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Abstract
This article addresses how academics navigate different kinds of prestige and different systems of value around what ‘counts’ in academic writing, focusing particularly on the impact of the genre regime associated with research evaluation in the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF). It draws on data from an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded project working with academics across different disciplines and different institutions in England. We interviewed people about their writing practices several times, exploring their practices, life histories, institutional contexts, and the tools and resources they draw on as they write. Academics’ research writing is framed within explicit institutional and departmental strategies around the numbers and publication venues of research outputs, driven by institutions’ need to succeed in the national competitive research evaluation system. Such institutional strategies do not always map well onto other values systems in which academics have been trained and within which they locate themselves. The articles analyses the interviews we carried out, exploring how academics negotiate tensions between these systems of value and considering the implications of this for what is considered to be important in academic work and, therefore, what it means to be an academic.
Notes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank, firstly, our project participants, without whose generous sharing of their time and experiences this work would not have been possible. Secondly, the other members of the project research team – the Senior Research Associates Dr Sharon McCulloch and Dr Ibrar Bhatt, co-investigators Professor David Barton and Professor Mary Hamilton, and administrator Dee Daglish. This work was a team effort and this paper owes a huge debt to their expertise and thoughtful work. The members of the project advisory group engaged with us at several crucial junctures and their support has been invaluable. All those who have attended project events and conference presentations have also helped us a great deal in developing our ideas.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 The project team included myself as Principal Investigator, Professor David Barton and Professor Mary Hamilton as Co-Investigators and Dr Sharon McCulloch and Dr Ibrar Bhatt as Senior Research Associates. This paper represents my own reflection on one aspect of the project research; see also Barton and McCulloch (Citation2018); McCulloch, Tusting and Hamilton (Citation2017); McCulloch (Citation2017); Tusting and Barton (Citation2016) for more information on the project.
2 See Tourish and Willmott (Citation2015) and Mingers and Willmott (Citation2012) for further development of the negative consequences of the primacy of the ABS rankings in the management disciplines.
