HOW ARE UNIVERSITY RESEARCHERS AFFECTED BY HAVING TO SHOW IMPACT?
Academic researchers are judged by publication of their work in peer-reviewed journals but, alongside that international gold standard, are new incentives with the potential to change research culture dramatically.
During his recent visit, the Australian Business Deans Council interviewed the Dean of Lancaster University Management School, Professor Angus Laing, to see how the UK experience of having to report on the wider impact of university research may inform Australia.
‘We always, traditionally, have thought of [research] impact as that classic academic Impact: the level of citations, how are you influencing, how are you shaping the thinking of one's academic peers, the academic knowledge base?' Professor Laing says.
‘What's been strengthened is the extent to which that is now being complimented by recognition of the importance of impact on practice.
'So, the impact on the peer academic community, but also the impact on the professional, the practice community.
'That's been a very, very significant re-balancing,’ he says.
Professor Laing, who is also Chair of of the Academic Journal Guide Board of the Chartered Association of Business Schools Association (CABS) says that the rebalancing, which stems from the introduction of the Research Excellence Framework in the UK in 2014, is prompting shifts in academic culture.
‘It would be fair to say we are seeing early career academics who, if you like, are being socialised into the academic job thinking about impact in terms of the practice – so impact from the outset,’ he says.
‘[But] there's an interesting challenge, I would suggest, for mid-career to senior academics, some of whom are having to retrofit, if you like, the idea of practice impact into their traditional academic model, into the way they operate.’
Professor Laing says the mid- to late-career researchers are having to develop new skills like ‘the ability to start to think about the very research questions from the perspective of businesses, from the perspective of policy makers, rather than purely from a theoretical, development perspective.’
The enhanced skillset requires being able to talk to, and bring on board, non-academic constituencies that, Professor Laing says, may once have been ‘treated as a slightly distant object of your study.’
Professor Laing says it is a challenge to ensure that academics avoid abstract and distant language that alienates, rather than engages, the business community.
‘There is a disconnect, that's often around language rather than necessarily around substance, and it is incumbent on us as business school academics, as business school leaders, to make sure that our academics actually talk those languages that the policy and business communities are going to be using,’ Professor Laing says.
For the first time this year, Australian universities have to submit impact statements to the Engagement and Impact Assessment of the Australian Research Council (ARC).
The ARC defines impact as ‘the contribution that research makes to the economy, society, environment or culture, beyond the contribution to academic research.'
Professor Laing says the first round of a similar process in the UK – the Research Excellence Framework in 2014-15 – produced examples where the impact of the research seemed ‘almost incidental’.
‘Practitioners, policy makers, may well have picked it up, but there was less of a deliberate on the part of many academics to go and build those engagement networks in advance,’ he says.
‘What we're seeing now is both individual academic colleagues, and business schools collectively, thinking about how they engage actively with business and policy communities to lay the framework that will generate impact cases in due course.
'So, engagement is a necessary pre-condition for being able to have impact,' Professor Laing says.
Professor Laing maintains that initial engagement may often involve looking at research through the practitioners’ lenses rather than changing underlying theoretical research questions.
'So, as academics are thinking about a research proposal, thinking about a research grant application, that you've got relevant business, or policy stake holders, involved in those discussions from the ground up,’ Professor Laing says.
Hear the full 25-minute interview with Professor Angus Laing of Lancaster University Management as a podcast or watch it below or at www.abdc.edu.au.
©Australian Business Deans Council 2018