Richard Watermeyer

Issues in the articulation of ‘impact’: the responses of UK academics to ‘impact’ as a new measure of research assessment

This paper reflects on the emergence of an impact agenda and its incorporation as a feature of the academic contract in UK universities. It focuses on the depositions of senior academic managers across a range of social science research centres, as they critically reflect upon their organizational strategy for capturing and communicating the socio-economic impact of their research. Their testimonies articulate manifold issues in impact capture yet focus mainly on a disjuncture between an impact discourse mobilised by research funders/regulators and the daily practice of academics. Respondents nevertheless identify the potential of ‘impact capture’ as an obligation that enriches the perceptual horizons of research and the critical reflexivity of academics as knowledge workers.

Impact in the REF: issues and obstacles

This article focuses on ‘impact’ as a new condition of research assessment for UK academics. It explores a history of resistance to an ‘impact agenda’ and how impact as a component of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) – a system of performance based funding – is viewed by academics as an infringement to a scholarly way of life; as symptomatic of the marketisation of higher education; and as fundamentally incompatible and deleterious to the production of new knowledge.

Artifice or integrity in the marketization of research impact? Investigating the moral economy of (pathways to) impact statements within research funding proposals in the UK and Australia

A focus on academic performativity and a rationalizing of what academics do according to measurable outputs has, in the era of higher educations (HE) neoliberalization and marketization, engendered debate regarding the ‘authenticity’ of academic identity and practice. In such a context, a ‘performative’ prioritization of leveraging ‘positional goods’, such as external research funds, presents a specific challenge to the construction of academics’ identity where in being entrepreneurial they are perceived to compromise traditional Mertonian edicts of scholarship and professional ideals of integrity and ‘virtuousness’. In this article, we consider how academics sacrifice scholarly integrity when selling their research ideas, or more specifically, the non-academic impact of these, to research funders. We review attitudes towards pathway to impact statements – formal components of research funding applications, that specify the prospective socio-economic benefits of proposed research – from (n = 50) academics based in the UK and Australia and how the hyper-competitiveness of the HE market is resulting in impact sensationalism and the corruption of academics as custodians of truth.

From Engagement to Impact? Articulating the Public Value of Academic Research

This paper reviews recent culture-change in British higher education (HE) and an increasing emphasis on academics evidencing, in meaningful and measurable ways, the value and contribution of their work to national societies. Discussion focuses on what is purported to be a shift from a focus on academics rationalizing the benefits of their work in terms of public engagement to a more contentious signifier of research worth, “impact”. The primary argument herein is that an impact agenda, framed in terms of assessment and by the upcoming Research Excellence Framework 2014, has not eclipsed an engagement initiative for HE in the UK but actually provided greater credence and tacit momentum. Where public engagement “pre-impact” was viewed by sections of the academic community as frivolous, faddish and tokenistic, it is now elevated as an integral component of impact-capture work and in plotting the pathways between research producer and research intermediary/end-user/collaborator. Where “impact” is a statement of the value of academic work, engagement is the method of its articulation and the means by which impacts are mobilized.

Lost in the ‘third space’: the impact of public engagement in higher education on academic identity, research practice and career progression

Public engagement (PE) is habitually recognized and advocated across the higher education (HE) community – especially by regulator and funder constituencies – as an intrinsically good thing. In the UK, a number of initiatives focused on embedding a culture of PE within universities have sought to further this claim, yet have done so without considering or reporting upon some of the less positive elements of its undertaking. In this paper, we report upon evidence from interviews with n = 40 UK academics, drawn from across the academic hierarchy, disciplines and a diverse range of higher education institutions. The testimony of respondents points towards a number of issues for public engagement in higher education (PE-HE), specifically the deleterious effects of its undertaking on academic identity; research practice and career progression.

