Beyond Legitimacy and Participation: Reimagining Organisational Supports for Practice Research through Polycentric Indigenisation

Charles Tong-Lit Leung

doi:10.20944/preprints202606.2193.v1

Submitted:

29 June 2026

Posted:

30 June 2026

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Abstract

Contemporary social work continues to face a persistent tension between efforts to consolidate shared professional standards and the need to sustain epistemic plurality across diverse socio-political contexts. This tension is especially evident in organisational supports for practice research, which are often treated as neutral administrative arrangements despite their role in shaping whose knowledge is recognised, funded, translated and sustained. This paper develops polycentric indigenisation as a conceptual framework for rethinking organisational supports as epistemic infrastructures rather than merely technical supports for collaboration. Drawing on scholarship on practice research, indigenisation, epistemic justice and southern theory, the paper argues that prevailing support models remain constrained by a narrow legitimacy-participation binary. Some arrangements widen participation without redistributing epistemic authority, whilst others secure institutional legitimacy at the cost of subordinating inquiry to hierarchy, compliance or policy alignment. In response, the paper outlines a framework centred on distributed epistemic authority, situated translation, boundary critique and negotiated co-authorship. It identifies four directions for the development of organisational supports: authentic indigenisation, polycentric dialogue, contextualised critical autonomy and ethical co-creation. The paper concludes by considering implications for future research, policy and practice in international social work.

Keywords:

practice research

;

organisational supports

;

polycentric indigenisation

;

epistemic justice

;

international social work

Subject:

Social Sciences - Other

Since 2004, global social work bodies, most notably the International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW) and the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW), have sought to consolidate a shared professional identity and common educational standards across national contexts (cf. Ioakimidis & Sookraj, 2021). This project has been motivated by a legitimate aspiration: to strengthen the coherence and public standing of social work as a global profession capable of responding to complex human needs across diverse settings.

At the same time, internationalisation has generated enduring tensions within social work scholarship. A substantial critical literature argues that global standard-setting often carries a “one-size-fits-all” tendency (e.g., Lin, 2021; Noble, 2004; Yip, 2004), even when flexibility and contextual adaptation are acknowledged in principle (Nuss, 2023). In practice, these processes may still privilege Anglophone epistemologies, professional vocabularies, and normative assumptions, thereby marginalising locally grounded ways of knowing and reproducing forms of epistemic hierarchy in non-Western settings (Jones et al., 2025).

These tensions are especially salient when considering organisational supports for practice research. Organisational supports are often treated as neutral administrative arrangements that facilitate collaboration, funding, and knowledge exchange. However, the existing landscape is not epistemically neutral. Organisational supports vary across political, institutional, and ideological contexts, and they shape whose knowledge is recognised, how research agendas are set, and what forms of practice knowledge become durable and transferable. In broad terms, the literature (e.g., Austin et al., 2024) often portrays Western organisational supports as more decentralised and partnership-oriented, whereas supports in mainland China are more likely to be shaped by state-led policy priorities and legitimacy concerns. Although this contrast is necessarily schematic, it points to an important gap: existing models remain poorly equipped to support equitable, reciprocal, cross-border practice research.

This paper argues that organisational supports should be reconceptualised not simply as technical enablers of research activity, but as epistemic infrastructures that mediate global knowledge circulation and the possibilities of epistemic justice. To address the limitations of monolithic and unidirectional approaches to indigenisation, the paper proposes the framework of polycentric indigenisation (PI). PI reframes organisational support as a dynamic and relational process through which multiple knowledge centres can engage in negotiated, context-sensitive, and ethically reflexive exchange without presuming a single universal epistemic core.

The paper makes three contributions. First, it synthesises several strands of literature—practice research, organisational supports, indigenisation, epistemic justice, and southern theory—to clarify why current support structures remain inadequate for genuinely reciprocal knowledge production. Second, it develops PI as a conceptual framework for rethinking how organisational supports can enable multi-directional translation, critical autonomy, and ethical co-creation across contexts. Third, drawing particularly on debates and examples related to mainland China, it outlines four evolutionary directions through which organisational supports might move beyond local survival and administrative legitimacy toward global epistemic connectivity.

