed development.