“A modern research profession’: government social research, evidence-based policymaking and blind spots in contemporary governance research

ABSTRACT

Recent debates on evidence-based policymaking have demonstrated limited engagement with the history of the Government Social Research (GSR) profession and its role in facilitating the translation of evidence into policy. Though there was a concerted scholarly focus on social research functions within government during the 1980s and 1990s, the recent limited focus on these professions has led to a ‘blind spot’ in contemporary governance research. As a case in point, the United Kingdom's GSR profession offers a critical vantage point upon which to develop new insights into the relationship between evidence and policy. We argue that just as the GSR profession is currently undergoing significant reform programmes, there is a critical need for a critical research agenda on the composition of research professions within governments. Such a research agenda would reflect on crucial questions about the interface between research evidence and other government functions. In conclusion, we offer four starting points for a comparative, interdisciplinary, transnational research agenda, focusing on the effects of reform programmes for (1) researchers’ professional identities and values, (2) organisational change processes, (3) accountability challenges, and (4) intra-professional relationships with evidence producers.

KEYWORDS:

• Government social research
• evidence-based policymaking
• governance
• accountability
• public administration

Introduction

The literature on evidence-based policymaking (EBPM) has significantly contributed to contemporary public policy analysis research (Cairney, 2016; Cartwright & Hardie, 2012; Oliver et al., 2022), despite paying limited attention to the role of researchers within government and their role as translators, appraisers, and knowledge producers. We argue that governance scholarship should pay more attention to this forgotten community of knowledge producers and the reform programmes that are currently impacting these in-house evidence generators within government. In brief, there is a critical need for more sustained scholarship on the contemporary importance of research professionals involved in the production, commissioning, and utilisation of research evidence within governments. The central argument of this paper is that public policy and public administration scholarship should restart an active research agenda on government research professions and the transnational approach to the reform programmes that are reshaping analysis functions within government departments, ministries, and agencies. Such an agenda would make two main contributions to contemporary governance scholarship. Firstly, these professions are critical intermediaries in EBPM processes, yet they have been overlooked as active participants in EBPM. Secondly, to understand the relationships between research dissemination, knowledge mobilisation, impact generation and policymaking, critical insights about organisational processes can be gained by paying greater attention to professionals routinely involved in this conjuncture.

We develop our argument by focusing on recent reform programmes impacting the GSR profession in the United Kingdom to demonstrate their potential importance in evidence production, circulation, and translation between academic, commercial, and policy settings. The paper argues that contemporary governance research should address the impacts of such reform programmes on researchers’ professional identities, organisational change processes, accountability challenges, and infra-professional relationships with evidence producers. By taking up such a research agenda, we claim that governance scholarship can offer a more critical understanding of EBPM within the bureaucracy of government (Cairney, 2022). We suggest that a critical engagement with professional social researchers in government, along with other analysis functions, such as economists, data scientists, and operational researchers, opens up a new conceptual space to understand processes of EBPM. As a starting point, it invites researchers to consider how researchers within government actively negotiate competing policy demands by reconciling questions of research ethics and professional identities and operate through the constraints of professional standards and administrative reputations. By setting out this future direction for governance scholarship, we argue there is a strong need for comparative investigations of the critical role that professional government researchers take in translating research into policy requirements, network-building activities between government, academic and commercial researchers, or contributing to government policy agendas. Scholarship on evidence and policy should focus on government analysis professions to understand how these professional groups, for example, contribute to decisions about ‘What Works,’ promote multi-disciplinarity working arrangements and evaluate the impact of public policies.

The next section outlines some theoretical assumptions underlying future sociological studies of government research professions, drawing on scholarship in public administration, the sociology of professions, and the social life of methods. The paper then begins to appraise some recent trends impacting the constitution of the UK GSR profession before concluding with a more detailed outline for a future research agenda on government research professions.

