ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the impact of doctoral research on policy making in education. Doctoral research is regarded as having as a central purpose a contribution to knowledge and understanding, a purpose similar to that of academic research in education, while the impact on education policy also works in similar ways. We can also distinguish between doctoral research in education generally and that explicitly focused on education policy. There are also professional doctorates in education, which seek a more direct policy and practice impact, but which also have an outcome criterion of contribution to knowledge. The distinction between research of/for policy is a useful analytic here (Gordon et al. 1977), with the former the more academically oriented education policy research and the latter more akin to commissioned research. This binary will be utilised in this chapter and will assist in assessing the impact of research upon policy, which it is argued is always heavily mediated and indirect. In the next section, some preliminary considerations are traversed, including how we
might usefully define education research, how we might define impact, and how we need to reconceptualise what we take as education policy today, given the effects and workings of globalisation. Following these definitional preliminaries, the complexity of the relationship between education research and education policy will be considered. The subsequent section will seek to elaborate and understand this relationship through an account of the ‘distinctive and misaligned cultures’ of education research and policy (Orland 2009: 117). Finally, the conclusion will summarise the argument proffered regarding the complex connections and disconnections between education research and policy and offer an evaluative view of this state of play.
