Month: March 2014

Three problems with the impact agenda

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Katherine Tonkiss

In a recent post for the LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog, I argued with Catherine Durose that while the idea of delivering policy relevant research is positive, too often our claims to relevance do not deliver genuine impact. A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to revisit this issue when I spoke on the PSA Postgraduate Network impact panel, and here I reflect on some of the themes that emerged.

‘Impact’ is a response to the perception that academic work suffers from a relevance gap – that research is not relevant beyond academia and that therefore we should work to address this problem by producing research which has an impact on the wider world. This claim of a relevance gap has been critiqued on the grounds that it may not be true – many disciplines including feminism, and many policy-relevant academic departments (such as INLOGOV) have long had impact beyond their academic niche.

Despite this critique, the imperative to create impactful research is not necessarily something to be avoided. Not all research has to create impact, but it is a good thing that some research does, and maybe more research should do. Impactful research drives a democratisation of knowledge, enabling wider society to challenge and press for change.

There are, however, three key problems with the impact agenda.

1. Privatisation of knowledge

Impact is intended to democratise academic knowledge – to allow it to reach wider audiences. However, as Martin Eve has argued, the need for impact has arisen because of the privatisation of higher education which is privatising knowledge and therefore giving rise to the need for impact. Discussion at the PSA impact panel centred on how, for many, their biggest impact came from teaching but that this form of impact is, in their view, being curtailed. This is not an argument against impact, but rather the narrow way in which having an impact is understood.

2. Quantifying impact

Yesterday, Kate Dommett described in her blog post the various ways in which the impact of academic work is being measured. The problem with this is that, by demanding that impact must be quantifiable and suited to specific measures, we may miss quite a lot of the benefit and value of our research. Again, this is not an argument against impact, but rather what counts as impact. This is particularly evident in how we treat activities such as blogging and engaging with the media. As I argued with Catherine Durose, too often we count hits and retweets as measures of impact, rather than the less quantifiable and more long term dialogue that is opened up by engaging with these media. As such, we are performing claims to relevance rather than genuinely being relevant.

3. Doing research faster

Patrick Dunleavy has recently stated that research should be ‘shorter, better, faster, and free’, and that this should have implications for how research projects are constructed. Dunleavy wants information available to policymakers as quickly as possible and critiques social scientists still ‘trundling on’ doing three year studies and not getting results to policymakers in time for them to be relevant.

Rethinking how we construct large research projects is to be welcomed. However, the claim that this should mean producing research more quickly potentially undermines the quality and rigour of our academic work, as well as the depth that we are able to reach. Rather than thinking about how to shorten projects and deliver results more quickly, a more fruitful avenue may be to think about how to include those affected by the research in that research as it happens. This means co-designing research projects with participants and working with them closely throughout. In an article we wrote for Political Insight, Kate Dommett and I have described how we have taken this approach in the research project that we are currently working on.

Despite the three problems I have described, I do think that there is value in research which creates impact – that is, where it involves participants in the research process and aims to stimulate dialogue beyond the ivory tower. We need to avoid thinking about impact solely as fast research and performances of claims to relevance, but genuinely impactful research can have a positive effect.

tonkiss

Katherine Tonkiss is a Research Fellow in INLOGOV. She has research interests in normative and empirical questions surrounding migration, citizenship and identity, particularly in the UK. Her first book, Migration and Identity in a Post-National World, was published in 2013. Follow Katherine on Twitter @ktonkiss.

Embarking on impact: why do it and what to consider

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Katharine Dommett

The impact agenda has emerged as a prominent component of academic life. Over the last few years alongside the pressures of writing, teaching and administration scholars have been encouraged (if not expected) to conduct impact and public engagement activities. The origins of this agenda are manifold but derive in the main from the Research Excellence Framework which assesses academic departments on their ‘impact case studies’ and ‘environment statement’ as well as research. In an era of austerity it is being made clear to academics that high quality research is no longer enough, scholars must also demonstrate the public value of their work and the return produced on public money.

This logic has permeated the ethos not simply of evaluation but also of research grant capture. As a statement from the Research Councils UK website says:

‘The impact of a piece of research is a key determinant of its value to a university department given the difference between a 3* impact rating and a 4* impact rating can mean as much as an £80K difference in its annual income. In addition, the impact element has also been fully recognised by each member of the Research Councils UK (RCUK) so the potential impact of research is now a significant factor in assessing whether a funding bid will be successful’

In this context Universities are directing increased resources towards impact activities and training, particularly targeting ‘enthusiastic’ early career academics likely to embrace and pursue publically engaged research. Yet, in spite of these developments few opportunities have been provided for early career academics to engage in debates about the underlying questions of:

  1. Why they should engage with these activities (beyond the need to fulfil REF requirements and gain research grants) and
  2. How they can do so in the most meaningful way possible.