Selling ‘impact’: peer reviewer projections of what is needed and what counts in REF impact case studies. A retrospective analysis

Abstract The intensification of an audit culture in higher education is made no more apparent than with the growing prevalence of performance-based research funding systems like the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) and the introduction of new measures of assessment like ‘impact’ or more specifically, the economic and societal impacts of research. Detractors of this regulatory intervention, however, question the legitimacy and credibility of such a system for, and focus within, the evaluation of research performance. Within this study, we specifically sought to understand the process of evaluating the impact of research by gaining unique access as observers of a simulated impact evaluation exercise populated by aproximately n = 90 senior academic peer reviewers and user assessors, undertaken within one UK research-intensive university prior to and in preparation of its submission to REF2014. Over an intensive two-day period, we observed how peer reviewers and user assessors grouped into four overarching disciplinary panels went about deliberating and scoring impact, presented in the form of narrative-based case studies. Among other findings, our observations revealed that in their efforts to evaluate impact, peer reviewers were indirectly promoting a kind of impact mercantilism, where case studies that best sold impact were those rewarded with the highest evaluative scores.

Public intellectuals vs. new public management: the defeat of public engagement in higher education

Much is written apropos a rationalization for public engagement in science and technology (PEST). Less copious is a literature that considers PEST in a broader form and operationalized in the specific environment of higher education and the impact of its undertaking on the working lives of academics. This paper considers the status of public engagement in higher education (PE-HE) in the UK and the deliberations of academics, distinguished for their PE-HE activity, regarding the (im)possibility of PE-HE as an integrated and valued component of research practice and culture. This ‘state-of-the-art’ review situates a diagnosis of PE-HE being at odds with, if not defeated by, the organizational structure and institutional priorities of UK universities.

Fear and loathing in the academy? The role of emotion in response to an impact agenda in the UK and Australia

ABSTRACT The research impact agenda is frequently portrayed through ‘crisis’ accounts whereby academic identity is at risk of a kind of existential unravelling. Amid reports of academics under siege in an environment in which self-sovereignty is traditionally preferred and regulation is resisted, heightened emotionalism, namely fear and dread, dominates the discourse. Such accounts belie the complexity of the varying moral dispositions, experiences and attitudes possessed by different individuals and groups in the academic research community. In this article, we attempt to examine the role of the affective in response to a particular research policy directive – the impact agenda. In doing so, we reveal the contributing factors affecting the community’s reaction to impact. In cases where personal, moral and disciplinary identities align with the impact agenda, the emotional response is positive and productive. For many academics, however, misalignment gives rise to emotional dissonance. We argue that when harnessed, further acknowledgement of the role of emotion in the academy can produce a more socially and morally coherent response to an impact agenda. We review academic responses from the UK and Australia (n = 51) and observe a community heavily emotionally invested in what they do, such that threats to academic identity and research are consequently threats to the self.

‘Excellence’ and Exclusion: The Individual Costs of Institutional Competitiveness

A performance-based funding system like the United Kingdom’s ‘Research Excellence Framework’ (REF) symbolizes the re-rationalization of higher education according to neoliberal ideology and New Public Management technologies. The REF is also significant for disclosing the kinds of behaviour that characterize universities’ response to government demands for research auditability. In this paper, we consider the casualties of what Henry Giroux (2014) calls “neoliberalism’s war on higher education” or more precisely the deleterious consequences of non-participation in the REF. We also discuss the ways with which higher education’s competition fetish, embodied within the REF, affects the instrumentalization of academic research and the diminution of academic freedom, autonomy and criticality.

Social network science:Pedagogy, dialogue and deliberation

The online world constitutes an ever-expanding store and incubator for scientific information. It is also a social space where forms of creative interaction engender new ways of approaching science. Critically, the web is not only a repository of knowledge but a means with which to experience, interact and even supplement this bank. Social Network Sites are a key feature of such activity. This paper explores the potential for Social Network Sites (SNS) as an innovative pedagogical tool that precipitate the ‘incidental learner’. I suggest that these online spaces, characterised by informality, open-access, user input and widespread popularity, offer a potentially indispensable means of furthering the public understanding of science; and significantly one that is rooted in dialogue.