There isn’t a think-tank, policy institute or academic department anywhere in the world that doesn’t have a cupboard or entire room given over to hoarding vast quantities of unread pamphlets from years gone by. When I was at the Foreign Policy Centre in London, we actually had a whole cellar (although the FPC has moved office since then, which probably meant a good spring clean). Surveying the serried ranks of good ideas going stale, your average policy wonk is liable to wonder whether anyone actually reads their stuff – and then go and gloomily Google themselves for any scrap of evidence that someone might have done so…
It was only a matter of time before someone came up with a theory of why nobody reads stuff. An insightful summary of the problem comes from the unexpected quarter of Police Practice and Research (erm, rather ironically given the subject-matter of this post, I can’t get a working link to the PPR website). I guess you’ve already powered through your copy, but just in case you’ve been too damn busy policing to get to round to it, you should check out “Their Reports are not Read and the Recommendations are Resisted” by Gordon Peake and Otwin Marenin. Their tripartite theory of why writing on police reform goes unread could be applied to almost any field:
There is a copious amount of non-directed research produced by this community. There have been country and regional specific articles, monographs and books. Why is their effect so slim?
First, it is simply difficult to get people to read them. Reading an article, book or report takes time and patience. This combination of luxury and attribute is something that only a few have. Moreover, as these pieces of writing are targeted to general audiences, they tend to lack the specificity that may resonate with implementers. Policing is often asserted as being one of the most ‘context-specific’ of activities – it is scarcely surprising that authors writing in geographic and temporal isolation from these contexts don’t get specificities correct.
Second, these products may be written with purposes other than police reform more uppermost in the mind of their authors. Members of this community write with multiple intents – the desire to burnish a career in the ‘community,’ get invited to conferences in exotic locales and generally live the interesting life of the travelling purveyor of policing knowledge. Some of these goals may even run contrary to police reform. For those desiring recognition within an academic community, an esoteric argument has more motility than a simple one.
The third reason is prosaic but no less important for that: the outputs of this community are not easy to find. Determined sleuthing is required to seek them out. Articles are parked in academic journals or working papers that are hard to find. Members of the community seem content to let research pollinate freely, hoping that someone will happen up it up, read it, internalise and use it. At the very least this is a leap of faith.
I’d like to quote more, but that would be a breach of copyright. Just in case you felt like reading about not reading… but that would defeat the point of the article.