Towards a sociology of government research professions

At the outset, such a research agenda requires a more robust engagement with scholarly work in the sociology of professions to critically examine the administrative structures and technical requirements of government analysts and professionals involved in evidence production and utilisation (Adams, 2015). In the UK, the experience of the 2,300 Government Social Research (GSR) Professionals embedded in over fifty departments and organisations inevitably varies (Government Analysis Function, 2022a). Across the UK Civil Service, social researchers find themselves embedded within policy or delivery units, in departmental or ministries’ analysis or data services, or interdisciplinary units of social researchers and other research professionals. Though there has been recent interest in knowledge brokerage organisations and the efficacy of embedded researchers in local government (MacKillop & Downe, 2022), there has been a recent limited focus on this professional function and its forms of evidence brokerage, boundary work, and cross-governmental efforts to reshape the professional identities amongst GSR members. In the 2020s, the GSR profession is well-established and organised through clear bureaucratic demarcations of specialism, pay, and seniority. Social researchers operate across civil service grades in roles such as Research Officers or Analysts at the Higher Executive Officer level, heads of research teams at the Senior Executive Office or Grade 7 level, up to more senior posts as Principal Social Researchers, Heads of Profession, and Chief Scientific Officers. Recruits, including ‘fast streamers,’ to the Civil Service's GSR Profession are required to have a university degree, which must have a minimum of thirty percent content focused on research methods across quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis, literature reviews, and the application of ethics to research (HM Government, 2022a). Applicants to the GSR Profession are assessed using a standardised GSR competency-based test corresponding to the GSR Technical Framework (HM Government, 2022b). Passing this test enables GSR members to become ‘badged’ members of the GSR Profession, requiring a shared commitment to the GSR ethical framework (the ‘Government Social Research Code’) (HM Government, 2018). Until 2022, members of the GSR Profession were awarded a specialist pay allowance.

We argue that this research agenda needs to theorise how professionals within the field of government research experience particular challenges that other researchers on the ‘outside’ do not, rather than treat academic research communities as a canonical source of knowledge and inquiry (Krause, 2017; Molina, 2023) while retaining a critical view on the relationship between professional knowledge production, ‘the social life of (government research) methods’ and the composition of public policy problems (Lury, 2020; Savage, 2013). We need critical assessments of GSR professionals’ practices for negotiating power relations and conflicting values in EBPM as part of the British public administration environment (Mair, 2021; Mangset & Asdal, 2019; Oliver & Fraser, 2021). Some critical historical developments within the British government have shaped the direction of social research functions. Since the Fulton Inquiry in 1968, the provision of social science expertise in government has been subject to recurrent organisational reforms, which have introduced client-customer relations, new relations between Research Councils and government departments, and sought to introduce new standards in specialist analysis services (HM Government, 2021; Fulton Report, 1968; Parker, 2016). Over twenty years since the New Labour government established a Chief Government Social Researcher in 2002, we see the professional function provided by social researchers in government being reshaped by modernisation efforts. We need to ask how this ordinary infrastructure of government is reordering the relationship between technical expertise, evidence, social science, and policy (Burnett & Duncan, 2008; Kattirtzi, 2017). As part of a broader analysis function in government, as currently conceptualised in Cabinet Office guidance, social researchers ‘plan and undertake analysis to support well-informed decision making, in order to deliver better outcomes’ (Cabinet Office, 2022a). This function intersects with other government functions, such as commercial and grants, communication, counter fraud, debt, digital, data and technology, finance, human resources, internal audit, project delivery, property, and security (Cabinet Office, 2022a).

As we argue throughout this paper, government research professions offer a critical vantage point for developing new insights into the ‘epistemic cultures’ of research within government, focusing on the relationships between evidence and policy and the organisational changes impacting evidence production (Knorr Cetina, 1999). We argue that such a research agenda should begin by examining the socio-historical emergence of the government research professions, such as GSR, and the emerging international trends impacting government analysis functions. As a critical starting point, this agenda should understand the challenges research professionals face in government departments and their interprofessional relations with evidence producers, civil servants, political appointees, and policymakers. With these challenges in mind, this paper offers a preliminary contextualisation for further study of the experiences of social researchers in government by looking at the developments and issues surrounding the United Kingdom's social research profession. We make a case for an interdisciplinary, transnational research agenda on the emerging trends transforming the relations between GSR, government analysis functions, policymakers, and evidence producers.

