Professional Practices: Unravelling the effect of university impact policies on societal engagement of academics

Many academics consider engagement with and impact on other individuals, groups and organisations in society inherent to their profession. Nevertheless, in recent decades governments, research funders and universities have introduced policies to increase impact of academics on society. Effects of these policies on research are well documented. Surprisingly, effects on impact itself have thus far received little attention. Do policies affect the types of individuals, groups or organisations that academics engage with and have an impact on? This project for the first time addresses this issue within the context of universities by answering the research question ‘how do internal impact policies affect societal engagement of academics?’ The project is positioned in the managerialism versus professionalism debate and located at the intersection of science policy studies and public administration. I take a combined case study approach of the Netherlands and the UK and include 1) nested case studies of four universities and three research fields and 2) a large-N survey of university policy staff and academics. The resulting model contributes to our still limited understanding of how universities affect academic work. Focus will be on the still ill-studied social sciences and humanities. The project will support evidence based science policy making.