Science and policy: scientific expertise and individual participation in boundary management

Boundary theory has assumed that two distinct organizations—scientists and policy-makers—can interface with one another via an external boundary organization, yet boundary management contexts often call for different strategies where a neutral third party is not involved. Recent scholarship has highlighted alternative models for boundary organizations, including the emergence of boundary organizations within universities. Most of these studies have taken an organizational perspective, yet as universities increasingly fulfill the role of boundary organizations by direct engagement with policy-makers, we need a deeper understanding of the roles scientists should play within this context. This study highlights the need to understand context before designing and implementing boundary management strategies, and considers the complexities of direct engagement between scientists and policy-makers. We draw from a case study conducted in Maine to argue that there are contexts in which scientists need to manage and span the science–policy boundary. The complexities involved in preparing scientists to engage more thoroughly in policy activities and the challenges in garnering institutional support for advancing the participation of scientists in boundary-spanning activities are explored.     

Cultivating consubstantiality with the land institute: Organizational rhetoric and the role of place-making in generating organizational identification

This essay examines the organizational rhetoric of the Land Institute in order to address the ways place-making contributes to the inducement of organizational identification (OI). In addition to defining place-making as a practice of cultivating arrangements, the essay unpacks two ways in which a strategically arranged place facilitates OI: (a) materializing the places and times imagined in textual materials, and (b) generating encounters with OI targets. By analyzing the Land Institute’s Prairie Festival alongside discursive materials, the essay also demonstrates how organizations take control of place’s inherently inventive character and thoroughly distributed rhetoricity in order to achieve organizational ends. In order to make these arguments, the essay employs a critical method that operates through both field immersion and textual criticism.