Modernising government social research functions in the UK

The extant scholarly literature highlights several tensions and debates regarding social researchers’ role in the civil service. Government analysts operate in networks of evidence producers, routinely horizon scan for new evidence in policy fields (Stevens, 2011), and develop interfaces between policy and academic communities through acts of translation (Connelly et al., 2017) and knowledge exchange and brokering (Neal et al., 2021). Incisive research has outlined features of the GSR profession (Kattirtzi, 2017; MacClancy, 2017). Even amongst senior members of the GSR profession, there has been a longstanding sense that the evidence-based policy paradigm seems little more than a ‘slogan,’ providing an idealised model of the relationship between science and government, and one which fails to reflect actual relations between expertise, evidence, and policymaking (Boaz et al., 2008; Burnett & Duncan, 2008, p. 285).

In an era of data-driven decision-making, governments increasingly operate in a post-trust context, where public sentiments and feelings have supplanted objective scientific evidence (Davies, 2018). It is also essential that public administration and public policy scholars develop a more explicit conceptualisation of how social research functions are reformed through efforts to innovate, coordinate, and standardise analysis functions across governments. Moreover, while there has been a regular reorganisation of analysis functions within government departments, these reforms often hinge on claims about how new structural arrangements will increase synergies and efficiencies, enabling researchers to ‘plug into’ operational planning, programmes, and policymaking. The relative autonomy of groups of social researchers, and the analysis function, within government, have been progressively reframed since the 1960s, boosted by the Rothschild Report (1972), ‘The Organisation and Management of Government R&D,’ to become more clearly aligned with meeting the needs of ‘customers’ (Parker, 2016; Thomas, 1982). These alignments recast the profession's role, making it subject to the requirement of servicing policy demands through introducing new mechanisms of control, whether budgetary or organisational structures, over the development of professional autonomy over research programmes and agendas.

While the suggestion that the social research profession predominantly offers a scrutiny function should be acknowledged (Kattirtzi, 2017), where the value of its work is to offer a form of judgment of policy proposals, further historical work is needed to examine the longer-term reforms of social research functions and its relationship to policy design, implementation, and evaluation. To indicate some trends that have historically reshaped the GSR profession in the UK, we can draw on the example of a critical government department in the United Kingdom – the Home Office. The Home Office's research function, the Research Unit, subsequently named the Research & Planning Unit, Research & Statistics Directorate, and now the Insight & Analysis, operated in the 1970s and 1980s. In the words of one former social researcher in the Home Office from the mid-1970s to the 1990s, the function primarily worked ‘autonomously’ (Mike Hough in European Society of Criminology, 2019). This autonomy was increasingly superseded during the 1980s and 1990s, and it became subject to the ‘policy machine,’ so much so that: ‘Over the twenty year period, ministers got a lot more controlling and civil servants got a lot more anxious about sort of things we wrote, eventually the policy machine took control of the research functions’ (ibid). In recent years, we have seen the publication of protocols to publish government research and evidence, increasing the transparency of evidence use (Welsh Government, 2016), while numerous public controversies have emerged around the failure to disclose data and research evidence (Butler, 2022; Shaw, 2019). With these points of reference in mind, there is understandable that the GSR profession represents a critical domain for understanding how public administrators negotiate conflicting values – to the public, quality of evidence, and policy relevance – as well as technical innovations, transparency, and openness in data and evidence-production.

This research agenda would reflect on critical, longstanding questions amongst scholars about how research evidence interfaces with other functions of government (Sanderson, 2002; Weiss, 1986), which has curiously overlooked the strategically important role of GSR professionals in this process, especially in terms of their professional identities, accountability challenges and impact on public policy. There was a concerted scholarly focus on the social research function in government during the 1980s and 1990s (Backman, 1987; Bulmer, 1987; Kogan & Henkel, 1983; Nathan, 2000). In our view, the recent limited focus on social research functions has led to a ‘blind spot’ in understanding how government analysis functions have changed and how social researchers assess and use evidence, design, and manage evaluation programmes. Giving more attention to the institutional and historical focus on GSR and the broader analysis functions would enable a new critical understanding of the evidence and policy interface through the examination of the implications of new demands on professional ethics of GSR professionals, civil service reforms, changing accountability dynamics, and modernisation agendas.

