ABSTRACT
There is a large body of research on the interaction between researchers and the other participants in collaborative research. Here, researchers involved in collaboration reflexively analyse the processes that they themselves have been involved in. The other case chapters in this book carry out such analyses and I have done this myself elsewhere (Vehviläinen 2006). In this chapter, I present an analysis of another form of collaborative knowledge production and communication: namely, practices of collaborative knowledge production and communication carried out in organisations that act as intermediaries in dialogue between research and different social actors. National and transnational science and innovation policies that emphasise the key role of research-based knowledge in societal development have encouraged the development of intermediary organisations. These organisations include science and technology centres and science parks devoted to the commercialization of research which were established in the 1970s in the U.S. and have spread to other parts of the world (Etzkowitz 1997, Krücken et al. 2007). They also embrace non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that have the public understanding of science as their remit (e.g. Irwin and Wynne 1996, Yearley 1996). Such organisations facilitate the collaboration of knowledge production and the production of new kind of research-based activity between researchers, private and public actors and citizens (Krücken et al. 2007). They are important actors in ‘the dialogic turn’ (Phillips 2011) whereby there has been a proliferation of dialogue-based approaches in which communication is conceived in terms of participation and dialogue. In processes constructed in these terms participants ‘co-produce knowledge on the basis of the different knowledge forms that they bring with them’ (Phillips 2011: 9).