Mapping the Literature

To situate polycentric indigenisation (PI) conceptually, the author reviews five interconnected areas of scholarship: the scope of practice research, the role of organisational supports, the tensions within indigenisation, the institutional dimensions of epistemic justice, and the circulation of Global South knowledge. Together, these literatures show that the challenge is not merely how to include more voices in existing systems, but how to redesign the infrastructures through which credibility, transferability, legitimacy, and utility are organised in the first place.

Practice Research as Collaborative Knowledge Production

Practice research is best understood not as a single method, but as an evolving field of inquiry in which knowledge is generated from and for practice (Chen et al., 2024; Joubert et al., 2023). Across the literature, practice research is associated with collaborative forms of knowledge production involving practitioners, researchers, and, ideally, service users (Joubert et al., 2023; Kong et al., 2023). This openness is one of its strengths, as it allows methodological pluralism and responsiveness to the complexity of practice settings. At the same time, the field has long faced questions about conceptual clarity, boundary definition, and the extent to which participation is realised in substantive rather than symbolic ways (Joubert et al., 2023; Uggerhøj & Andersen, 2024).

Recent scholarship has moved beyond the conventional “research-practice gap” metaphor by emphasising interactional, co-productive, and continuum-based understandings of inquiry. On these accounts, practice is not merely a site from which data are extracted; it is constitutive of social reality and therefore central to knowledge generation itself (Smith et al., 2024). Emerging approaches go further by reversing conventional hierarchies of expertise, allowing practitioners to lead the initial framing of inquiry before academic researchers enter the process (Hothersall, 2018; Reckwitz, 2002). They also highlight an immersive process in which intersubjectivity, collective sense-making, and co-construction with front-line social workers are taken place for unveiling practitioners’ enactment and embodiment (Tsang et al., 2025). Such moves are important because they challenge the assumption that theoretical legitimacy must flow primarily from the university to the field.

Yet this democratising promise remains fragile. Participatory practice research often continues to under-engage service users or retain unequal divisions of epistemic labour between professional researchers and frontline actors (Uggerhøj & Andersen, 2024). As a result, the question is not only whether practice research is collaborative in principle, but what kinds of organisational arrangements are necessary to make such collaboration sustainable, credible, and useable.

Organisational Supports as Epistemic Infrastructures

A growing body of scholarship suggests that organisational supports should not be understood merely as background administrative resources. Rather, they function as epistemic infrastructures: arrangements that shape what kinds of knowledge can be produced, funded, circulated, recognised, and retained over time (Austin et al., 2024; Chuang et al., 2023). From this perspective, issues such as funding, senior leadership support, institutional partnership, and co-leadership are not external to knowledge production; they are constitutive of it.

This line of work highlights the importance of stable, institutionally embedded platforms rather than one-off projects or short-term grants. Sustainable practice research typically depends on structures that connect practitioners, researchers, and service users over time, while also legitimising negotiated forms of knowledge production within organisations. Long-term platforms can support shared agenda-setting, continuity of inquiry, and the cumulative development of practice-based evidence.

However, organisational supports are not normatively innocent. Critical scholarship on evidence-based practice and the governance of knowledge shows that institutional arrangements can also function as mechanisms of control, standardisation, and exclusion (Jacobsson & Meeuwisse, 2018; Webb, 2001). Supports that appear enabling on the surface may, in practice, discipline what counts as evidence, privilege managerial forms of accountability, and render local or experiential knowledge secondary. This creates an important analytical distinction between enabling supports and governing supports. The former broaden epistemic participation and facilitate negotiation; the latter formalise participation while preserving pre-existing hierarchies of credibility.

Indigenisation Beyond Localisation

The literature on social work indigenisation has developed in response to the inadequacy of simply transferring Western models into non-Western contexts. Earlier diffusionist assumptions have increasingly been challenged by scholars who argue that indigenisation requires the re-centring of local philosophies, cultural logics, helping traditions, and linguistic resources (Ibrahima, & Mattaini, 2019; Tamburro, 2013). In this sense, indigenisation is not merely the contextual adaptation of imported frameworks, but a deeper epistemic and political project.

Even so, indigenisation is not free from internal tension. If pursued in overly bounded terms, it risks essentialising “local culture,” treating indigeneity as static, and reducing cross-contextual learning to a threat rather than a resource. A rigid indigenisation model may therefore reproduce another form of closure: it resists epistemic domination, but can also inhibit translation, dialogue, and mutual transformation across settings.