This assertion does not deny the ever increasing online debate about impact (not least on the LSE impact blog) but rather highlights how within departments and specifically PhD training there are few opportunities to explore these issues.

Following this logic a recent roundtable event held by the PSA post-graduate network at the University of Birmingham sought to encourage young PhD scholars to critically consider the impact agenda. The three speakers, Dr Helen Turton, Dr Katherine Tonkiss and Dr Matthew Wood, each have different research backgrounds and perspectives on the impact agenda and provided thoughtful and personal experiences of their early career engagement with impact. Each speaker presented their own account of what they thought impact was, whether they thought it was beneficial and how it could be delivered in practice.

Through critical analysis of this agenda and the sharing of personal experiences each speaker made the audience think about the virtues and vices of the impact agenda, and offered tips to help scholars make conscious choices about whether, why and how to engage with the impact agenda in the future.

In the wake of this conference our three speakers have written up their thoughts and ideas as blog posts aimed at continuing the debate and stimulating ongoing discussion about why to engage and what to consider when dealing with impact. These will be posted here over the course of the next week.

kateDommett

Katharine Dommett is a Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield. She recently convened and chaired the workshop at the University of Birmingham entitled ‘Why Bother with Impact’. She has also written about her experiences of impact with her colleague Dr Katie Tonkiss for PSA’s Political Insight Magazine. Katharine is currently developing training for academics on how to do impact in her role as Deputy Director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics at the University of Sheffield. For any questions contact [email protected]

Sustainable construction and local authorities: a failed experiment

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Max Lempriere

Sustainable housing policy is a hot-topic at the minute. The autonomy that local authorities have had from central government since 2007 to require local energy efficiency and sustainable construction that supersede those in national building regulations is set to be revoked. The government has raised concerns that because so few local authorities are embracing this autonomy there is a hotchpotch of standards in different parts of the country, creating an un-even playing field and raising costs for developers. The decision to strip local authorities of this legislative independence represents a serious blow to the question of whether the sustainability of housing can be raised but, importantly, it also forces us to ask why the uneven playing field was created in the first place.

This experiment to involve the local level in the design and adoption of sustainable planning policy has failed not because of a lack of environmental concern amongst local authorities but because central policy makers and academics alike are unaware of the social, economic and political factors that affect the ability of local government to embrace any autonomy they are granted. They failed to see that conditions on the ground simply weren’t right for a significant number of local authorities to face up to developers and require more from them. Political, institutional, economic and sociotechnical barriers prevent a large number of local authorities from raising local standards, even when the will was there.

In my PhD research I attempt to increase our understanding in this regard by focusing on the barriers faced by local authorities. Up until now there hasn’t been much work that looks at what factors encourage or inhibit local government to legislate in pursuit of environmental goals, so my research doesn’t just help us understand this policy area but helps us refine our analytical models of the politics local government in processes of sustainable development.

It is becoming clear that for change to occur policy champions must push sustainable construction proposals through the local legislative process, there must be a culture of innovation and sustainability and a sense of ecological optimism in the council and proponents of change must be organised and resourced well enough to counter any challenges. It looks like these conditions simple weren’t there in the majority of local authorities to the extent required for reform of spatial planning policies.

Of course this provides only a snapshot of a bigger, far more complex picture. Spatial planning in particular and sustainable development in general cuts across many areas of policy, economics, society, technology, history and geography and the answer to why a local authority is more or less willing to legislate for either goal lies in a particular combination of factors drawn from all of these areas.

My work is therefore part of a bigger picture, one that policy makers and academics alike need to start painting. We need to recognize the important role that local government plays in the transition towards a more sustainable society and ask how we can understand the barriers they face in order to encourage more, and better, policy.

That brings me on to the main point I want to make here: If we are to prevent a repeat of this failed experiment then we need to increase our understanding of whether and why local authorities embrace the legislative autonomy granted to them in the context of environmental policy. Doing so will allow us to increase our certainty that future devolutions from the national to local level will be successfully endorsed. If, alternatively, we continue along our current trajectory of ignorance of the politics of local government’s role in legislating for sustainable development then we can expect any future experiments to fail.

