Short abstract:

I will discuss how shifts in institutional strategies of universities towards societal impact can be seen as an attempt to re-enter the agora. If so, what does that mean for what inclusion or exclusion of societal and scientific problems?

Long abstract:

In the Netherlands, many universities explicitly position themselves as engaging with societal challenges, most prominently in a third mission context. Slogans like ‘science with impact’ or ‘creating a positive societal impact’ indicate that impact is on the agenda of universities, not only in terms of their respective institutional strategies, but also as part of their public identity. However, transdisciplinary research has a complex relationship to societal impact, as different understandings of TDR can lead to diverse types of impact. The aim of this study is to explore how universities understand, shape, and institutionalize societal impact in transdisciplinary research. We do so by means of a diagnostic study into recent emerging cross-university collaborations that have societal impact as their main objective. Our focus is on power strategies of universities in terms of agenda setting; which research questions and collaboration partners are included or excluded in transdisciplinary research in these cross-university collaborations, and with what effect?

Our findings indicate that societal impact was framed as contributing to problem solving in predefined research areas such as health, artificial intelligence, or resilience. We argue that universities exercise a form of discursive power by pre-defining research domains, while preventing other research domains to enter the stage. Moreover, universities set financial thresholds for collaboration and by doing so, exercise a form of instrumental power as well. We conclude by discussing how attempts to change institutional practices at universities in a top-down fashion might lead to reproducing and even reinforcing existing power imbalances in transdisciplinary research settings.