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Paper short abstract

Exploring contemporary ‘Research Culture’ in UK higher education, this paper shows how the silent normativities and temporal structures of projects produce friction between audit culture’s managerial epistemologies and the messy, relational complexities of culture.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how the project form makes the epistemologies of ‘audit culture’ visible through its friction with ‘research culture’. Debates on ‘rituals of verification’ (Power 1998; Strathern 2000; Shore & Wright 2015) track how quantification and managerial accountability have reshaped higher education. As competition intensifies and resources dwindle, these logics increasingly collide with concerns about precarity, wellbeing, and the conditions of knowledge production. ‘Research culture’ has emerged as a strategic response—an attempt to diagnose and intervene in these conditions through actionable initiatives and measurable change (Royal Society 2017).

Recent REF 2029 guidance underscores the problem: the People, Culture and Environment element has been reframed as Strategy, People and Research Environment, with a reduced weighting, signalling the difficulty of rendering ‘culture’ governable through audit-like criteria.

Drawing on eighty ethnographic interviews across three UK universities—one research-intensive institution and two post-1992 teaching-intensive universities under financial strain—we show how tensions between culture as relational practice and culture as strategic object surface through projectification (time-bounded initiatives, pilots, action plans). Projectification is itself resource-dependent: where research-intensive institutions sustain dedicated teams to “do” research culture, post-1992 institutions often lack the apparatus to respond, producing uneven compliance and a Russell Group model exported into misfitting organisational realities. The normativities and forward temporalities of projects reproduce managerial logics while displacing relational understandings, incentivising performativity in the very domain research culture initiatives claim to repair. We argue that these frictions reveal the limits of audit: projects presume problems can be bounded, measured and resolved; culture repeatedly exceeds those assumptions.