Social impact of social sciences and humanities undervalued at UvA
The UvA finds social impact of research difficult to define and quantify and therefore prefers simplicity and market returns. But should universities be driven by profit models for research, ask Olga Gritsai and Frances Singleton.
Attempts to find a balance between academic freedom and the necessity to justify public spending have been going on for decades. “A valley of death” – the gap between fundamental research and practical innovation – is a well-known phenomenon with continuous (but rarely successful) attempts to address it. Economic impact, often in the form of patented discoveries or researcher-led spin-offs, is the return-on-public-investment model prioritised by governments and universities. However, economic valorisation is rarely an option (or even relevant) for researchers in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) domain. Both UvA and other (Dutch) universities find societal impact difficult to define and quantify, preferring the simplicity (and market returns) of its financial cousin. But should universities be driven by profit models for research? And why has such a relevant form of impact as societal become both misunderstood and overlooked?
User unfriendly
The reason for years of misunderstanding are threefold. First, societal impact, compared to economic, is not measurable. How can one measure a social media post which triggered an international discussion and overturned the draft of a new law by the European Commission? How can a university coherently track or compare the dozens of policy papers and hundreds of media interviews of its researchers, even if many of them might have been crucial in directing societal discussions?
Second, societal impact is not visible. It receives little attention in national media, stands last in university yearly reports, and offers no direct boost to one’s academic career. Pure, the existing infrastructure for systematic reporting of impact, isn’t user-friendly and fails to capture domain-specific impact activities like policy advisory work.
Third, societal impact is misunderstood. Academics do not believe themselves to be engaging with societal impact, even as they advise policy makers or collaborate with nonprofits to ensure their findings reach relevant stakeholders. Societal impact is incorrectly defined as the creation of output – media appearances, infographics, design workshops – rather than any activity that ensures academic knowledge reaches and is used by non-academic stakeholders. As a result there is underreporting of impact activities in the belief that they don’t qualify as well as a wider perception among academics that they personally aren’t suited to (or capable of) societal impact.
Which is why the societal impact of SSH researchers - being unmeasurable, invisible and misunderstood - is also undervalued, losing in perceived importance to the market. “It is all very nice but how can we judge the scope and the value of your impact without concrete indicators?,” SSH faculties are asked by visitation commissions. It becomes a justification, too, for the lion’s share of valorisation funding going to economic impact while SSH faculties are hamstrung by reduced investment in an immensely valuable form of valorisation simply because simply because the investment in it may not pay off.
How to make impact
However, difficult to measure is not the same as difficult to map. To prove it, we decided to approach this problem bottom-up and capture a real picture of how impact is made by one UvA faculty – the Faculty of Law. As a pilot study of the Amsterdam Law School and Law Hub we interviewed in depth 31 researchers, from different departments and at different career levels, asking them two questions: 1)in what format and for what kind of stakeholders do they deliver their research results (policy reports, workshops, teaching courses etc), and 2)how - in their view - can they evaluate impact they make – short-term and long-term. Results were not exactly surprising: the faculty’s impact-related activities turned out to be extensive and overwhelmingly diverse with many admitting they never realised how much they do, or never thought that what they do is impact.
More than 80% of respondents work directly with policy-makers, most commonly the EU Commission and National Ministries, and further 39% with regulatory authorities. Some researchers (39%) founded an NGO or social enterprise. The majority (87%) give trainings or masterclasses to professionals from legal and non-legal fields. About a third (29%) wrote non-academic books and many (61%) appeared regularly in national or international media.
Our researchers have been instrumental in key legislation/policy for ZZP and informal employment, AI in healthcare, digital platform regulation, consumer protection, but it is difficult to quantify and evaluate their input. We have impressive engagement with the most senior decision makers in the EU & National governments via events, trainings and membership of exclusive advisory groups resulting in considerable opportunities to influence policy-making. But paradoxically, without being translated into a figure in an excel sheet all this work goes practically unnoticed and unrecognised when compared to one single start-up from technical and life sciences. It is hardly surprising that impact activities have practically become a hobby, carried out in the evening, the weekend, or outside working hours.
So how do we move forwards to address the position of societal valorisation in Dutch academia? Having carried out our impact database project, we propose a new perspective on societal impact. While our work has confirmed that any attempt to measure societal impact is misguided and unlikely to result in relevant indicators, this should not hold us back from making impact visible and valued. We can achieve it by redesigning the tools or processes we use to record societal impact, tailoring them to the needs of individual faculties and reducing the administrative burden they present when compared to databases like Pure. Our own experience has shown that measuring societal impact is irrelevant so long as you can track it and celebrate it.
Reconsider priorities
Without a rebalancing of funding to recognise economic and societal valorisation as equal peers it will remain difficult to justify public spending in an increasingly hostile political climate. The strength of social sciences, humanities and law is not in creating commercial companies but in advising, evaluating, coaching and teaching. Realising this and reconsidering priorities would help considerably in unlocking the impact potential of SSH faculties. Not to mention provide a much more direct pay off for citizens than that offered through purely economic models.
Olga Gritsai and Frances Singleton are both researchers at the Amsterdam Law Hub of the UvA.