This tension becomes especially pronounced in contexts where indigenisation is shaped by the state rather than emerging only from grassroots or professional actors. In mainland China, for example, indigenisation may be linked to broader state projects of professional development, governance, and national knowledge formation (Chen et al., 2024). Such arrangements can generate important institutional resources, but they may also intensify asymmetries over who has authority to define what counts as legitimate indigenous knowledge. These tensions suggest the need for a framework that can affirm local epistemic autonomy without collapsing into either monolithic universalism or bounded epistemic nationalism.

Epistemic Justice as Institutional Design

The concept of epistemic justice helps clarify why participation alone is an insufficient goal. While early discussions focused on interpersonal harms such as testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice, later scholarship has increasingly emphasised the institutional organisation of credibility, interpretation, and recognition (Anderson, 2012; Samaržija & Cerovac, 2021). From this perspective, injustice is not only a matter of individual prejudice; it is also embedded in the rules, infrastructures, and norms through which some knowers are authorised and others marginalised.

This broader lens is particularly relevant to practice research. Service users, practitioners, and scholars do not enter research spaces with equal access to credibility, conceptual resources, or interpretive authority. Structural dynamics such as contributory injustice, wilful hermeneutical ignorance, silencing, and credibility excess can all shape whose knowledge is heard, whose concepts are taken seriously, and whose claims are translated into institutional action. In this sense, simply inviting more actors into research processes does not in itself secure epistemic justice (Maleku, 2025; Okoroji et al., 2023).

What is required instead is institutional redesign. Hiring practices, authorship conventions, peer review systems, funding arrangements, and partnership models all influence whether knowledge production is genuinely shared or only superficially inclusive. This is why the question of organisational support is central rather than secondary: supports are among the key mechanisms through which epistemic justice is either enabled or obstructed.

Global South Knowledge and Polycentric Circulation

Debates on decolonisation and southern theory further underscore the limits of global knowledge systems organised around a single centre of validation (Connell, 2014). Scholars of medical ethics and cognitive justice argue that social justice cannot be separated from the recognition of multiple epistemologies, particularly those marginalised by dominant Euro-American academic structures (Pratt & De Vries, 2023; Santos, 2023). In many fields, non-Western settings remain positioned primarily as sites of data extraction or contextual testing, while theory continues to travel outward from the Global North (Pratt & De Vries, 2023).

This asymmetry raises a structural question: how can knowledge generated in the Global South circulate not merely as local illustration, but as conceptually generative work capable of reshaping wider professional and theoretical debates? Recent scholarship suggests that this requires attention to multiple layers of knowledge production (Pratt & De Vries, 2023), including who is funded to produce knowledge, which conceptual frameworks are treated as analytically valid, and whose voices are actively solicited to shape inquiry. These layers are interdependent, and reform at only one level is unlikely to produce meaningful epistemic change (Connell, 2014; Turba et al., 2026).

Taken together, these debates point toward a polycentric rather than monolithic understanding of professional knowledge. If no single geopolitical, institutional, or cultural centre should monopolise legitimacy, then organisational supports should be designed to sustain distributed forms of credibility, transferability, and legitimised collaboration across universities, agencies, communities, and cross-border networks. This problem space provides the basis for the diagnostic analysis that follows and, ultimately, for the development of PI as a framework for structuring dialogue without epistemic absorption.

The Institutional Penalisation of Peripheral Knowledge

If polycentric indigenisation (PI) is to serve as a useful framework for practice research, it ought to first respond to a concrete realistic problem: the institutional penalisation of peripheral knowledge within global social work. The issue is not simply that non-Western knowledge is occasionally overlooked. Rather, peripheral knowledge is often produced within organisational and academic environments that systematically constrain its circulation, recognition, and theoretical development.

This penalisation operates through interlocking mechanisms rather than a single barrier. Existing critiques often focus on bias in publication systems or the overrepresentation of Anglophone scholarship, and those concerns remain important. However, the difficulty runs deeper. This claim is informed by the author’s long-term engagement and critical reflection across Chinese societies over two decades. For scholars and practitioners working outside dominant centres of academic validation, the problem is often institutional before it is discursive: the conditions under which knowledge is funded, evaluated, rewarded, and translated already narrow what kinds of practice research can emerge and travel.

Career Structures and Publication Ecology

One mechanism lies in the relationship between career appraisal and publication regimes. In many non-Western settings, academic progression is strongly tied to performance indicators shaped by international publication norms, particularly those associated with Anglophone journals and indexing systems. This creates a familiar dilemma. Scholars are incentivised to frame their work in ways that are legible to dominant epistemic centres, even when their most meaningful insights arise from local histories, languages, and practice traditions.

