Two discourses: Researchers and policy-making in higher education

The theme of this article focuses on how policy discourse and research discourse meet in contract research in higher education. The interplay of these discourses has con'sequences for researchers who have to balarlce conflicting demands, which we view as links between research and policy cycles. Two evaluation studies on the introduction and effects of new policy instruments are discussed, focusing on the interaction between policy needs, and research design. The examples are taken from policies in the development towards increasing self-regulation in higher education, of which Finland and the Netherlands are interesting examples in the European context. Introduction: Two discourses and two cases The relationship between policy makers and contract researchers belongs to the 'h idden ' issues in social sciences. Sometimes it surfaces, but the authors feel that this issue too often does not come up in discussion, although contract research, and especially government-funded contract research takes place even more often in the field of higher education than is usual in other fields of social sciences. The issue at hand is whether or not researchers can carry out independent scholarly research and retain all the integrity that follows, and simultaneously meet the needs of the principals. Fol lowing from their different positions and interests, pol icy makers and researchers have different ideas about what a research project can or should do. At a conceptual level these differences in expectations and attitudes can be interpreted as different discourses with various or even conflicting views on the purposes of research and on the use of its results. In this paper we wish to characterize the two discourses in the European context, to probe into their interconnectedness, illustrated by our experiences in two recently completed contract research projects. 'Discourse ' has many overlapping and even conflicting definitions formulated from various theoretical perspectives (cf. Macdonell 1986). Introduced mainly by Foucault (1972) to social sciences it has been used in a variety of ways in different disciplines (cf. Van Dijk 1985). Fol lowing a more linguistic approach, discourse can be used as an analytical method in the interpretation of texts to reveal the motives and purposes of a writer or a speaker (cf. Van Dijk 1985). This may be called textually-oriented discourse analysis (Fairclough 1992, 37). The other main stream of applying 'discourse ' , which will be followed here, defines the term as a frame of reference, or a cognitive structure (Wagner and Wittrock 1990, 333), pointing to the discursive construction of social subjects and knowledge. This use of the concept emphasizes the interactive nature of creating and understanding a