Section: Work and Equal Opportunities

This report reflects on the UNTANGLED project’s initiatives to engage stakeholders and identifies promising formats and some challenges. It explores the reasons why some formats may work better than others. Discussing UNTANGLED’s various engagement and reflection formats, we conclude that both disciplinary and transdisciplinary subject-related “communities” are prerequisites of projects and recipients of their results and outcomes. They also intermediate any scientific and societal “impact” a project may have – but they perform these functions just because they are not built and sustained by the project. Hence, we argue that stated ambitions for a project to “build” a community need to be taken with a grain of salt. A successful project fits into a stream of ongoing research and builds on existing disciplinary, transdisciplinary, and practice- and policy-related communities. Hence, the function of stakeholder engagement consists in connecting research insights and researchers with related research, policy and practice and their representatives and in sustaining such exchanges and networks. This applies especially to a project in an institutionalised academic field such as labour economics, where there are already more durable institutions and practices of generating, distributing, exchanging and translating knowledge. The conclusions provide some advice for considering disciplinary cultures and conventions in engaging stakeholders and introducing some open formats.

Authors: Dworsky, L., Holtgrewe, U.

Downloads:

Related Articles:

• Project: Untangling the impacts of technological transformations, globalisation and demographic change to foster shared prosperity in Europe