Local authorities have an enormously important role to play in the provision of sustainable development and we cannot afford to ignore the mechanisms that permit or prevent them exercising that role.

lempriere

Max Lempriere is a second year PhD student in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham. His research interests include the politics of planning and construction, local government innovation and ecological modernisation.

The Political Colour of an English Parliament

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Chris Game

One of the closing questions put to Professor Eastwood following his recent Distinguished Lecture on The British State: Past, Present and Future concerned the place, if any, of an English Parliament in the kind of future federal or quasi-federal Britain about which the lecture had speculated. Pressure of time permitted only a brief answer, but one reason proffered for what I took to be Professor Eastwood’s instinctive scepticism concerning such an institution was that it would be likely to have “a permanent Conservative majority”.

Even here in the Midlands, which could lay claim to be its most obvious location, a separate English Parliament has hardly captured the popular imagination as being the answer to Britain’s unfinished devolution project.  Much preferred, certainly within the present Government, would be ‘English votes for English laws’ – English MPs having the final say on purely English legislation – which has the considerable advantage that it wouldn’t itself require legislation, simply a change in the Standing Orders of the Commons.  Some suspect that an English Parliament would undermine the Union almost as seriously as Scottish independence. Still, that’s no reason not to consider what politically an English Parliament might look like, if there were one.

I’ll take the most improbable scenario first. If a devolved English Parliament were to comprise all the 533 English constituency MPs elected at the 2010 General Election, the Conservatives, even with their 39.5% of the English vote, would indeed have an overall majority – with 297 seats to Labour’s 191 (from 28% of the vote) and the Liberal Democrats’ 43 ( from 24%). It’s even further from proportional representation than was the actual Westminster result, thereby avoiding the need for any coalition negotiations. That, however, with great respect to the Vice Chancellor, is about as far as a permanent Conservative majority goes. In 1997, 2001 and 2005 Labour would have had very comfortable overall majorities of 127, 117 and 43 respectively.

It is, though, politically inconceivable that a new, devolved English Parliament would contain anything approaching the present number of English MPs – which would put it amongst the dozen largest national lower chambers in the world. For illustrative purposes, therefore, I will use a 180-seat chamber, loosely modelled on the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly, as proposed in a 2011 policy paper by The Wilberforce Society. Obviously, if that two-thirds cut in membership were the only change posited, then the same results in recent General Elections would produce the same outcomes: overall, if numerically smaller, majorities for the Conservatives in 2010 and for Labour previously. But it wouldn’t be the only change.

Like the Scottish and Welsh devolved bodies, a devolved English Parliament would almost certainly be elected by some system of Proportional Representation (PR) – not least to reduce the prospect of any one party being able to obtain an overall majority on the basis of a minority vote. The Wilberforce Society’s model uses the Scottish and Welsh Additional Member System (AMS), in which each elector has two votes: a constituency vote and a party vote. 120 of the 180 MDEPs (Members of the Devolved English Parliament) would be elected from single-member constituencies, and the remaining 60 additional or ‘top-up’ members from regional party lists, in such a way as to make the Parliament’s final membership as proportionally reflective as possible of the party votes cast.

It needs to be remembered that PR isn’t itself an electoral system, but simply the broad aim of many different systems, some more perfectly arithmetically proportional than others. The German system, used to elect the Bundestag, is almost perfectly proportional, having exactly equal numbers of constituency and top-up members.  The Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly systems aren’t, with only 43% and 33% of top-up members respectively, which partly explains how the Scottish National Party, despite having only 44% of the party vote in 2011, achieved 69 of the 129 Parliamentary seats and an overall majority.

It would be possible, therefore, for a single party – say the Conservatives – to win an overall majority even in an English Parliament elected by a supposedly proportional electoral system like AMS. It would also be possible to prevent it: simply by adopting the German, rather than the Scottish, variant.

game

Chris Game is a Visiting Lecturer at INLOGOV interested in the politics of local government; local elections, electoral reform and other electoral behaviour; party politics; political leadership and management; member-officer relations; central-local relations; use of consumer and opinion research in local government; the modernisation agenda and the implementation of executive local government.

Migration, citizenship and diversity: questioning the boundaries

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Katherine Tonkiss and Nando Sigona

In recent decades, a significant transformation in the meanings, practices and experiences of membership in contemporary Western democracies has taken place. These transformations have challenged traditional conceptions of state membership which have typically assumed the existence of a nation-state, with a burgeoning line of scholarship challenging the significance of the nation-state in determining membership and endowing rights. This literature argues that recent trends in globalisation, human rights and multiculturalism have made state borders less important.

