April 2021
This month reports summarises four articles that in/directly relate to the impact of universities. The first discuses conditions of how honesty is lost within academia (Hermanowicz, 2021). The second investigates the epistemological difference between STEM fields and humanities and social sciences when making impact claims (Bonaccorsi et al., 2021). The third talks about the by-products/hidden benefits overlooked by standard impact assessment within occupational health research (Jones et al. 2021). The last study investigates a systematic impact assessment of impact within health services (Allbutt & Irvine, 2019).
1. The articles discusses the conditions of how honesty and confidentiality is lost within internal academic promotion. Whilst ethical issues to academic freedom are usually construed as external threats, the author argues that there are also internal threats from other academics. In specific he identifies what he calls ‘massification’, ‘identity politics’ and ‘mediocrarcy’ as conditions that represent a threat to meritocratic and honest promotion in specific and the role of the university and academia in general. Massification refers to increase in size of the higher education sector, which comes at the detriment of collegiality and ability to dissent, leading to preference falsification. Identity politics, whilst construed as emancipatory for the identity it promotes, can turn into a privileged position immune to criticism. Mediocracy, in the sense that an emphasis on inclusion, equity and diversity punishes/selects against excellence (which by definition is only a small subset).
2. They analysed the causal references from REF impact case studies, and compared the STEM fields to SSH (Social Sciences and Humanities) fields. They discovered that the causal chains that STEM scholars’ claiming impact built are usually shorter than by SSH scholars, yet the presentation of impact is done in a similar way. An epistemological consequence is that longer causal chains are more fragile, and the impact claims of the STEM fields come across as more believable. The impacts in the STEM fields appear most standardised and repeatable, reflecting the disciplinary nature of these disciplines. In their analysis, this throws up serious question if the same approach to studying impact is applicable for SSH as for STEM.
3. The research focused on a way to identify research impact of occupational health research and the ‘hidden’ benefits or ‘by products’ of research that are non-obvious. They specifically focused on a local approach, surveying research leaders, healthcare professionals and patient representatives. The six domains of impacts they routinely looked for and logged were; “health benefits of participants, service and workforce changes, research profile and capacity, economic benefit, organisational influence, knowledge production and exchange” (p. 198). Meanwhile, the hidden/by-product impact they identified as improvements to “service delivery changes, workforce benefits and patient experience benefits” (p. 198).
4. The study represented a health care service providers attempts to incorporate a research impact assessment into their own organisational framework in order to get the best value for money of the research that they fund. They found that no systematic approach for impact evaluation existed for research users hence they created their own. In their opinion, an impact assessment represented a good aid in differentiating which research to invest in and which not. Furthermore, they established that applied research and research that incorporated stakeholders was the most impactful. As well, that there is a need to plan for impact and the role of senior leadership in aiding communication and impact management.
1. Hermanowicz, J. C. (2021). Honest Evaluation in the Academy. Minerva, 1-19.
2. Bonaccorsi, A., Melluso, N., Chiarello, F., & Fantoni, G. (2021). The credibility of research impact statements: A new analysis of REF with Semantic Hypergraphs. Science and Public Policy.
3. Jones, N. L., Cooke, J., & Holliday, J. (2021). Making occupational therapy research visible: amplifying and elevating the contribution and impacts. British Journal of Occupational Therapy.
4. Allbutt, H. and Irvine, S. (2019) Research assessment in a National Health Service organisation: a process for learning and accountability, Evidence & Policy, vol xx no xx, 1–13.
