About the Seminar Series

For all our research in and on public policy, we know surprisingly little about what public officials do when they are doing their job. We continue to communicate through stylised accounts of the ‘stages’ of the ‘policy cycle’, in an abstract language of processes and programmes. The purpose of this seminar series is to put practice and the practitioner at the centre of policy research and teaching.

We are guided by a set of fundamental questions:

• What is policy?
• What do policy makers do when they go to work?
• What kinds of activity does policy making entail?
• How is practice embodied in technologies and artefacts?
• How is what policy makers do represented in the accounts that researchers and practitioners themselves respectively give of it?

Meetings will be co-convened by the Universities of Birmingham and Edinburgh, in collaboration with APSE (the Association for Public Service Excellence), and funded by ESRC. Participants include senior and early career academic researchers, policy makers and practitioners. The series is paralleled by a practitioner 'learning set', which will both inform and reflect on our work.

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