Impact monoculture – are all impact case studies the same old story?

The impact of quantitative research measures on academic behaviours have been widely discussed, but the impact of qualitative assessment regimes is more often thought of as benign. Drawing on an analysis of impact case studies submitted to REF 2014, Justyna Bandola-Gill and Katherine E. Smith, explore how the narrative turn in research assessment has created four distinct narratives for impact case studies. Finding these narratives to diverge from more complex accounts of real-world impact, they assess the relative value of this ‘governance by narrative’

Governing by narratives:REF impact case studies and restrictive storytelling in performance measurement

Performance assessment is permeating increasingly diverse domains of higher education, even in areas previously perceived to be too complex and idiosyncratic to quantify. The UK's attempts to assess 'research impact' within the Research Excellence Framework (REF) are illustrative of this trend and are being closely monitored by several other countries. A fundamental rationale for employing narrative case studies to assess impact within REF, rather than taking a (less resource intensive) quantified approach, was that this would allow for the variation, complexity and idiosyncrasy inherent in research impact. This paper considers whether this promise of narrative flexibility has been realised, by analysing a combination of REF impact case study reports and interviews and focus group discussions with actors involved in case study production. Informed by this analysis, our central argument is that the very quality which allows narratives to govern is their ability to standardise performance (albeit whilst retaining a degree of flexibility). The paper proposes that REF impact case studies position narratives of impact as technologies of governance in ways that restrict the 'plot line' and belie the far more complex accounts held by those working to achieve research impact. This is partly because, as research impact becomes institutionalised within universities' measurement infrastructures, higher education institutions become impact gatekeepers, filtering out narratives that are deemed overly complex or insufficiently persuasive, while perpetuating particular approaches to recounting tales of impact that are deemed likely to perform well. Crucially, these narratives not only describe impact but actively construct it as an auditable phenomenon

Governing the Sustainable Development Goals

This open access book conceptualises the Sustainable Development Goals as epistemic infrastructures that connect numbers, networks and governing paradigms.The book approaches quantification not merely as a tool for governing, but rather as a broader epistemic system through which global public policy is produced. This book focuses on the role of international organisations in shaping and implementing the 2030 Agenda and demonstrates how the SDGs have transformed and accelerated trends in quantification

Between autonomy and engagement: interpreting and practising knowledge exchange in UK academia

Scholarly interest in “impact” - the focus on the social and economic relevance of science as a research assessment criterion - has been steadily rising in UK academia since the early 1990s. In this context, knowledge exchange between researchers and policymakers has become increasingly incentivised by funders and universities. Building on theories from STS, evidence-policy relations and organisation studies, this PhD thesis explores the cultural and institutional determinants of the changing relationship between science and policy over the last thirty years. The thesis employs the concept of institutional logics to examine the broader implications of these changes, arguing that the so-called “research impact agenda” has resulted in the emergence of new practices in UK academia. In this work I identify and define two main logics that both co-exist and compete: the logic of excellence, which views science as intellectually driven and underpinned by the freedom of inquiry of academics, and the newly emerged logic of impact, which is problem-driven and assumes high levels of engagement with research users for the purpose of solving policy relevant problems. The empirical foundations of this thesis rest on two case studies of publicly-funded knowledge exchange organisations: the ESRC Genomics Policy & Research Forum and Fuse – the Centre for Translational Research in Public Health. Based on 51 in-depth semi-structured interviews with academics and policymakers engaged with these two organisations, plus an analysis of over 80 documents (including research funding policy statements and case study organisations’ strategies and reports), this thesis offers insights into the academics’ responses to the dual logics shaping contemporary academia. This thesis argues that this paradigmatic pluralism poses a particularly acute challenge for academics engaged in knowledge exchange organisations who perceive themselves to be guided by contradictory expectations and incentive systems. In particular, three areas of contestation of these logics are foregrounded: i) academic knowledge practices including producing academic research, translating research and producing policy research; ii) various framings of knowledge exchange employed by academics, including viewing it as challenging policy frameworks, facilitating learning, producing usable evidence, or advocating for specific policy options; and iii) practices of boundary work between science and policy in terms of both blurring existing boundaries and setting new ones. Establishing hybridity between different logics within designated knowledge exchange spaces involves a rhetorical, material and structural process of navigating these multiple framings of knowledge exchange, research practices and boundary work. Through employing such diverse framings and practices, the interviewees aimed to secure legitimacy in the eyes of both policy audiences and fellow academics by variously positioning themselves as both relevant to the policymaking process and independent from it. This thesis argues that the authority of science in knowledge exchange processes and its effectiveness at contributing to policy change stem neither from the close engagement of academics with the political context nor from complete autonomy from such setting, but rather it is grounded in an ability to constantly negotiate the two. To understand this persistent institutional and cultural duality, this thesis proposes we should understand science and policy as symbiotically intertwined but nonetheless distinguishable from one another

Numbers as utopia:Sustainable Development Goals and the making of quantified futures

In this article, we argue that number-making is a mode of imagining political futures – not only futures that are probable but, crucially, futures that are desired. In this way, rather than simply a mode of ‘technicising’ policy challenges, quantification fleshes out the utopian dream of a better world. Global governance is faced with the paradox of, on one hand, the utopian aspiration of the Sustainable Development Goals to create a perfect world (free of poverty, inequality, diseases and climate disaster) and, on the other hand, the dystopian effects of inaction – both tracked carefully through a complex network of indicators. This article focuses on the materiality of the Sustainable Development Goals as a productive device through which a monitoring agenda such as the Sustainable Development Goals has become ever more influential and has led to the emergence of a global public policy space

Next slide please:The politics of visualization during COVID-19 press briefings

How do governments visually communicate policies, and what does this reveal about actors’ political objectives? Governments strategically narrate their priorities, yet few studies examine this process through visual modes. We contribute to theoretical and empirical understanding in policy studies by focusing on the UK government’s COVID-19 response through its daily press briefings during the first wave of 2020. Combining quantitative changepoint and content analysis with qualitative discourse analysis, we examine all 79 sets of slides when briefings occurred. We identify a reactive phase focused on communicating knowledge about the pandemic in a boundedly rational manner, and a proactive phase that created new policy-based narratives of the pandemic. Besides contributing to emerging pandemic-related policy scholarship, we argue that conceiving these visualizations as visual narrative assemblages is relevant more broadly because it shifts attention to the interaction and interdependence of multiple visualizations as they enable policymakers to perform their authority to govern.</p