March 2022
This month’s reports summarises four articles that in/directly relate to the impact of universities. The first paper quantitatively investigates if the founding source is related to the (academic) impact of a paper (Álvarez-Bornstein & Bordons, 2021). The second study looked at ways of how to embed impact activities within design of social science research (vom Lehn & Heath, 2021). The third piece of research scrutinised the state of academic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of UK research culture (Watermeyer et al. 2021). The last item represents a reflective piece of 26 scholars upon the shifting boundary between science, philosophy and religion brought about through the digital revolution (Reader et al. 2021).
[1]) They looked at Spanish-based researchers over a five year period (2010-2014) in seven disciplines (Biodiversity Conservation, Cardiovascular System, Polymer Sciences, Spectroscopy, Statistics & Probability, Telecommunications and Virology). They found that funded research is published in higher impact factor journals and attains more citations, as compared to non-funded research. Funded research also tended to have greater size of the research teams. The type of collaborations (international vs. national) was mixed across the disciplines, but did not seem to affect the two aforementioned findings.
[2]) They based their approach upon ethnomethodology and conversation analysis of four of their own and other research projects. They found that a key factor in generating impact were the mundane everyday interactions, which collectively represented the medium of where the impact manifested. Likewise, they contest that collaboration with ‘practitioners’ from the outset of the research design, improved the impact albeit that came with challenging discussions of whom and what decides the category of practitioner in the first place. Lastly, they stressed the unpredicted and unpredictability of what is considered important to everyday practice and how successfully incorporating these represented the hallmark of not jeopardising academic integrity.
[3]) They surveyed over a thousand UK academics across a range of different disciplines, finding a complex picture brought on by the pandemic. They noted that the state of precarity for academic increased, in terms of work intensification, reduced job security as well as negative impacts on health and well-being. They attribute these overarching negative changes to the UK research sector largely to, that the remote working model further empowered research managers. Such a circumstances then increased and worsened tendencies of neoliberal governmentality that already existed within the system prior to the pandemic.
[4]) The article makes the claim that the increased complexity brought upon by the digital revolution, has also consequences for understanding the boundaries between science, philosophy and religion. In specific four domains are discussed. Firstly, philosophically the deluge of information opens up new questions of (super-)complexity and how this relates to our understanding of the world. Secondly, theologically such a state of uncertainty invites for the re-evaluation of religious dogmatic assumptions. Thirdly, in terms of critical theory there needs to be a reconsidering of the implications of our understanding of trust and power relationships. Finally, that the heading of postdigital studies allows a medium for sense-making of where such discussions can occur with the spirit of mutual understanding and respect.
[1] Álvarez-Bornstein, B., & Bordons, M. (2021). Is funding related to higher research impact? Exploring its relationship and the mediating role of collaboration in several disciplines. Journal of Informetrics, 15(1), 101102.
[2] vom Lehn, D., & Heath, C. (2021). Embedding impact in research: Addressing the interactional production of workplace activities. British Journal of Management.
[3] Watermeyer, R., Shankar, K., Crick, T., Knight, C., McGaughey, F., Hardman, J., ... & Phelan, D. (2021). ‘Pandemia’: a reckoning of UK universities’ corporate response to COVID-19 and its academic fallout. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 42(5-6), 651-666.
[4] Reader, J., Jandrić, P., Peters, M. A., Barnett, R., Garbowski, M., Lipińska, V., ... & Baker, C. (2021). Enchantment-disenchantment-re-enchantment: Postdigital relationships between science, philosophy, and religion. Postdigital Science and Education, 3(3), 934-965.
