Changing the conversation: Knowledge exchange as process

This paper is about changing two conversations. The first, and primary, focus is the academic research and discourse, or conversation, around knowledge exchange and impact. Experience of working within a long running, multi-institutional and multi-disciplinary collaboration between Scottish Universities and Police Scotland (The Scottish Institute for Policing Research), whilst confirming many recurrent themes in these conversations, also finds them to be limited by their narrow, albeit illustrative, focus upon the fortunes of individual researchers, teams and projects. This article gives attention to wider processes of interaction across multiple institutional boundaries and through diverse forms and locations of interaction and encounter. It argues that there are potential virtues of this more collective model of academic collaboration, although it does come with its own risks and challenges. The second conversation is the conversation about ‘policing’, police policy, and practice. It is argued that the collective, long term process of collaboration thus far sketched, has further potential to disrupt and demonopolise this conversation, opening it up for greater and more democratic deliberation. The wider role of science and research in providing legitimation for policy and practice, perhaps especially in a politically scrutinized organisation such as the police, needs to be understood in relation to both conversations.