Networked reports: Commissioning and production of expert reports on Swedish health care governance

The article analyzes the commissioning and production of expert reports about Swedish health care management and governance. We show that these reports are rarely solitary stand-alone products, but tend to form clusters in an evolving discourse centered around specific policy solutions. We also show that the most important producers of such reports tend to come from a small circle of informally recruited academics and policy experts representing a narrow segment of academic disciplines. We point to some of the risks involved in this structure of knowledge production and argue that reports: (a) may form their own environment rather than address real problems; (b) may reproduce certain taken-for-granted assumptions and critical lacunae; (c) may have their impact decided by their network connections rather than by their intellectual content; and (d) represent a structure that provides opportunities for special interests to enter the process.