In the eye of the beholder: Lessons from the art market for knowledge brokering organisations

In this paper, I draw on my interdisciplinary background to argue that knowledge brokering organisations (KBOs) should learn from other professions that sit at the interface between ‘experts’ and lay audiences. The art market shows us how connoisseurial expertise is often centred on institutional rather than individual reputation; similarly, universities can be used as a proxy for the quality of the research that they support. This enables KBOs to broaden the pool of expertise that they draw upon, actively building capacity among groups underrepresented in academic-policy engagement (Morris, 2021). This, in turn, improves the diversity and breadth of knowledge on offer to policymakers. In early 2023, I joined Insights North East: a publicly funded KBO bringing together universities and local authorities across north-east England. As a researcher-practitioner embedded within a university-based KBO—but with a background spanning linguistic translation and art history—I have been struck by the ways in which the process of knowledge mobilisation resembles the practice of connoisseurship in the art market: both rely heavily on relationships and on pre-established networks of trust, reputation and status. Artistic connoisseurship can be defined as the judgement of artworks on criteria such as authorship, condition and quality (Clarke, 2022; Gibson-Wood, 2000). However, connoisseurial expertise by its very nature is particularly hard to verbalise, involving as it does the translation into words of ‘fine perceptual discriminations’ of ‘diagnostic perceptual qualities’ that can be literally unseeable to the novice observer (Palmeri and Tarr, 2008). The lay audience simply has to take on trust the opinion put forward by the connoisseur. This results in a situation where the opinions of well-established ‘experts’—such as those employed by high-profile auction houses or public galleries—are given extra weight because of the reputation of the organisation that employs them. This connoisseurial framing of the status of experts and their place within an organisation can be extrapolated to the practice of knowledge mobilisation. Too often KBOs tend to rely on the output of established academics, rather than drawing on the work of early career researchers (Oliver & Cairney, 2019). This has worrying Equity, Diversity and Inclusive (EDI) implications, given the well-demonstrated ‘leaky pipeline’ in academia for a range of minoritized groups: in the UK, for example, only 22% of professors in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths) are women (Jebsen, 2022). Equally, KBOs tend to favour quantitative information (particularly economic data) over qualitative evidence (Morris et al., 2019, 31). To tackle these challenges, we should move away from a system where policymakers continue to receive expert opinions from the same ‘usual suspects’. Instead, KBOs can—and should—take a lesson from the art market by emphasising the reputation and credentials of the universities to which researchers belong, rather than foregrounding individual job titles or academic fields of study. This will challenge the existing power dynamics across the academic-policy system, helping us to ‘find ways to navigate the complex practical, political, moral and ethical challenges associated with being researchers today’ (Oliver & Cairney, 2019).