2 How Thinking Takes Place in Think Tanks
This chapter lays the theoretical and methodological groundwork for this book. I start by presenting and examining three approaches that inform the conceptual apparatus I use going forward: Medvetz’s employment of Bourdieusian field theory; the sociology of intellectual interventions; and Neoinstitutionalist studies of organisations and public policy. I then expand on how I use think tanks’ public interventions as indexes of intellectual and institutional change, as well as on my approach to interviews. These reflections give form to the research design that structures the following chapters, centred on the ‘null,’ hysteresis hypothesis.
Think Tanks as Boundary-Crossers Thomas Medvetz’s (2012) Think Tanks in America is perhaps the most influential recent book on the topic. It challenges a tendency in the scholarship on think tanks to fixate on definitions and typologies. Concerning the former, Medvetz claims there has been a proclivity for tautological argumentation in relation to what an organisation must be © The Author(s) 2019 M. González Hernando, British Think Tanks After the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, Palgrave Studies in Science, Knowledge and Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20370-2_2
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