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Policy PointsFaced with urgent threats to human health and well‐being such as climate change, calls among the academic community are getting louder to contribute more effectively to the implementation of the evidence generated by our research into public policy.As interest in knowledge translation (KT) surges, so have a number of anxieties about the field's shortcomings. Our paper is motivated by a call in the literature to render useful advice for those beginning in KT on how to advance impact at a policy level.By integrating knowledge from fields such as political science, moral psychology, and marketing, we suggest that thinking and acting like marketers, lobbyists, movements, and political scientists would help us advance on the quest to bridge the chasm between evidence and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper advances the position that sociology needs to develop an approach to research which focuses on fundamental social problems. In doing so it shares many of the intellectual values and goals of political arithmetic while seeking to move methodologically beyond it. Since such problems are complex they will require, typically, interdisciplinary input and a concomitant approach to the development and appraisal of theories. We are not, therefore, advocating the primacy of sociology but arguing that it has a distinctive part to play in addressing the fundamental problems of the twenty-first century. However, a policy-oriented sociology has also to take up the task, so clearly defined by the tradition of political arithmetic, which is to hold governments to account. Consequently a central principle of a new policy science is that it should contribute to democratic debate about policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper comments on that article "Sociology and political arithmetic: some principles of a new policy science," by Hugh Lauder, Phillip Brown and A.H Halsey in this issue of "The British Journal of Sociology." The article's main point is that sociology is more open than the other social sciences and therefore more suited to open democratic public debate At the same time the authors argue that openness must not be confused with epistemological relativism because that simply produces argument without any basis for closure except by exhaustion. What is welcome is the argument that policy debates need to engage the wider public The authors' ideal of "political arithmetic" has a democratic pedigree that can hardly be gainsaid.

In this paper two disparate areas of social science theory, actor–network theory and policy networks, will be brought to bear on the problem of explaining the rapid development of an area of medical science and health policy in the UK. There has been a surge of interest in the treatment and management of personality disorder from within both the psychiatric profession and government ministries, and particularly those personality disorders deemed to be severe or dangerous. This has resulted in the development of a new psychiatric classification, the ‘dangerous and severe personality disorder’ (DSPD), and the funding and development of a new service to deal with it. Major new mental health legislation has been set in train to provide legal backing for the pre–emptive detention of patients with such a diagnosis, despite widespread uncertainty over its status, reliability or predictive capability. In the process of presenting and analysing this development, actor–network theory and policy networks will themselves be reviewed and compared, and common and incompatible elements, foci and mechanisms identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]