The DOI matches its Crossref record; 9 of the 9 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Epistemological Bricolage: How Practitioners Make Sense of Learning
Abstract
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, empirical 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 secondhand. It shows how much policy making is knowledge work, and how learning might be thought of as a process of epistemological bricolage.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991) · Cambridge University Press eBooks · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511815355 · Cited by 35,324
Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective
Argyris, C., & Schön, D. A. (1997) · Reis · doi:10.2307/40183951 · Cited by 11,113 · cited 9×
“” This is Bateson’s “deutero-learning” (above), and is what became for Argyris and Schön (1978), in their work on organizations, “double-loop” learning. 6. Such learning was one of the examples March and Olsen (1984) used in their seminal treatment of the new institutionalism, that is of “organizational factors in pol…”
BackgroundInfluentialStreet-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services
Lipsky, M. (1981) · Michigan Law Review · doi:10.2307/1288305 · Cited by 8,981
Policy paradigms, social learning, and the state: The case of economic policymaking in Britain
Hall, P. A. (1993) · Comparative Politics · doi:10.2307/422246 · Cited by 7,369
Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics and Culture in Everyday Life
Lave, J. (1988) · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511609268 · Cited by 5,148
Institutional conditions for diffusion
Strang, D., & Meyer, J. W. (1993) · Theory and Society · doi:10.1007/bf00993595 · Cited by 2,114
Coase's penguin, or, linux and “the nature of the firm”
Benkler, Y. (2002) · The Yale Law Journal · doi:10.2307/1562247 · Cited by 1,572
The lessons of learning: Reconciling theories of policy learning and policy change
Bennett, C. J., & Howlett, M. (1992) · Policy Sciences · doi:10.1007/bf00138786 · Cited by 1,346
Evaluation, Policy Learning and Evidence‐Based Policy Making
Sanderson, I. (2002) · Public Administration · doi:10.1111/1467-9299.00292 · Cited by 1,068
Cited by
Systematising Policy Learning: From Monolith to Dimensions
Dunlop, C. A., & Radaelli, C. M. (2013) · Political Studies · doi:10.1111/j.1467-9248.2012.00982.x · Cited by 572
Furthering critical institutionalism
Cleaver, F., & de Koning, J. (2015) · International Journal of the Commons · doi:10.18352/bmgn-lchr.605 · Cited by 364
Speaking of change: why discourse is key to the dynamics of policy transformation
Schmidt, V. A. (2011) · Critical Policy Studies · doi:10.1080/19460171.2011.576520 · Cited by 317
Paradigm man vs. the bricoleur: bricolage as an alternative vision of agency in ideational change
Carstensen, M. B. (2011) · European Political Science Review · doi:10.1017/s1755773910000342 · Cited by 316
The questioning theory of policy practice: Outline of an integrated analytical framework
Turnbull, N. (2013) · Critical Policy Studies · doi:10.1080/19460171.2013.776501 · Cited by 33
Metadata
- Authors
- Freeman, R.
- Venue
- Administration & Society
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2007-07
- Volume
- 39
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 476-496
- ISSN
- 0095-3997 (ISSN-L)
- 1552-3039
- OpenAlex
- W1964206206
- Cited by
- 165
- References
- 9
- FWCI
- 25.07
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Epistemological Bricolage: How Practitioners Make Sense of Learning. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1177/0095399707301857
- The paper
- Freeman, R. (2007). Epistemological Bricolage: How Practitioners Make Sense of Learning. Administration & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/0095399707301857
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
