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Thinking Under Pressure: Think Tanks and Policy Advice After 2008

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British Think Tanks After the 2008 Global Financial Crisis

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Science, Knowledge and Policy ((SKP))

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Abstract

The introduction to this book sets forth and justifies the focus of this book on British think tanks, highlighting some of the issues they faced as they sought to position themselves as experts in the context of a perceived failure of expertise, the 2008 global financial crisis. This is followed by an overview of the institutional characteristics of British think tanks, their history, and the relevant literature on the subject. This chapter also clarifies how the book understands think tanks as a research object, and their relevance for detecting broader changes in the way that the public policy debate has evolved since 2008. It ends by presenting the four case studies this book comprises and outlining why they were selected.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For Gramsci, traditional intellectuals are those who claim to seek truth, while organic intellectuals are those who represent the interests of a particular social position or class (Gramsci 1999[1971]). Also, by ‘common sense’ (from the Italian senso comune) Gramsci means the disparate set of ideas about the world that are held widely yet vaguely within a community, without the connotations of reasonableness and even-handedness that are present in its English counterpart (see Crehan 2016).

  2. 2.

    In parts of Eastern Europe, due to charity regulation and limitations in available funding, many think tanks are registered as for-profit organisations (see Onthinktanks.org 2013).

  3. 3.

    This is also the case in the US, where most file as tax-exempt 501(c)(3) non-profits.

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  1. Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Marcos González Hernando

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González Hernando, M. (2019). Thinking Under Pressure: Think Tanks and Policy Advice After 2008. In: British Think Tanks After the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Palgrave Studies in Science, Knowledge and Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20370-2_1

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