Research for Policy's Sake: The Enlightenment Function of Social Research

For a long time the perception of how research related to policy was strongly influenced by linear and rational models, which focused on overcoming the distance between 'knowledge-producers' (researchers) and 'knowledge-consumers' (policy-makers). The assumption was that research is directly useful to policies, and therefore the solution lies in engineering the flow of knowledge from researchers so that it reaches policy-makers intact.

Weiss disputes the traditional model, and instead argues that social science research influences policy in other and less direct ways. Importantly, research introduces new concepts and thus incrementally alters the language used in policy-circles. Also, glimpses of new ideas and approaches may slightly alter the perception and understanding of policy-makers and advisors. Therefore, even though research findings are not directly employed in a specific policy, they still on the whole exert a relatively powerful influence over the terms used and the way issues are framed and understood. Weiss calls this the 'enlightenment function' of research. She also introduces another visual image to describe the process, namely 'percolation', which refers to the way in which research findings and concepts circulate and gradually infiltrate policy discourse.