Steering universities towards societal impact: governance by measurement?

This paper examines how five nations steer universities towards societal impact through national research policy settings. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of 14 policy documents and topic modelling across a corpus of 96 documents, we compare three national systems that employ structured national performance measurement frameworks for impact (Australia, Hong Kong, and the UK) with two that do not (the Netherlands and the US). Our analysis reveals variation in how ‘impact’ is constructed across these systems, whether they use performance measurement frameworks or not. We find that the biggest difference between systems lies not in whether impact is prioritised or how it is defined, but in how systems with performance measurement frameworks are associated with narrower conceptions of impact. We argue that such frameworks function not merely as assessment tools, but as governing instruments that steer through this measurement, potentially constraining what counts as valuable research.