This paper focuses on the relationship between knowledge and educational policy, through the study of a particular and heterogeneous set of actors whose activity seems to be gaining increasingly centrality in the making of public policies in the educational field in Europe. These actors have different academic backgrounds and professional trajectories, but they all seem to have the ability and interest to move in more than one space and in-between spaces (such as, expert networks, working groups and seminars), linking together other actors and institutions.

In the field of educational policies, this set of actors comprises academics, education professionals, experts and senior officials from the central administration services, who perform, in parallel, a diverse range of knowledge-related activities. Thus, they can be  seen as a new type of political actors, whose profile and repertoires of action result from their interaction with others actors and agencies involved in the fabrication of public policies.

Even though the empirical studies on this topic are still few, there is a significant body of scientific literature  emphasizing the need to reformulate the definition of expert (Berard & Crespin, 2010; Collins & Evans, 2007, Delmas, 1996; Pons & Van Zanten, 2007) and  going beyond traditional approaches of the relationship between knowledge and policy (Cadiou, 2008; Delvaux, 2008; Nowotny et alli, 2003; Ozga, 2008). Given the characteristics of contemporary societies, the profile of an expert is becoming more ubiquitous, polymorphic and fluid (Berard & Crespin, 2010, Robert, 2012). Concomitantly, the complexity of political and social problems requires  the production of more and diverse types of knowledge and encourages experts to develop and adapt new skills. Despite to the importance of experts, several authors have also been exploring a multiplicity of actors that perform less visible activities in the policy making processes, incorporating new interpersonal skills and learning mechanisms - mediators (Jobert & Muller 1987), policy brokers (Sabatier et al 1993), knowledge Brokers (Lindquist,  ), policy entrepreneurs' (Mintron 1997), 'boundary persons' (Sultana, 2001), 'intermediaries' (Latour, 1989; Nay & Smith, 2002; Haussentaufel, 2008), 'transnational policy actors' (Beland & Orenstein, 2010; Lawn & Lingard, 2008; Stone, 2004).

In my research, I am interested in getting closer to the cognitive, social and political worlds of these individuals in order to understand how do they identify and characterize themselves, considering their involvement in particular political processes?

The theoretical and conceptual framework is based on a cognitive analysis of public policies, inherent to the Sociology of Public Action (Haussentaufel, 2008; Surel, 2000). The concept of public action is quite useful to meet the complexity of political processes, and understand the actions of a plurality of actors and agencies (private and public) that come from  multiple spaces (from the state to the civil society) and maintain a multilayered web of relations at different sites (local, regional, national, supranational, transnational), producing new forms of regulation of human activities (Commaille, 2004).

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