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This article focuses on the social impact of educational sciences. It introduces a framework for studying the social impact of research and uses it to analyze the social impact of the work of a research group studying learning difficulties at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. The framework suggests that the social impact of research can be understood in terms of the context of impact. This context is composed of four interacting dimensions: epistemic, artefactual, social-institutional, and spatial-geographical dimensions. In addition, the paper suggests that the understanding of the phenomena to be studied and mediating artefacts based on this understanding play a key role in the expansion of the social impact in the educational sciences. The article provides a means of analyzing the narratives of longer-term impact of research and suggests that even in education—a classical area of advancing public good—the distribution of mediating artefacts is increasingly likely to be realized through markets.

Aligning itself with the interactive perspectives in research on science's social impact, this article combines the concept of productive interactions with the method of framing. We argue that this provides a more nuanced picture of the productive interactions between researchers and stakeholders in the social sciences. This approach offers a way to address changes in human valuation and meaning-making in politically controversial issues where social impact is acquired through complicated processes of public press discussion over long periods of time. The social impact of research is demonstrated with reference to the debate between researchers and societal stakeholders about urban segregation in Helsinki, Finland. The case shows how researchers challenged the established housing policy and opened room for alteration of the public understanding of urban development and segregation. The article illustrates how productive interactions, strengthened with the notion of framing, support the achievement of the social impact of science. 2 2 the so-called traditional social contract of science (Martin 2003; 2011), this was seen as materializing automatically without any deliberate attempts to achieve societal impact by means of research. With the advent of a broad structural movement towards intermingling the institutional spheres of science, government, industry, and civil society (Kleinman and Vallas 2006), the traditional social contract of science is giving way to an alternative conception according to which the boundaries of science are becoming porous such that science and society now invade each other's domains (Gibbons 1999: C81-82).

In this paper we suggest that theoretically and methodologically creative interdisciplinary research can benefit the research on social harms in an algorithmic context. We draw on our research on automated decision making within public authorities and the current on-going legislative reform on the use of such in Finland. The paper suggests combining socio-legal studies with science and technology studies (STS) and highlights an organisational learning perspective. It also points to three challenges for researchers. The first challenge is that the visions and imaginaries of technological expectations oversimplify the benefits of algorithms. Secondly, designing automated systems for public authorities has overlooked the social and collective structures of decision making, and the citizen’s perspective is absent. Thirdly, as social harms are unforeseen from the perspective of citizens, we need comprehensive research on the contexts of those harms as well as transformative activities within public organisations.

Higher education institutions promote academic entrepreneurship through organizational arrangements such as innovation programs, incubators, and accelerators aimed at implementing the third mission of the university. While research has examined how these multi-professional arrangements support entrepreneurial efforts, less is known about their individual level implications which emerge as researchers are exposed to different professional values and practices. This article draws on a longitudinal qualitative study on an innovation program to investigate through what kinds of identity processes nascent academic entrepreneurs construct their professional identities and how as part of these processes they position themselves in relation to different professional domains. The analysis demonstrates three identity construction processes (hybridization, rejecting hybridization, and transitioning) and their associated identity work tactics (compartmentalizing, protecting, and reframing) at the boundaries of professional domains. Our contribution is in demonstrating how nascent academic entrepreneurs’ identity construction processes are influenced by internally and externally oriented identity work and their interactive dynamics. Moreover, the findings advance our understanding of how individuals can purposefully mould the fluidity of domain boundaries through identity work by making boundaries bridgeable, impermeable, or permeable. These findings have value for those developing organizational arrangements for the promotion of academic entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial identities.