ABSTRACT
This chapter elaborates a model of knowledge exchange as a collective, sustained process. Knowledge exchange is a shorthand term for the processes and practices through which academic research knowledge is designed to inform, shape, and change thinking, policy, and practice in the ‘real’ world. Communities of practice is a social theory of learning. It developed as a critique of static theories of learning, where instruction through pre-drafted curricula would take place in designated places: schools, colleges, universities, and workplaces. Brokering communities of practice, as a social theory of knowledge, interaction, and learning; and democratic under-labouring, as explication of the political role of the criminologist, are both exploring the relationship between knowledge and policy/practice, albeit from different vantage points and for different purposes. Loader and Sparks acknowledge and favour ‘vigorous pluralism’ of theory and method within criminology. Criminology is a diverse field comprising many types of specialist knowledge, which any single criminologist can only have mastered to varying degrees at best.
