Discursive Black and Translucent Box Frames of Policy Work: How do Practitioners and Scholars Compare?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AbstractPolicy work in government is often framed as existing in a “black box”. It is assumed that public administrators, as “insiders”, have more knowledge of policy development processes than those outside of government. Are black box narratives of policy work constructed by practitioners? Or is the idea of a “translucent” box more appropriate to understand policy work within the bureaucracy? Based on interviews with sub-national civil servants in one provincial government in Canada, this article finds that black box narratives are used by practitioners to understand policy work. I interpret these results to argue that a theory-practice gap does not necessarily exist when it comes to constructions of policy work: practitioners in the field, like scholars, employ black box narratives to frame policy work in the bureaucracy. Yet, academics may still find that translucent box theory provides a more nuanced way of understanding government’s internal policy processes.RésuméLe travail politique au sein du gouvernement est souvent présenté comme existant dans une « boîte noire». On suppose que les administrateurs publics, en tant qu’ « initiés », ont une meilleure connaissance des processus d'élaboration des politiques que ceux qui ne font pas partie du gouvernement. Les récits en boîte noire du travail politique sont-ils construits par les praticiens ? Ou l'idée d'une boîte « translucide » est-elle plus appropriée pour comprendre le travail politique au sein de la bureaucratie ? Sur la base d'entretiens avec des fonctionnaires infranationaux d'un gouvernement provincial au Canada, cet article constate que les récits de la boîte noire sont utilisés par les praticiens pour comprendre le travail politique. J'interprète ces résultats pour soutenir qu'un fossé théorie-pratique n'existe pas nécessairement lorsqu'il s'agit de constructions de travail politique : les praticiens sur le terrain, comme les universitaires, utilisent des récits de boîte noire pour encadrer le travail politique dans la bureaucratie. Pourtant, les universitaires peuvent toujours trouver que la théorie de la boîte translucide offre une manière plus nuancée de comprendre les processus politiques internes du gouvernement.Key Words: Black Box Theory, Qualitative Semi-Structured Interviews, Social Constructivist Coding, Prince Edward Island Civil Servants, Policy CapacityMots-clés : Théorie de la boîte noire, entretiens qualitatifs semi-structurés, codage constructiviste social, fonctionnaires de l’Île-du-Prince-Édouard, capacité des politiques
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.069 | 0.086 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.019 | 0.018 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.103 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.040 | 0.052 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.021 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".