The consequence is not merely strategic adaptation; it is a narrowing of epistemic possibility. When career advancement depends on external validation, locally grounded inquiry may be translated prematurely into dominant vocabularies, stripped of contextual specificity, or abandoned altogether in favour of topics and formats more likely to succeed within established publication ecologies. Conversely, when scholars remain committed to regionally grounded or indigenous knowledge production, they may find that such work circulates only within bounded local or regional spaces, with limited institutional support for broader dialogue.

Rankings, Funding, and Bounded Knowledge Ecologies

A second mechanism concerns the relationship between university ranking systems and funding structures. Institutions in non-Western contexts are frequently pulled between two competing imperatives: to strengthen international standing through publication metrics associated with global rankings, and to respond to local or national funding environments that prioritise immediate administrative relevance. Each path creates a different, but related, form of constraint.

When institutional resources are directed primarily toward international ranking performance, fundable research tends to converge around what dominant databases, journals, and review cultures recognise as credible and valuable. Under these conditions, epistemic innovation may remain possible, but only within narrow parameters of recognisability. By contrast, when scholars and organisations depend heavily on localised or state-driven funding streams, research agendas may become shaped by short-term compliance demands, administrative utility, and policy alignment rather than by sustained theoretical development or cross-border exchange. The result is a bounded knowledge ecology in which peripheral knowledge is neither fully excluded nor fully enabled, but structurally contained.

Mainland China as an Illustrative Case

The contemporary social work landscape in mainland China illustrates how these pressures can converge. As documented in the Annual Conference Handbook of the China Association for Social Work Education 2025 (Leung, 2025), the expansion of social work in China has been closely linked to state-led institutional development, government purchase-of-service systems, and the strategic use of academic legitimacy in practice settings. This structural alignment is deeply underscored by macro-policy mandates, such as the national mobilization to apply and adapt the “Fengqiao model” or “Fengqiao experience” (State Council, 2023; Supreme People’s Court, 2023) —a state-sanctioned framework emphasizing grass-roots conflict resolution, social stability, and community-level governance under centralized guidance. In such an environment, practice research often develops under dual pressure: it must satisfy academic expectations tied to broader global publication and ranking systems while simultaneously responding to immediate state demands for local policy implementation, service evaluation, and community-level compliance.

This dual pressure fundamentally shapes the role of collaboration itself. Rather than functioning primarily as a reciprocal knowledge partnership, collaboration between universities and social work organisations may become a mechanism through which academic actors confer institutional legitimacy upon frontline agencies before state authorities. The use of researchers as external experts can be strategically rational under these conditions, but it also reproduces an epistemic hierarchy in which formal academic authority is privileged over practice-based knowledge. In such settings, practice research risks becoming a tool for top-down validation and compliance rather than a site of mutual inquiry and epistemic transformation.

The problem is intensified by a severe temporal mismatch. Academic publication cycles are notoriously slow, whereas service contracts, funding renewals, and state-led policy priorities—such as the rapid deployment of community governance mandates—can change overnight. This creates a structural disjuncture between the time required to produce durable, epistemically just scholarly outputs and the rapid time horizons that govern organisational survival in the field. As a result, practitioner investment in research naturally weakens, not because practice actors lack intellectual interest, but because the institutional ecology fails to align scholarly production with the practical rhythms and survival compliance of local organisational life.

Taken together, these mechanisms help explain why peripheral knowledge may remain localised, fragile, and under-theorised even when it is actively produced. The issue is not only that non-Western knowledge lacks access to existing global circuits; it is that the infrastructures through which knowledge becomes mobile, credible, and consequential have been unevenly organised from the outset. This assessment provides the basis for the next section, which proposes PI as a framework for rethinking those infrastructures rather than merely seeking better inclusion within them.

Conceptualising Polycentric Indigenisation

Polycentric indigenisation (PI) is proposed here as a framework for rethinking organisational supports for practice research in a way that neither reproduces monolithic universalism nor retreats into bounded localism. At its core, PI treats global professional knowledge as an ecosystem composed of multiple epistemic centres, none of which should claim a natural monopoly over legitimacy, translation, or theoretical authority. The framework therefore shifts the question from how local knowledge can be inserted into an existing centre, to how multiple centres can interact without one absorbing the others.