Emerging reform programmes: commercialisation, standardisation, and diversification

GSR professionals across government departments are primarily situated in multi-disciplinary, professional, and functional teams, units, divisions, or directorates, composed of other research professionals, including statisticians and operational researchers, and policy and operational officials (Government Analysis Function, 2022a). In recent years, there have been notable innovations in specialist research and analysis services, with social researchers contributing to new ‘paradigms’ of government analysis. For example, the most high-profile research unit in the UK Civil Service, the Behavioural Insights Team, also known as the ‘Nudge Unit,’ was established in 2010 by Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell. The Unit was located within the Cabinet Office. It was noteworthy for its quasi-consultancy structure, offering analysis to civil servants, private companies, and international governments through evidence assessments, literature reviews, or designing and assessing pilot interventions (Behavioural Insights Team, 2022). Other research units were established by the Cabinet Office, such as its Policy Unit, set up in response to the Civil Service Reform Plan (HM Government, 2012) to provide ‘specialist advice to departments on a shared basis’ (HM Government, 2012, p. 13). The Government White Paper, The Civil Service Reform Plan, stated that the delivery of analysis services requires provision of ‘high quality, flexible and resilient services available to every department,’ considering budgetary and staffing reductions in departmental analysis services (HM Government, 2012, p. 13). A new Ministerial Policy Unit was subsequently established in the Cabinet Office, and, by 2014, had been ‘providing fresh insights and advice, while also reviewing strategically important projects’ (Civil Service, 2014, p. 19). By 2022, the Unit was comprised of 16 members of staff, including a workforce of designers, researchers, and policymakers, and draws on innovative interdisciplinary social research methods, such as systems mapping, co-design, prototyping, and video ethnography (Cabinet Office Policy Lab, 2022). Let us take these two examples of recent innovations in the design and composition of social research functions. We suggest that further work is needed to understand efforts to modernise government analysis functions, and thereby should challenge a standard image of social researchers’ capacities and interface with policy officials. Scholars in public administration need to re-examine contemporary policy-evidence paradigms in light of such modernisation and reform programmes, not least these innovations in structural design and multi-disciplinarity.

Another feature of these recent efforts to modernise analysis professions, including the social research profession, requires further engagement with processes of standardisation and ‘harmonisation,’ and how these efforts set out to reconfigure the professional role of social researchers, seen in the context of broader efforts to promote multi-disciplinarity and ‘putting data at the heart of decision-making’ (Timmermans & Epstein, 2010). As articulated in the recently issued Analysis Function Strategy 2022–25, recent efforts to modernise the analysis function involve the promotion of:

• a more consistent standard of what good analysis looks like across government

• a vibrant analytical community across government, spanning departments and professions

• a greater harmonisation in standards and ways of working across government; with influential, joined-up leadership supporting this

• an opportunity for efficiency through economies of scale, reducing duplication and promoting opportunities for transformation and cutting-edge capabilities

• a more skilled, diverse, and widely deployable workforce who can enjoy a broader range of career opportunities

• ensuring analysis has a seat at the most important decision-making tables and leads the agenda in responding to the priorities of the day and the long-term challenges, risks and opportunities of the future

(Government Analysis Function, 2022c)

Since its origins in 2019, the Office of National Statistics’ Analysis Function also began establishing a network of analysts, including social researchers, actuaries, operational researchers, geographers, statisticians, and economists. This network currently promotes good practice through a Guidance Hub. In 2022, the Analysis Function published its Analysis Functional Standard, which set expectations for the planning and undertaking of analysis, which included criteria related to governance, the analysis cycle, and supporting practices (Government Analysis Function, 2022b; HM Government, 2022d).

