The Impact of Research Selectivity on Academic Work and Identity in UK Universities

At the same time as policy-makers, academic gatekeepers and institutional managements would have us believe that research selectivity is now an acceptable part of academic life, UK university departments are anxiously digesting the results of their submissions to the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). This article reports responses to a survey of academic staff in social science and business-related disciplines, carried out immediately after the results of the last RAE. This indicates that a significant proportion of academic staff are hostile to the exercise, believing the result to be the mass production of research for a rating which is more important than what is produced, and a reorganisation of academic work in ways which violate traditional academic values. There was, nevertheless, a high degree of compliance with the perceived demands of the RAE. Responses show that UK academics are co-implicated in the implementation of a mechanism perceived to be fundamentally flawed because of its high identity value, and for this reason playing the RAE game is likely continue to legitimate the unequal distribution of research funds in UK universities into the twenty-first century despite the high levels of disaffection found.