Epistemological Bricolage: How Practitioners Make Sense of Learning

• DOI: 10.1177/0095399707301857
• Published date: 01 July 2007
• Date: 01 July 2007
• Author: Richard Freeman
• Subject Matter: Articles

476

Epistemological Bricolage

How Practitioners Make Sense

of Learning

Richard Freeman

University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

How do policy makers come to know what they know? How do they think of

learning? And how does that inform what they do? In this qualitative,empir-

ical study, public health officials variously display scientific, institutional,

and more socially situated epistemological strategies or rationalities. In turn,

the study reveals that a key element of what they do is “piecing together,”

assembling and literally making sense of different bits of information and

experience, often creating something new from what they have acquired sec-

ondhand. It shows how much policy making is knowledge work, and how

learning might be thought of as a process of epistemological bricolage.

Keywords: learning; bricolage; public policy; public health

Learning and Public Administration

Politics, as Hugh Heclo famously observed, begins in uncertainty.1

Uncertainty makes for learning (or what Heclo called “puzzling”), and

there is an extensive literature in public policy and related fields that explores

what that might mean (Bennett & Howlett, 1992; Dolowitz & Marsh, 1996;

Etheredge & Short, 1983; Freeman, 2006). Political science has described

Administration & Society

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July 2007 476-496

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Author’s Note: The research on which this article is based was funded by the Fulbright

Commission through its New Century Scholars program, and supported by visiting fellowships

held at the Center for Population and Development Studies, Harvard University (May-June,

2002), and the Institution for Social and Policy Studies,Yale University (September-December,

2002). The work owes much to the interested participation of respondents, and I am indebted

to them as to Margaret Robertson, who transcribed the interview material. Drafts of the arti-

cle have been presented in seminars at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale, the

School of Social and Political Studies at the University of Edinburgh, the Centre for

Comparative Research in Social Welfare at the University of Stirling, and at LSE Health and

Social Care, London. It is in keeping with its argument that the article should have been much

Freeman / Epistemological Bricolage 477

some of the ways in which policy makers learn from others (Rose, 1993,

2005) and from the past (Neustadt & May, 1986). Organizational learning has

emerged as an important subfield of management science (Levitt & March,

1998; Weick & Westley, 1996), whereas applied social science of all kinds

has taken up the theme of knowledge transfer and the use of evidence (e.g.,

Sanderson, 2002). Across a wide variety of domains, learning is deemed

essential to both individual and institutional performance.

Yet we remain uncertain about learning itself. Thinking about learning is

difficult at least in part because it is a matter of common sense, if not exis-

tential necessity. It is something we do naturally and inevitably as an effect

of being in the world and as such it seems, like breathing, to resist theoriza-

tion. Beyond that, uncertainty is scarcely resolved by the multiplicity of dis-

ciplinary perspectives on which public administration might draw,and which

include sociology, psychology, anthropology, and zoology, as well as edu-

cation.2Inevitably, too, these various disciplines tend to talk past each other.3

Meanwhile, a different sort of complication is derived from learning being

invariably coupled with strong if often implicit normative claims. Learning

remains a policy “good,” despite skepticism about the extent to which it hap-

pens in practice. And to the extent that public administration is concerned

with knowledge for as much as of policy, thinking about learning inevitably

entails some problematization of the relationship between policy studies and

policy making; that is, of what policy scientists themselves do and to what

effect. Uncertainty about learning is doubly and deeply difficult, therefore,

both for the substance and the process of policy science.

So where to begin? What is learning? It follows from the above that

understandings of learning will differ across contexts and disciplines: We

must begin, then, with a metatheoretical definition. Bateson (1972, p. 283)

suggests that learning “undoubtedly denotes change of some kind,” and

then distinguishes successive orders of such change. The first, “Learning

Zero,” occurs when a given stimulus evokes a given response. Insofar as the

same stimulus always produces the same response, this is a pattern that is

difficult to classify as learning at all. “Learning I,”therefore, is the simplest

refined in discussion with friends and colleagues here and elsewhere, including Peter Bogason,

Elizabeth Bomberg, Viola Burau, Charlie Jeffery, Helen Kara, Russell Keat, Rudolf Klein,

David Laws, Maria Lupeanu, Theodore Marmor,Martin Rein, Deborah Stone, Sarah Vaughan,

Paul Wilding, and Craig Wilkie. It has further benefited from the criticism of anonymous

reviewers, while the graduate seminar in the Theory and Practice of Political Research at

Edinburgh has been a unique source of inspiration and support throughout. That said, I remain

responsible for faults the article still contains. Please address all correspondence via e-mail:

richard.freeman@ed.ac.uk.