This formulation departs from linear models of indigenisation. In conventional accounts, indigenisation is often imagined as a movement away from imported Western models toward locally authentic alternatives. That critique remains important, but it is incomplete. If indigenisation is framed only as localisation, it may insufficiently address the problem of cross-contextual exchange and may inadvertently reify local knowledge as closed, static, or self-sufficient. PI instead conceptualises indigenisation as a dynamic and relational process through which knowledge is negotiated across contexts while remaining accountable to place, history, power, and institutional conditions.

A Polycentric Epistemic Ecology

The framework is grounded in the idea that different knowledge traditions are partial rather than self-sufficient. This premise, which resonates with southern epistemologies and the notion of an ecology of knowledges, does not imply that all knowledge claims are equivalent. Rather, it suggests that professional knowledge is enriched when multiple epistemic traditions encounter one another under conditions that permit translation without assimilation. PI therefore affirms plurality while resisting the assumption that theoretical movement must proceed from a single centre outward.

In this sense, polycentricity refers not merely to diversity, but to the distribution of epistemic authority. A polycentric system requires organisational arrangements that allow knowledge to move across nodes—universities, agencies, communities, professional associations, and transnational networks—without predetermining which node has the final authority to define relevance, rigor, or legitimacy. The design question is therefore organisational as much as philosophical.

Translation in Situations

A second feature of polycentric indigenisation is its emphasis on translation as a situated process. Knowledge does not travel into an empty space; rather, it is interpreted and enacted within institutional and political environments shaped by particular histories, material conditions, and power relations (Bryant & Williams, 2020; Popkewitz, 1997; Potter, 2010). More precisely, situated translation is conceptualised here as the historically situated intersection of place, temporality, governance, and social relations that shapes how practice knowledge is interpreted, negotiated, and applied in specific contexts.

This emphasis matters because the value of a practice model cannot be judged independently of the conditions under which it is enacted. An intervention that appears robust in one setting may become ethically or operationally problematic in another if its assumptions about family, authority, welfare institutions, or acceptable evidence do not translate well. PI therefore rejects both abstract universalism and simplistic contextualism. It does not assume that knowledge is universally transferable, but neither does it assume that translation is impossible. Instead, it treats translation as something achieved through negotiation, mediation, and reflexive redesign.

Boundary Critique as an Organisational Mechanism

To move from philosophical pluralism to institutional practice, PI relies on boundary critique as a core organisational mechanism. According to Midgley and colleagues (e.g., Boyd et al., 2003; Foote et al., 2021; Midgley, 2006; Midgley & Pinzón, 2011), boundary critique helps make visible how research systems define what counts as relevant evidence, whose perspectives are included, what values are prioritised, and which experiences remain outside the frame. This is especially important in practice research, where the apparent inclusiveness of collaboration can mask deep asymmetries in interpretive authority.

Within PI, boundary critique is not simply an abstract methodological tool; it is an organisational process through which stakeholders interrogate the assumptions built into research design, service evaluation, partnership arrangements, and institutional mandates. By asking who is inside the boundary, who is outside it, and what value judgments organise that distinction, organisations can begin to redesign supports in ways that are more reflexive and more just. This makes boundary critique central to the transformation of organisational supports from administrative enablers into epistemic infrastructures.

From Unidirectional Support to Negotiated Co-Authorship

A further implication of PI is that organisational support should be understood as a negotiated and bi-directional process rather than a top-down delivery mechanism. In unidirectional models, research agendas are often defined by institutional elites, funders, or external experts, while practitioners and service users participate downstream. PI challenges this ordering by emphasising co-authorship of the research process itself.

This does not mean that all actors enter the process with equal power, nor does it romanticise consensus. Based on the author’s research findings and reflections (Leung, 2017; Leung, 2023; Leung et al., 2023), the point is that organisational supports should create structured opportunities for research agendas, evaluative criteria, and interpretive frameworks to be shaped through interaction among stakeholders whose positions and interests differ. Indigenisation, on this view, is not an endpoint but an ongoing process of negotiation in which organisational mechanisms either widen or narrow the possibilities for reciprocal learning.

