ABSTRACT
Concern with understanding how academic knowledge affects decision making is not new. It dates back to the early days of social science, and has persisted in contemporary debates about the knowledge-policy nexus and the functions of experts with regard to decision makers, assessing who is subordinate to whom, and in the name of what legitimacy. Only in the postwar period was analysis of these matters systematized as a specifi c branch of the recently created science of public policies.2
