Internationally, the gap between research, policy and practice in public
life has become a matter of concern. When professional practice - in
nursing, education, local governance and other fields - is uninformed by
research, it tends to reinvent itself in the light of a range of (often
conflicting) principles. Research uninformed by practical considerations
tends to be ignored by practitioners, however good it is academically.
Similarly, the axis between policy and research needs to be a working
one if each is to inform the other. Research is important to the
professions, just as it is in industry and the economy: we have seen in
the last fifteen years especially that companies which do not invest in
research tend to become service agents for those companies that are at
the cutting edge of practice. The new work order (see Gee et al., 1996)
makes research a necessity.