Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T05:48:30.116Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Governing Researchers through Public Involvement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 April 2021

ARIS KOMPOROZOS-ATHANASIOU Open the ORCID record for ARIS KOMPOROZOS-ATHANASIOU [Opens in a new window] ,
JONATHAN PAYLOR  and
CHRISTOPHER MCKEVITT
ARIS KOMPOROZOS-ATHANASIOU
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of Sociology, UCL Social Research Institute, University College London, 18 Woburn Square, LondonWC1H 0NR, United Kingdom email: a.komporozos@ucl.ac.uk
JONATHAN PAYLOR
Affiliation:
PhD Candidate, School of Population Health & Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Life Sciences and Medicine, King’s College London, Addison House, LondonSE1 1UL
CHRISTOPHER MCKEVITT
Affiliation:
Professor of Social Sciences & Health, School of Population Health & Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Life Sciences and Medicine, King’s College London, Addison House, LondonSE1 1UL
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper focuses on recent developments in UK health research policy, which place new pressures on researchers to address issues of accountability and impact through the implementation of patient and public involvement (PPI). We draw on an in-depth interview study with 20 professional researchers, and we analyse their experiences of competing for research funding, focusing on PPI as a process of professional research governance. We unearth dominant professional narratives of scepticism and alternative identifications in their enactment of PPI policy. We argue that such narratives and identifications evidence a resistance to ways in which patient involvement has been institutionalised and to the resulting subject-positions researchers are summoned to take up. We show that the new subjectivities emerging in this landscape of research governance as increasingly disempowered, contradictory and fraught with unresolved tensions over the ethical dimensions of the researchers’ own professional identities.