PI therefore offers a conceptual bridge between epistemic justice and organisational design. It explains why the problem of peripheral knowledge cannot be solved solely through calls for inclusion, representation, or participation. What is required instead is a reconfiguration of the supports through which knowledge is produced, translated, validated, utilised, and sustained across contexts. The following section builds on this framework by examining how existing arrangements differ across settings and what kinds of transformation would be needed to move toward a more polycentric research ecology.

Comparative Patterns in Existing Organisational Supports

The value of polycentric indigenisation (PI) becomes clearer when set against existing patterns that shape practice research across contexts. This section does not claim to offer a comprehensive typology of national systems. Rather, it uses the literature reviewed earlier, together with the China-related examples discussed in the paper, to illustrate two recurrent institutional tendencies that influence how practice research is authorised, resourced and translated.

At a broad level, one tendency is organised around participation, professional pluralism and distributed collaboration. This pattern appears in scholarship emphasising university–agency partnerships, communities of practice, shared governance, practitioner autonomy and reflexive inquiry as conditions for sustainable knowledge production. In such arrangements, frontline practitioners are positioned as contributors to inquiry rather than merely as implementers of externally defined agendas.

Yet participatory arrangements also have clear limits. Even where structures appear decentralised, participation does not automatically redistribute epistemic authority or material resources. Research agendas may still be framed primarily by universities; funding may remain concentrated in established centres and service users may be included only at the level of consultation rather than co-determination. Participation, in other words, can be procedurally broad while remaining structurally shallow.

A second tendency is organised around legitimacy, institutional hierarchy, and policy alignment. In contexts like mainland China, this pattern manifests where the development of social work and practice research is structurally bound to state-led institutional expansion, government procurement systems, or the strategic mobilization of academic credibility within service settings. Under these conditions, research operates less as an arena for open-ended, critical inquiry and more as a vehicle for demonstrating policy compliance, securing institutional legitimacy, and ensuring basic organisational survival.

In this configuration, collaboration with universities remains important, but its function changes. Rather than primarily supporting mutual learning, external researchers may serve as symbolic guarantors of quality and legitimacy before funders or state actors. This can reinforce a hierarchy in which formal academic status outweighs experiential and frontline knowledge. Such arrangements may be strategically necessary, yet they can narrow epistemic possibilities by tethering inquiry to administrative timelines, approved vocabularies and short-term validation needs.

The contrast between these tendencies should not be overstated. Neither “Western” nor “Chinese” arrangements are internally uniform, and many systems contain hybrid features. Even so, the contrast is analytically useful because it reveals a common limitation across different settings: one pattern may widen participation without redistributing authority, while the other may provide institutional backing at the cost of critical independence. In both cases, the central issue is not simply whether research is supported, but how legitimacy, credibility and translation are organised.

PI departs from both patterns. Rather than choosing between participation and legitimacy, it asks how legitimacy itself might be more polycentrically constituted, and how participation might become structurally consequential rather than merely procedural. The next section develops this argument by presenting four evolutionary directions through which current arrangements might be reconfigured within a more reflexive, distributed and ethically co-creative research ecology.

Reimagining Support Arrangements: Four Evolutionary Directions

If practice research is shaped by epistemic infrastructures, then reform cannot be reduced to adding more stakeholders or multiplying collaborative activities. What is required is a shift in how institutions organise legitimacy, transferability, reflexivity and the conditions under which knowledge moves across settings in ways that have practical effect. Polycentric indigenisation identifies four evolutionary directions for such reform. A summary of the four directions is provided in Table 1. These directions are not rigid developmental stages; rather, they are analytically distinct orientations that clarify what kinds of institutional conditions are needed for more reciprocal and epistemically just forms of inquiry.

Authentic Indigenisation

The first direction concerns the consolidation of locally grounded knowledge systems. In many settings, institutional resources have been directed toward adapting imported models rather than strengthening the internal development of local concepts, methods and evaluative standards. This orientation seeks to correct that imbalance by enabling the documentation, refinement and formal recognition of practice approaches rooted in local histories, cultural logics and traditions of problem-solving.

This is an important starting point because practice knowledge cannot participate in wider exchange if it remains informal, weakly theorised or dependent on external validation for intelligibility. The point is not to romanticise the local, but to build sufficient epistemic confidence and infrastructure for locally grounded approaches to enter professional debate on stronger terms.

