Epistemic Communities

A fancy way of saying groups of people and organisations that build up around particular kinds of ‘knowledge claim’.  Within Multiple Streams Approach, you can see epistemic communities beavering away within the ‘problem stream’, trying to refine what the problem is, how we can reliably know the size, shape and speed of the problem…

See Peter Haas’s work, on climate science, back in the day.

See Wikipedia entry.

See also instrument constituencies.

(How) are they different from “cognitive communities”?

Competitive Groups as Cognitive Communities: The Case of Scottish Knitwear Manufacturers Revisited

Porac, Joseph ; Thomas, Howard ; Baden-Fuller, Charles

The Journal of Management Studies, May 2011, Vol.48(3), p.646

and