The development of the standardisation efforts, seen in the Analysis Functional Standard, should be analysed in the context of the Government's A Modern Civil Service plan, issued in 2021 which set out a vision for a ‘skilled,’ ‘innovative,’ and ‘ambitious’ civil service (Cabinet Office, 2021). The plan's Declaration of Government Reform, while responding to the Covid-19 pandemic, framed these reforms as requirements to enable a government response ‘equal in scale and ambition to any post-war recovery’ (HM Government, 2021). Part of these reforms included putting data at the ‘heart of our decision-making’ by creating data inventories, widening the use of data visualisation, ensuring the use of the ‘latest evidence underpinning decisions,’ harnessing science, engineering, and technology, and promoting ‘mixed disciplinary teams and avoiding hierarchies slowing down action’ (HM Government, 2021). These reforms led to the establishment of an Evaluation Task Force, a joint Cabinet Office and HM Treasury unit, which supports evidence use and evaluation design within departments (Cabinet Office, 2022b). This Task Force has produced guidance for evaluating policy and promoted evaluation resources for policymakers, evaluators, and social researchers (Cabinet Office, 2022c).

Part of these Modern Civil Service reforms in 2021 also set out the need for a ‘new standard for diversity and inclusion’ (HMG, 2021). Moreover, just as the GSR Profession promotes diversity and offers evidence and analysis with diversity and inclusion data (Government Social Research, 2021c), these reforms also involved the social research profession formulating a diversity and inclusion strategy for 2021–25. Supported by a Diversity & Inclusion Steering Group and Working Group, the diversity and inclusion strategic priorities include ‘attracting a diverse profession,’ ‘inclusive and fair recruitment and selection,’ ‘embedding and retaining an inclusive culture,’ and ‘accurate monitoring of GSR data’ (Government Social Research, 2021a). This commitment to ‘being diverse and inclusive’ also appears as one of the three main priorities of the GSR Profession (2021–25) (Government Social Research, 2021a, p. 3). This comes at a time when the members of the GSR Profession are more likely to be female, part-time workers, carers, and lesbian, gay or bisexual, and being less likely to come from an ethnic monitory background, than other analysis professions or the broader civil service (Government Social Research, 2021a, p. 10).¹

The Strategy will draw upon various resources, including the Diversity and Inclusion Implementation Working Group, the GSR Profession's central support team, GSR Heads of Profession, Departmental GSR Diversity and Inclusion groups and representatives, with ‘oversight and accountability owned’ by the GSR Strategy Board (Government Social Research, 2021a, p. 9). Some of the strategies objectives of this plan include actions to ‘ensure D&I is a regular feature within the [GSR] newsletter – reflecting perspectives, issues, events, etc.,’ understand ‘specific barriers experiences by underrepresented groups,’ ‘design longitudinal research to understand retention,’ and ‘undertake diversity audits of all boards, steering and working groups and set up a process to ensure all future groups take diversity into account’ (Government Social Research, 2021b). The reform programmes currently reshaping the GSR profession present a complex picture of innovation and modernisation through efforts to improve standards, diversity, and inclusion, as well as embedding multi-disciplinarity and offering services to policy clients inside and outside of government.

In taking the debate forward, it is essential to understand how organisational changes that have introduced new forms of multi-disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and interprofessional coordination impact the epistemic cultures of social research and the interface between evidence and policy. We need to understand the relationships between the reorganisation of analysis functions about policy teams as ‘customers’ and how members of the social research profession understand the introduction of new technical analysis requirements and standards. We also need a better understanding of the role of cross-government groupings in negotiating and implementing reforms in the profession. Furthermore, we need to understand how members of professional analysis communities seek to influence their functional role in the civil service by promoting its achievements and lobbying senior civil servants to experiment with and champion new models of social research.

