A politics of doing social research for fishery biologists, managers and industry

Social impact assessment of management change is becoming an increasingly common injunction in many fisheries around the world. Funding for such work is often provided by government and/or corporate bodies and can require researchers to work with industry participants and fishery biologists and managers to produce work that is credible and useful to these groups. Design of such work, therefore, is scrutinized by other than social researchers. In this article, I present some responses to challenges put by fishery biologists, fishery managers and industry participants regarding my research. It eventuated that in my work I had to be mindful of both political and methodological requirements affecting the credibility, use and funding of my research outside the academy. © 2003, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.