Keywords

health researchresearch governancepolicy enactmentpatient and public involvementprofessional subjectivity
Type
Article
Information
Journal of Social Policy , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , April 2022 , pp. 268 - 283
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Andreassen, T. A. (2018), From democratic consultation to user-employment: shifting institutional embedding of citizen involvement in health and social care. Journal of social policy, 47(1), 99–117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Apple, M. W. (1999), ‘Between neo and post: Critique and transformation in critical educational studies’ in Grant, C. A. (ed.), Multicultural Research: A Reflective Engagement with Race, Class, Gender and Sexual Orientation, London: Psychology Press, pp. 54–67.Google Scholar
Ball, S. J. (2000), ‘Performativities and fabrications in the education economy: towards the performative society’, Australian Educational Researcher, 27(2): 1–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ball, S. J. (2012), Performativity, commodification and commitment: An I-spy guide to the neoliberal university, British Journal of Educational Studies, 60(1): 17–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ball, S. J. (2015), ‘Subjectivity as a site of struggle: refusing neoliberalism?’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 37(8): 1129–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ball, S. J., Maguire, M., Braun, A. and Hoskins, K. (2011), Policy subjects and policy actors in schools: Some necessary but insufficient analyses. Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education, 32(4), 611–624.Google Scholar
Boaz, A., Biri, D. and McKevitt, C. (2016), Rethinking the relationship between science and society: Has there been a shift in attitudes to Patient and Public Involvement and Public Engagement in Science in the United Kingdom?. Health Expectations, 19(3), 592–601.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brett, J., Staniszewska, S., Mockford, C., Herron-Marx, S., Hughes, J., Tysall, C. and Suleman, R. (2014), ‘A systematic review of the impact of patient and public involvement on service users, researchers and communities’, Patient, 7(4): 387–95.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Clarke, J. (2015), ‘So many strategies so little time… Making universities modern’, in Hyatt, S. B., Shear, B. W., and Wright, S. (eds.), Learning under neoliberalism: Ethnographies of governance in higher education, New York: Berghahn Books. 129–151.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clarke, J., Newman, J., Smith, N., Vidler, E., and Westmarland, L. (2007), Creating Citizen-Consumers: Changing Publics and Changing Public Services, London: SAGE.Google Scholar
Dean, M. (1999), Governmentality: Power and rule in modern society, London: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
Department of Health (2006), Best research for best health: A new national health research strategy. The NHS contribution to health research in England, London: Department of Health.Google Scholar
du Gay, P. (2000), In praise of bureaucracy: Weber-organization-ethics, London: Sage.Google Scholar
Ersoy, A. (Ed.) (2017), The impact of co-production: From community engagement to social justice. Policy Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilmore, S. and Kenny, K. (2015), ‘Work-worlds colliding: Self-reflexivity, power and emotion in organizational ethnography.’ Human Relations, 68(1): 55–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hammersley, M. and Atkinson, P. (1995), ‘Insider accounts: Listening and asking questions.’ Ethnography: Principles in practice, 124–156.Google Scholar
Hyatt, S. B., Shear, B. W. and Wright, S. (Eds.), (2015), Learning under neoliberalism: Ethnographies of governance in higher education (Vol. 1), Berghahn Books.Google Scholar
Irwin, A. (2006), ‘The politics of talk: coming to terms with the ‘new’ scientific governance’, Social Studies of Science, 36(2): 299–320.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kirwan, S., McDermont, M. and Clarke, J. (2016), Imagining and practising citizenship in austere times: the work of Citizens Advice. Citizenship Studies, 20(6–7), 764–778.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Knowles, C. and Burrows, R. (2014), The impact of impact. Etnográfica. Revista do Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia, 18(2), 237–254.Google Scholar
Komporozos-Athanasiou, A. and Thompson, M. (2015), The role of emotion in enabling and conditioning public deliberation outcomes: A sociological investigation. Public Administration, 93(4), 1138–1151. doi:10.1111/padm.12188 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Komporozos-Athanasiou, A., Thompson, M. and Fotaki, M. (2018a), Performing accountability in health research: A socio-spatial framework. human relations, 71(9), 1264–1287.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Komporozos-Athanasiou, A., Fudge, N., Adams, M. and McKevitt, C. (2018b), Citizen participation as political ritual: Towards a sociological theorizing of ‘health citizenship’. Sociology, 52(4), 744–761.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Komporozos-Athanasiou, A., Renedo, A. and McKevitt, C. (2019), Citizen participation in neoliberal times, Sociological Research Online CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leathwood, C. and Read, B. (2013), ‘Research Policy and Academic Performativity: Compliance, Contestation and Complicity’, Studies in Higher Education, 38(8): 1162–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lehoux, P., Daudelin, G. and Abelson, J. (2012), ‘The unbearable lightness of citizens within public deliberation processes’, Social Science & Medicine, 74(12): 1843–50.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Maguire, M., Braun, A. and Ball, S. (2015), ‘Where you stand depends on where you sit’: The social construction of policy enactments in the (English) secondary school. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of education, 36(4), 485–499.Google Scholar
Newman, J., Barnes, M., Sullivan, H. and Knops, A. (2004), Public participation and collaborative governance. Journal of social policy, 33(2), 203–223.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peters, M. A. (2011), Education and ‘societies of control’: From disciplinary pedagogy to perpetual Training. Contemporary Readings in Law and Social Justice, 3(1), 7–32.Google Scholar
Phillips, L., Kristiansen, M., Vehviläinen, M. and Gunnarsson, E. (Eds.) (2013), Knowledge and power in collaborative research: A reflexive approach. Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Renedo, A., Komporozos-Athanasiou, A. and Marston, C. (2018), Experience as evidence: The dialogic construction of health professional knowledge through patient involvement. Sociology, 52(4), 778–795.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Richards, T. (2017), ‘Patient and public involvement in research goes global’, The BMJ Opinion, November 30, 2017, http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2017/11/30/tessa-richards-patient-and-public-involvement-in-research-goes-global/ Google Scholar
Rose, D. (2014), Patient and public involvement in health research: Ethical imperative and/or radical challenge?. Journal of health psychology, 19(1), 149–158.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rose, N. (1996), Governing ‘advanced’ liberal democracies, in Barry, A., Osborne, T. and Rose, N. (eds), Foucault and Political Reason: liberalism, neo-liberalism and rationalities of government (London: UCL Press), 37^64.Google Scholar
Shore, C. (2008), ‘Audit culture and illiberal governance: universities and the politics of accountability’, Anthropological theory, 8(3): 278–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shore, C. and Wright, S. (1999), Audit culture and anthropology: neo-liberalism in British higher education. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 5(4), 557–557.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shore, C., and Wright, S. (2011), ‘Conceptualising policy: technologies of governance and the Politics of Visibility’, in Shore, C., Wright, S., and Pero, D. (eds.), Policy Worlds: Anthropology and the Analysis of Contemporary Power, New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 1–21.Google Scholar
Thompson, J., Barber, R., Ward, P. R., Boote, J. D., Cooper, C. L., Armitage, C. J. and Jones, G. (2009), ‘Health Researchers Attitudes towards Public Involvement in Health Research’, Health Expectations, 12(2): 209–20.Google ScholarPubMed
Walshe, K. and Davies, H. (2013), ‘Health research, development and innovation in England from 1988 to 2013: From research production to knowledge mobilization’, Journal of Health Service Research Policy, 18(3 Suppl.): 1–12.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ward, P. R., Thompson, J., Barber, R., Armitage, C. J., Boote, J. D., Cooper, C. L. and Jones, G. L. (2010), Critical perspectives on ‘consumer involvement’ in health research: epistemological dissonance and the know-do gap. Journal of Sociology, 46(1), 63–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Watermeyer, R. and Lewis, J. (2018), Institutionalizing public engagement through research in UK universities: perceptions, predictions and paradoxes concerning the state of the art. Studies in Higher Education, 43(9), 1612–1624.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weber, M. (1988), ‘Science as a Vocation’ in Lassman, P., Velody, I. and Martins, H. (eds.), Max Weber’s ‘Science as a Vocation’, London: Unwin Hyman, pp 3–32.Google Scholar
Wetherell, M. (2013), “Affect and Discourse – What’s the Problem? From Affect as Excess to Affective/Discursive Practice.” Subjectivity 6: 349–368.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wetherell, M. and Edley, N. (1999), “Negotiating Hegemonic Masculinity: Imaginary Positions and Psycho-Discursive Practices.” Feminism and Psychology 9(3): 335–356.CrossRefGoogle Scholar