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

Chubb, Jennifer; Watermeyer, Richard

doi:10.1080/03075079.2016.1144182

Cited by 123 publications

(114 citation statements)

References 31 publications

(17 reference statements)

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“…Chubb and Watermeyer, 2017;Gunn and Mintrom, 2017;Smith et al, 2011;Watermeyer, 2016). This article concurs with a number of these critiques, and draws on them in a systematization of five principal 'perils' of the impact agenda.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 48%

“…These risks of distorting behaviour, of gaming the system and even of falsifying evidence have been observed at other levels of the education system and in other parts of higher education (Chubb and Watermeyer, 2017;Martin, B., 2011;Smith et al, 2011). With significant resources attached to these evaluations, the scenario is highly likely -and will also reinforce some of the tendencies outlined above, of a linear, university-owned, predictable and short-term process.…”

Section: Measurementmentioning

confidence: 96%

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Five perils of the impact agenda in higher education

McCowan¹

2018

London Review of Education

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The impact of higher education institutions on society has become the focus of significant policy attention in recent years, most prominently as part of research evaluation. This paper presents a theoretical exploration of the notion, identifying the key dimensions as source, form, trajectory, intensity, timescale and destination. While acknowledging the importance of porosity between universities and society, and the need to address critical contemporary challenges, five dangers of the impact agenda are highlighted: the normative dimension; the linear relationship; unpredictability; measurement; and instrumentalization. As a response to dominant conceptualizations, the paper proposes the notion of the generative intrinsic as a more robust basis on which to base the work of universities.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 48%

Section: Measurementmentioning

confidence: 96%

Five perils of the impact agenda in higher education

McCowan¹

2018

London Review of Education

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“…The drive for "excellence" in the eyes of assessors is shown even more starkly in work by Chubb and Watermeyer (2016). In structured interviews, academics in Australia and the United Kingdom admitted to outright lies in the claims of broader impacts made in research proposals.…”

Section: What Is "Excellence"?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A narrative of scarcity combined with "excellence" as an interchange mechanism leads to concentration of resources and thence hypercompetition. Hypercompetition in turn leads to greater (we might even say more shameless, see Anderson et al, 2007;Fanelli, 2009;Tijdink et al, 2014;Chubb and Watermeyer, 2016) attempts to perform this "excellence", driving a circular conservatism and reification of existing power structures while harming rather than improving the qualities of the underlying activity.…”

Section: Caveats and Further Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Mistakes and errors made in good faith are a natural and necessary part of the research process. Yet, as focus groups and surveys conducted by various researchers have demonstrated, some forms of error can be misconduct in the form of a (semi-) deliberate strategy for ensuring quick and/or numerous publications by " 'cutting a little corner' in order to get a paper out before others or to get a larger grant,... [or] because... [a researcher] needed more publications that year" (Anderson et al, 2007: 457-458; see also Fanelli, 2009;Tijdink et al, 2014;Chubb and Watermeyer, 2016).…”

Section: What Is "Excellence"?mentioning

confidence: 99%

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“Excellence R Us”: university research and the fetishisation of excellence

et al. 2017

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The rhetoric of "excellence" is pervasive across the academy. It is used to refer to research outputs as well as researchers, theory and education, individuals and organizations, from art history to zoology. But does "excellence" actually mean anything? Does this pervasive narrative of "excellence" do any good? Drawing on a range of sources we interrogate "excellence" as a concept and find that it has no intrinsic meaning in academia. Rather it functions as a linguistic interchange mechanism. To investigate whether this linguistic function is useful we examine how the rhetoric of excellence combines with narratives of scarcity and competition to show that the hyper-competition that arises from the performance of "excellence" is completely at odds with the qualities of good research. We trace the roots of issues in reproducibility, fraud, and homophily to this rhetoric. But we also show that this rhetoric is an internal, and not primarily an external, imposition. We conclude by proposing an alternative rhetoric based on soundness and capacity-building. In the final analysis, it turns out that that "excellence" is not excellent. Used in its current unqualified form it is a pernicious and dangerous rhetoric that undermines the very foundations of good research and scholarship. This article is published as part of a collection on the future of research assessment.

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Social science as social action to address inequalities

Staines

Smith

Plage

et al. 2023

Aust J Social Issues

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In its most recent report, the Academy of the Social Sciences Australia (ASSA, 2021: 10) identified social inequality as a “grand challenge” for the social sciences, arguing that social scientists have a pivotal role to play in “understanding, addressing and guiding us towards a narrowing of a two‐tier society.” Nevertheless, the social sciences continue to be regularly positioned as “soft” and esoteric in relation to the natural sciences, while also sustaining disproportionate funding cuts. In this article, we—a multidisciplinary group of social science researchers forming part of the Inequalities and Social Action Research Cluster based at The University of Queensland (Australia)—draw on the existing literature and our diverse experiences to reflexively consider how academic social scientists might play the active role that ASSA foresees to address social inequalities into the future. This includes by countering the inherent imperialism of the Western academy itself. We explore the roles, barriers and tensions that social scientists face and conclude by offering a framework of key strategies to improve the translational impacts of social science research for addressing social inequalities.

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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

Abstract: 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',

Cited by 123 publications

References 31 publications

Five perils of the impact agenda in higher education

Five perils of the impact agenda in higher education

“Excellence R Us”: university research and the fetishisation of excellence

Social science as social action to address inequalities

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