Brokering communities of practice: a model of knowledge exchange and academic-practitioner collaboration developed in the context of community policing

Abstract

Knowledge transfer and knowledge exchange have recently become commonly used terms in the social sciences. They imply a number of different relationships between researchers and practitioners, and between research and practice, although these have often remained implicit or underdeveloped. Drawing from the experience of designing, delivering and refining a three-year knowledge transfer fellowship on community policing, this article aims to critically appraise these concepts and the assumptions about ‘knowledge’ and academic-practitioner roles and relationships that underpin them. It examines the role of research in knowledge transfer and exchange collaborations and the importance of personal relationships and organisational structures in shaping and sustaining them. In so doing, we contend that the nature and scope of academic-practitioner collaborations (and the potential benefits and pitfalls inherent within them), is more meaningfully captured by a model that is introduced and sketched out in this article: ‘brokering communities of practice’.

Keywords:

• brokering
• community
• policing
• knowledge exchange

Notes

1. We are using the language of ‘KTE’ to refer to this broader literature simply because it was our starting point, and because none of the alternatives are much preferable.

2. Officers recorded reflections on their activities on Dictaphones, usually over periods of a couple of weeks or so, that were then reviewed by the KTE team and used to form the basis of an interview through which points raised in the Dictaphone diary could be probed or clarified.

3. Through casting policies or practices as being of value (or the ‘right’ answer) because they have been ‘evaluated’, or that they are ‘legal’, or that they are ‘scientific’ without there being reflection on the content of such claims.

4. It should be noted, however, that the Division with which we collaborated were very much in the process of seeking to sharpen up and promote community policing as a valued enterprise within the organisation. This will, in all likelihood, be given further impetus around the country when force amalgamations make the real and symbolic links between the police and the public all the more potent objects of study.