The cultural impact of impact policies in Australia, United Kingdom and United States
Eliel Cohen
(King's College London)
Paper Short Abstract
Impact policies ‘work’ – they promote impact as a value and goal amongst academic. But interviews with 90 AI-focused academics across three countries shows how impact policies also sharpen tensions within and between disciplinary specialisms, raising questions about policy effects and effectiveness.
Paper Abstract
Impact policies aim to shift academic incentives and practices away from merely production of knowledge towards realising potential socioeconomic benefits. We interviewed 90 academics from across the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences in Australia, UK and USA, all specialising on some aspect of artificial intelligence (AI), to investigate shifts in academic culture. One of the key findings relates to a split amongst the ‘hard’ scientists. For some, delivering/realising impact has become the core driving force of their work and their sense of academic identity and purpose, while others consider impact subservient to or secondary to more ‘traditional’ commitments to one’s immediate disciplinary community. This divide does not only affects impact engagement but has broader effects on academics’ research and educational practices. Another important but more nuanced finding relates to international differences in how impact policies affect academia. Impact policies interact with distinctive system features in ways which can lead to specific but unpredictable challenges arising within sub-groups. For example, impact policies appear to be sharpening divisions and debates amongst UK computer scientists about the field’s role in and relation to wider society. And for some, but especially for social scientists in the Australia context, there was a strong sense of disparity between impact rhetoric and reality, with impact activities perceived as not being genuinely understood, supported or valued by the sector. Overall, there is no uniform ‘impact of impact’ at either national or disciplinary level. Impact policies must be continuously analysed at relatively disaggregated levels to understand their effects and effectiveness.
Accepted Poster
Paper Short Abstract
Paper Abstract
Impact policies aim to shift academic incentives and practices away from merely production of knowledge towards realising potential socioeconomic benefits. We interviewed 90 academics from across the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences in Australia, UK and USA, all specialising on some aspect of artificial intelligence (AI), to investigate shifts in academic culture. One of the key findings relates to a split amongst the ‘hard’ scientists. For some, delivering/realising impact has become the core driving force of their work and their sense of academic identity and purpose, while others consider impact subservient to or secondary to more ‘traditional’ commitments to one’s immediate disciplinary community. This divide does not only affects impact engagement but has broader effects on academics’ research and educational practices. Another important but more nuanced finding relates to international differences in how impact policies affect academia. Impact policies interact with distinctive system features in ways which can lead to specific but unpredictable challenges arising within sub-groups. For example, impact policies appear to be sharpening divisions and debates amongst UK computer scientists about the field’s role in and relation to wider society. And for some, but especially for social scientists in the Australia context, there was a strong sense of disparity between impact rhetoric and reality, with impact activities perceived as not being genuinely understood, supported or valued by the sector. Overall, there is no uniform ‘impact of impact’ at either national or disciplinary level. Impact policies must be continuously analysed at relatively disaggregated levels to understand their effects and effectiveness.
Poster session
Session 1 Tuesday 1 July, 2025, -