In this context, several questions emerge about the interplay between forms of contemporary membership, migration governance, and the politics of belonging:

  • What is the position of the non-citizen in contemporary immigration and emigration states?
  • How can the nexus between human mobility, immigration control and citizenship be best conceived?
  •  How can we resolve the tension in policy and practice between coexisting traditions and regimes of rights; and the intersection of ‘race’ and other social cleavages and legal status?

We invited four speakers to participate in a seminar series at the University of Birmingham earlier this year, to explore these issues through a focus on the boundaries between migration, citizenship and diversity. Each speaker brought a distinctly different perspective, yet some common themes emerged.

Our first speaker was Phillip Cole (University of the West of England). Phillip’s talk was on ‘unreason’ in the UK immigration debate – that is, the reluctance of people to abandon myths about immigration despite the prevalence of evidence that shows these myths to be false. He described how much of the immigration debate is imbued with ‘Heimat’ – a nostalgic idea of belonging to the nation based on an imaginary ideal of the past. Immigration is problematized because it is seen to bring change which pulls us further from this imaginary past.

Phillip’s seminar contributed insights into the politics of belonging and how emotional belonging intersects with the processes of immigration to shape migration governance. Here, such emotional belonging is seen to affect the emergence of different regimes of migration governance as a result of its effects on the political debate.

In her talk, Madeleine Reeves (University of Manchester) explored the boundaries between immigrant ‘legality’ and ‘illegality’ in the context of the territory of the former Soviet Union. Her presentation provided a rich account of migration and immigration governance in what is to date an under researched region in migration studies. By focusing on passports and papers, she drew attention to the hyper-documentation of so called ‘undocumented’ migrants. Her contribution to the debate on ‘illegality’ is especially valuable because it questions assumptions around the significance of legal documents and the role of the state. By shifting the focus, Madeleine reveals the legal and historical production of ‘illegality’ and its significance in the everyday lives of migrants in contemporary Russia.

In her talk, Agnieszka Kubal (University of Oxford) examined the criminalization of migration and migrants and how the incorporation of criminal law into the immigration domain serves to demonstrate government’s firm grip over immigration. But how do migrants respond to this increasing conflation between criminal and immigration domains in the wider social context?  Drawing on in-depth interviews with 270 return migrants, Agnieszka demonstrated how migrants’ responses to the stigmatizing force of criminalisation do not always mean resistance, but quite often are placed on a continuum between the contestation and the reproduction of the stigma.

Sarah Neal (University of Surrey) was the final speaker of the series. Her talk focused on the everyday experience of superdiverstity; specifically, how do people live and negotiate cultural difference? Sarah drew particular attention to the apparent absence of ‘race’ in contemporary discussions of superdiversity, and demonstrated through her own research how race has a continued presence as a construct that shapes social relations.

Drawing on her research on ‘living multicultures’ in different urban contexts, Sarah’s talk explored some of the complexities surrounding the relationship between migration and other social cleavages such as race, and during the discussion we also focused on class as another often absent dynamic in debates about diversity. Challenges may arise when we talk about ‘cohesion’ because this fails to capture the enduring complexities of superdiverse communities.

The talks in this series, jointly organised by the Institute for Research into Superdiversity (IRiS) and the School of Government & Society, raised important and timely questions of the changing relationship between migration and citizenship, and between the alien and the citizen. They revealed the power and limitations of the law, the impact of migration myths and the roots of widespread anti-immigration sentiments. They also highlighted the importance of paying attention to national, regional and neighbourhood contexts in order to understand how immigration regimes operate and intersect other spheres of public life at different scales and in different locales.

tonkiss

Katherine Tonkiss is a Research Fellow in INLOGOV. She has research interests in normative and empirical questions surrounding migration, citizenship and identity, particularly in the UK. Her first book, Migration and Identity in a Post-National World, was published in 2013. Follow Katherine on Twitter @ktonkiss.

 

 

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Nando Sigona is Birmingham Fellow and Lecturer in the Institute for Research into Superdiversity (IRiS) and the School of Social Policy at the University of Birmingham. He is Research Associate at the Refugee Studies Centre and Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, both at the University of Oxford. Nando is co-author of Sans Papiers. The social and economic lives of undocumented migrants, Pluto Press 2014 (forthcoming) and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook on Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, Oxford University Press 2014 (forthcoming) and of the special issue of Identities: Global Studies in Power and Culture on ‘Ethnography, diversity and urban space’, 2013. Follow Nando on Twitter @nandosigona and on http://nandosigona.wordpress.com.