In recent decades there has internationally been an increasing emphasis on evidence in education (Levinsson & Prøtz, 2017) which has led to various initiatives aimed at bridging the, since many years asserted, ‘research-practice gap’ (Biesta, 2007; Neal et al., 2019). One initiative is the establishment of formal organisations with the main task to synthesise and disseminate research, using the systematic review format. Since one prominent expression for the gap between research and practice includes limited use of research in practice, an assignment for these formal organisations is to facilitate bridging the research-practice gap by establishing channels of communication between researchers and practitioners (Neal et al., 2019). To narrow the gap between researchers and practitioners a reconsideration of the disseminating process is suggested, from a traditional view of dissemination as a linear rational process to a more complex and differentiated phenomenon (Vanderlinde & van Braak, 2010). A more realistic representation of the process will then be an interactive model, where interdependencies and connections between different actors influence each other in different ways.

In Sweden, the Swedish Institute for Educational Research (SIER) was established by the Swedish government in 2015 with the mandate to synthesise research that can provide knowledge support for professionals at various organisational levels. This was a response to increased evidence-based requirements in the field of education. The main task of SIER is to enable practitioners to plan, carry out and evaluate teaching based on research-based methods. This objective is supposed to be achieved by carrying out systematic reviews and other research summaries in a way that is useful to those who work in the school system. Being in the borderland between politic, research, and practice when conducting a systematic review, SIER have a mediated role between researchers and those who work in the school system. To manage the tension between two different social worlds and the fact that various stakeholders place diverse, and sometimes conflicting demands on organisations as SIER, Parker and Crona (2012) highlight the importance of ‘boundary management’ as an adaptive, navigating, and negotiating continuous process to handle these dynamic tensions over time.

The aim of our study is to contribute to deepen the understanding on how boundary management at SIER, when producing a systematic review, can be understood. To deepen the understanding on boundary management at SIER, this paper draws on concepts from the interdisciplinary research field of Science and technology studies (STS). STS regards science as a complex and socially constructed activity. To understand boundary management at SIER the concept of boundary work (Gieryn 1983) is a fruitful analytic tool with “broad applicability” (Sismondo 2012, p. 34), that could make visible how cooperation; the various ways in which different social worlds, are handled in various sites and situations (Star & Griesemer 1989, p. 393).

In order to deepen the understanding on how boundary management at SIER, when producing a systematic review, can be understood we adopted a case study with mixed-method. The empirical material was both from in-depth interviews and document analysis. We selected two “critical cases” (Flyvbjerg 2001, p. 78) as our empirical material. A critical case has “strategic importance to the general problem” (Ibid, p. 78), in this case, the role of boundary management when conducting a systematic review in education. The process of conducting two different systematic reviews are our critical cases. The two cases cannot be assumed to represent the process of every systematic review in education, of course, but this selection of material allows us to conduct a careful empirical examination of the boundary management between different social worlds, when synthesising and disseminating research. This means that even if this is a case study at a Swedish organisation, the findings could be of international interest due to the increased number of systematic reviews conducted at similar organisations in education. Data for this study is drawn from in-depth interviews with 10 actors involved in the review process at SIER, and documentary analysis of documents related to the review process. The interviews were conducted with a semi- structured open-ended interview. The reason we used this interview structure was to have flexibility to ask follow-up questions, that could lead us to a deeper understanding of the case. The choice of actors was to identify key informants from diverse perspectives within the process of conducting a systematic review, followed by snowball sampling. Diverse perspectives of actors means both project leaders, researchers, and teachers. The interviews were recorded and transcribed, analysed in two steps; first a brief analysis of important signs related to the theoretical concept of boundary work and boundary objects, second the signs were juxtaposed with the definition of both boundary work and boundary objects to see if they are coherent. The documentary analysis is based on an abductive textual analysis where the repeatedly close readings allow us to explore the empirical material by drawing on the theoretical resources of boundary concepts, to visualise both manifest and latent signs of how cooperation between actors could be understood. This process, which is configurative and iterative, preferably “ends with models of relationships [between a set of seemingly unrelated findings]“ (Sandelowski et al 2012,s. 326).

Preliminary results indicate a complex network of actors from different social worlds; researchers, project leaders, teachers, facing the process of the systematic review process with diversified meanings. The study shows that, as in Star and Griesemer (1983) study, the starting point for cooperation is shared vision between the actors about the usefullness of the systematic review format. This means that despite the differences and lack of consensus between the actors, they are all on common ground regarding the being of the systematic review format. During the process of constructing the systematic review the different actors cooperated and communicated by means of method standardization; in this case the formalised predefined steps when conducting a systematic review. The predefined steps focused on how and not why, constraining the actors and made them focus on how they should carry out the systematic review and not why. This avoids tension between the difference meanings and perceptions between actors. Furthermore, the study indicates that boundary management at SIER is an ongoing process where SIER navigates the tension and boundaries over time by changing the boundaries to reduce the tension. However, the rhetoric framework found in both policy documents and quotes from informants indicate an epistemological division and conflict between the agency and other parts of the educational research community as well as the practitioners; actors that don’t share the common ground about the existence of the systematic review format. As Bowker & Star (1999) highlight with citing Foucault the creation of classification schemes by setting the boundaries of categories “valorizes some points of view and silences another" (p.5). This indicates that the boundary management at SIER could be understood as boundaries that both reconcile and divide different social worlds.

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