Outline of a research agenda on government research professionals

Considering these reform programmes, we are left with a sense of shifting mechanisms of control and coordination with a Whitehall ‘policy machine,’ where the autonomy of analysis professions, including social researchers, are being actively reformed around new standardised requirements for analysis products and services, alongside new expectations over ensuring analytical products are policy-relevant and innovative. In returning to our starting point, we argue that there is a critical need for a research agenda to more fully examine how such reform programmes impact evidence infrastructures within government, reshape researchers’ professional cultures and identities, and restructure EBPM. In brief, this agenda should attend to the practices of government research professionals and specific reform programmes. For example, there is a study yet to be done to examine how evaluation researchers employed as civil servants within the Department for International Development (DFID) experienced the transition to work within the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) following the abolition of the DFID by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson in 2020. Furthermore, we need to understand better how social researchers, and other analysis professionals, negotiate conflicting professional and personal values, whether as civil servants or sociologists, within these complex infrastructures of government. As this paper has argued, there are gaps in knowledge about the professional challenges of government research, and more work is needed to understand the changing composition of the government research professions, their role in establishing networks of evidence-producers, and shaping the environment for non-commercial, commercial, and academic research (Oliver & Faul, 2018). Moreover, we argue that there is a need to examine how analysis professions are part of fields of governmental, academic, and commercial research practitioners and associations through routine involvement in funding councils and research grants, network and capacity building through technical and methodology transfers, and activities which shape academic disciplines and research markets (Institute for Government, 2018).

To take this agenda forward, we identify four initial starting points for this agenda. These are: (1) The effects of reform programmes on researchers’ professional identities: This would explore social researchers’ views of their identities as researchers, through exploring their sense of professionalism and autonomy; (2) Processes on organisational change: This would focus on how government departments organise the relations between analysis and policy functions, the impacts of different staffing models, such as the use of multi-disciplinary directorates, and professional resistance to these processes; (3) Accountability challenges: This would seek to understanding lines of accountability and how they shape the work of GSR professionals, and well as how GSR professionals navigate accountability complexities as evidence producers within the bureaucracy; (4) Intra-professional relationships with evidence producers: This fourth area would focus on the relations between international networks of professional, academic, and applied researchers, and their interface with GSR professionals and policy needs.

Without anticipating future reform programmes, such future scholarship could usefully focus on these areas through an explicitly interdisciplinary and comparative lens to understand the contemporary history, governance, and experience of government research functions. Though this paper primarily focuses on the UK, this agenda should also take an international, interdisciplinary, and comparative approach to understand the specific national and regional histories of research professions across governments in the Global North and Global South. Such an approach could address essential questions about how GSR professionals understand the ethics of evidence in government. This agenda could be explored through in-depth interviews with current and past members, heads of the profession, and chief scientific officers. Furthermore, there is scope to conduct network analyses of government departments’ analysis functions by examining intra-professional and organisational relations with external partners, such as research institutes, think tanks, research foundations, research councils, and university-based experts. This agenda could also incorporate oral history and ‘official papers’ to understand the history of research functions and the significant transformations affecting the provision of research services within governments. These are some potentially fruitful starting points and are not exhaustive. We seek to start a conversation about how best to plug gaps in knowledge about the roles, functions, identities, and effectiveness of research functions embedded within the infrastructure of government and their impacts on EBPM. As academics with prior experience working with and within government research functions, we would be keen to have further conversations with the academic and policy community to take this debate and agenda forward.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julian Molina

Julian Molina is a lecturer in Public Policy at the University of Bristol. As a former government social researcher, he currently works on the contemporary history of the social sciences and administrative criminologies, government analytical professions and their data infrastructures. He is currently working on studies of the first British Crime Survey, the history of social research within the Home Office and the politics of policing racial attacks before the Macpherson report.

John Connolly

John Connolly is a former public servant having worked as an evaluator of complex public health interventions before entering academia on a full-time basis. Before joining Glasgow Caledonian University, he was a professor of Public Policy at the University of the West of Scotland. His research has been funded by major funding bodies including the Economic and Social and Research Council (ESRC) and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), as well as public bodies such as NHS Education for Scotland and the Scottish Government. He is currently working with Indian partners at IIT Bombay to examine the global threats posed by antimicrobial resistance in the environment. Professor Connolly is a former Editor in Chief of Contemporary Social Science journal (the flagship journal of the Academy of Social Sciences) and is currently the Chief Editorial Adviser for Routledge Open Research (Social Sciences).

Notes

1 If we are to understand some of these strategic priorities, we should also see this concern with diversity and inclusion in light of analysis of underrepresentation of minority groups in doctoral training pathways in the social sciences (UKRI, 2021).