Polycentric Dialogue

The second direction concerns the creation of channels for reciprocal exchange across knowledge systems. If the first orientation secures local epistemic standing, this one seeks to prevent that standing from hardening into closure. It prioritises multilingual dissemination, cross-border collaboration, reciprocal agenda-setting and institutional mechanisms through which knowledge can move in more than one direction, including from the Global South to the Global North.

The challenge is that dialogue is easy to endorse rhetorically but difficult to institutionalise materially. Reciprocal exchange requires funding, governance design and durable collaborative platforms rather than symbolic commitments to internationalisation alone.

Contextualised Critical Autonomy

The third direction addresses how professional reflexivity can be preserved within systems marked by strong macro-level constraints. In highly centralised or compliance-driven environments, research support may provide stability while narrowing the space for critical, place-sensitive inquiry. This orientation therefore seeks to protect the capacity of practitioners and agencies to interrogate imported models, standardised metrics and dominant assumptions without severing themselves from the institutional frameworks on which they depend.

This is where boundary critique and place-based reflection become essential. Protected internal spaces for pilot inquiry, practitioner-led evaluation and situated interpretation can help prevent research from collapsing into epistemic obedience. They also support greater accountability to marginalised groups (e.g., service users) whose experiences are often poorly captured by dominant policy categories.

Ethical Co-Creation

The fourth direction extends the model toward its most demanding form: shared and reflexive governance of knowledge production. At this point, the task is not only to protect local knowledge or enable cross-border dialogue, but to build arrangements in which multiple actors participate in shaping inquiry, interpretation, and application under explicitly ethical, non-extractive conditions. This orientation is especially urgent where digital systems, data infrastructures, and artificial intelligence are becoming embedded in social services. Under such technocratic conditions, efficiency and standardisation can easily displace local meanings while obscuring deep asymmetries in data extraction and decision-making.

Ethical co-creation therefore requires participatory scrutiny of how technologies and interventions reorganise social relations, place attachments, and distributions of harm and benefit. Crucially, this infrastructure must explicitly protect the interpretive authority of service users. Rather than treating service users as mere passive recipients of care or as “solicited data points” to be extracted for academic consumption, ethical co-creation redesigns institutional platforms so that service users possess the structural authority to co-author the meanings, evaluations, and outcomes of the practices that affect their lives. Otherwise, an unanticipated and even hostile research and evaluation outcomes could be revealed (e.g., Foote et al., 2021).

Propositions for Future Research

The value of polycentric indigenisation ultimately depends on whether it can inform empirical inquiry into how organisational supports shape the production, circulation, and use of practice knowledge across contexts. Rather than multiplying propositions to cover every possible implication, this section distils the framework into a smaller set of analytically central claims. The seven propositions below are intended to guide future comparative and practice-based research.

Proposition 1: Organisational Supports as Distributed Epistemic Infrastructures

Practice research is more likely to generate multi-directional knowledge circulation when organisational supports are structured as distributed epistemic infrastructures rather than as unidirectional administrative mechanisms. Supports that fund multilingual dissemination, cross-institutional networks, practitioner-led platforms, and sustained collaborative partnerships should be associated with broader and more reciprocal knowledge movement across contexts.

Proposition 2: Dynamic Indigenisation and Cross-Contextual Utility

The cross-contextual usefulness of practice knowledge is likely to be greater when indigenisation is organised as an ongoing, negotiated process rather than as either static localisation or universal transfer. Practice models translated through iterative stakeholder negotiation, contextual mediation, and reflexive redesign should travel more effectively than those moved through one-way adaptation or direct transplantation.

Proposition 3: State Alignment, Legitimacy Pressure, and Epistemic Narrowing

In state-centric support environments, stronger organisational pressure to align research exclusively with top-down policy agendas is likely to increase the risk that practice research becomes legitimacy-seeking rather than critically generative. Unless moderated by practitioner-led inquiry, decentralised reflective spaces, or other mechanisms of contextualised autonomy, such pressure should be associated with greater epistemic narrowing and reduced visibility of marginalised or subaltern experiences.

Proposition 4: Boundary Critique and Contextualised Critical Autonomy

Organisations that institutionalise boundary critique within their support structures should demonstrate higher levels of practitioner critical autonomy and stronger capacity to adapt interventions to local socio-political conditions. Where organisational supports create protected spaces for questioning evaluative criteria, imported models, and dominant assumptions, practice research should be more responsive to place-based realities and less dependent on externally imposed definitions of evidence.

