integrity in the marketization of research impact? investigating the moral economy of (pathway to) impact statements within research funding proposals in the UK and Australia',

No 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 dominate 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.

Little is known about the process of evaluating the economic and societal impact of research undertaken in university settings. In this paper, we explore the accounts of senior academics and user-assessors, populating disciplinary sub-panels spanning the humanities and social sciences, convened to judge and 'score' the impact claims of researchers from UK universities as a new component of research evaluation within the specific context of the UK's performance based research funding system (PBRFS), the Research Excellence Framework (REF). We perceive from their accounts the emergence of a new and liminal space in the production of scholarly 'distinction' that is unlike archetypal modalities of academic excellence. Analogously, we identify an emotional and intellectual vulnerability in the review process and the loosening of the structures reviewers traditionally call upon in making value-determinations that simultaneously facilitate their role as impact evaluators and create new modalities in scholarly distinction.

The requirement to anticipate, articulate and evaluate the impact of research is a growing part of academic labor. A research impact agenda in the UK and Australia reflects a drive from Governments to see a return on the public investment of research. Some view this as symptomatic of a marketised higher education system, in which knowledge is a commodity as opposed to an object of intrinsic value and dismiss the latter view as nostalgic and unrealistic. Within a research context where knowledge continues to be politicized, longstanding philosophical concerns concerning the value of knowledge and its purpose are rerehearsed and revisited. Discourse concerning the preservation of freedom in an age of increased accountability can be seen to give rise to increased moral and emotional dissonance amongst pockets of the academic community. At the same time, the academic community can be largely seen to possess a strong moral sense of epistemic responsibility toward the societal contribution of useful knowledge. This piece, based upon research that examined the philosophical challenges with respect to an impact agenda facing academics in the UK and Australia, will serve to provoke further discussion about the challenges posed by an impact agenda whilst also acting as a provocation for academics to locate and harness a sense of epistemic responsibility in order to respond to the impact agenda. This may enable a departure away from narrow conceptions of knowledge and its instrumentalism, thus supporting the academic community and its actors in forming a more holistic view of the value of knowledge within this context.