Proposition 5: Layered Epistemic Justice

Epistemic justice in practice research is more likely when organisational supports operate simultaneously across multiple levels of knowledge production. Supports that amplify voice solely at the solicited level (e.g., merely inviting service users or front-line practitioners to speak in focus groups) but leave producer-level resources and applied-level interpretive authority unchanged are likely to generate only partial, tokenistic, or superficial inclusion. By contrast, more symmetrical support across these levels—wherein service users and practitioners maintain the structural and institutional power to co-determine how data is framed, interpreted, and utilized—should be associated with a more substantive, durable redistribution of epistemic authority and the elimination of contributory injustice.

Proposition 6: Temporal Alignment and Research Sustainability

The sustainability of practice research partnerships is likely to depend on the temporal alignment between academic knowledge production and organisational survival cycles. Where publication timelines, funding periods, and service-contract rhythms are poorly aligned, practitioner investment in longer-term research collaboration should weaken, even when the partnership is normatively valued. Supports that better synchronise these temporal horizons should therefore be associated with stronger continuity and higher practical uptake of research outputs.

Proposition 7: Ethical Co-Creation Under Digital Governance

In policy environments increasingly shaped by data systems and artificial intelligence, practice research is more likely to support epistemic justice when organisational supports require participatory ethical scrutiny of technological design and implementation. Without such scrutiny, digital governance may intensify standardisation, displace local meanings, and reproduce structural asymmetries in data extraction and decision-making. Supports for ethical co-creation should therefore be associated with more critical and context-sensitive use of digital tools in social work settings.

Together, these propositions reposition organisational supports as objects of inquiry in their own right rather than as neutral background conditions for practice research. They also open an agenda for comparative research on how legitimacy, translation, autonomy, and co-creation are institutionalised differently across practice environments.

Conclusion

This paper has argued that organisational supports for practice research should be understood not merely as technical or administrative arrangements, but as epistemic infrastructures that shape whose knowledge becomes credible, mobile and consequential within global social work. Existing approaches often remain constrained within a limited legitimacy-versus-participation frame: some arrangements widen participation without substantially redistributing epistemic authority, whilst others provide institutional backing at the cost of subordinating inquiry to hierarchy, compliance or policy alignment. In response, Polycentric Indigenization has been proposed as a framework for rethinking support arrangements beyond both monolithic universalism and bounded localism. By emphasizing distributed epistemic authority, situated translation, boundary critique and negotiated co-authorship, the framework offers a way of conceptualising how practice research may become more reflexive, reciprocal and just across diverse socio-political contexts.

The central implication is that the just development of social work practice and education cannot be secured through ethical commitment at the personal level alone. Individual practitioners, educators and researchers remain indispensable, but their efforts are always mediated by the organisational, international and transnational conditions under which knowledge is produced, translated, legitimised and used. For that reason, the task is not only to cultivate reflexive and ethically engaged actors, but also to redesign the institutional arrangements that shape professional practice and its research across borders. A genuinely global profession cannot be built through the simple diffusion of pre-authorised standards, nor through the symbolic inclusion of peripheral voices into otherwise unchanged systems. It requires support structures capable of sustaining plurality, negotiating difference and enabling knowledge from the Global South to participate in reshaping professional theory rather than merely serving as a site for its local application.

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Table 1. Four Directions of Polycentric Indigenisation.

Direction	Core purpose	Main risk addressed	Institutional emphasis	Expected contribution
Authentic indigenisation	Consolidate locally grounded concepts, methods and standards	Dependence on imported models and weak local codification	Documentation, theorisation, training and formal recognition of local practice knowledge	Stronger epistemic autonomy and visibility of local knowledge
Polycentric dialogue	Enable reciprocal cross-contextual exchange	Inward-looking closure or one-way inter-nationalisation	Multilingual dissemination, cross-border platforms and reciprocal agenda-setting	More multi-directional knowledge circulation across contexts
Contextualised critical autonomy	Preserve reflexivity under macro-level constraints	Epistemic narrowing through compliance, hierarchy or policy alignment	Boundary critique, pilot spaces, practitioner-led evaluation and place-sensitive interpretation	Greater local responsive-ness and professional critical capacity
Ethical co-creation	Build shared governance of inquiry and application	Technocratic standardisation and hidden asymmetries in digital or institutional systems	Participatory ethics, joint interpretation and scrutiny of technological and organisational design	More reflexive, just and collaborative knowledge production

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