Abstract
This article addresses how academics navigate different kinds of prestige and different systems of value around what ‘counts’ in academic writing, focusing particularly on the impact of the genre regime associated with research evaluation in the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF). It draws on data from an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded project working with academics across different disciplines and different institutions in England. We interviewed people about their writing practices several times, exploring their practices, life histories, institutional contexts, and the tools and resources they draw on as they write. Academics’ research writing is framed within explicit institutional and departmental strategies around the numbers and publication venues of research outputs, driven by institutions’ need to succeed in the national competitive research evaluation system. Such institutional strategies do not always map well onto other values systems in which academics have been trained and within which they locate themselves. The articles analyses the interviews we carried out, exploring how academics negotiate tensions between these systems of value and considering the implications of this for what is considered to be important in academic work and, therefore, what it means to be an academic.
Highlights
I started writing this article in a room full of other academics, at a departmental writing retreat organized by our research committee
This paper explores the effects of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the UK on academics’ writing practices
Their disciplinary knowledge traditions may be in tension with certain aspects of the REF, or aspects of the strategies adopted by institutions may push them to make choices about writing that they would not otherwise have made
Summary
I started writing this article in a room full of other academics, at a departmental writing retreat organized by our research committee. This paper explores the effects of the REF in the UK on academics’ writing practices It draws on interviews conducted with academics across a range of institutions and disciplines to explore how the values and structures of the system of research evaluation in England emerge in academics’ talk about their research-related writing. It will argue that the systems and structures which frame academics’ writing, the REF and its mediation through institutional and departmental strategies, have the effect of constructing a dominant ‘genre regime’ with its own rules, representations and preferred practices around academic writing. The values implicit in the REF structures are consonant with their existing expectations about writing Their disciplinary knowledge traditions may be in tension with certain aspects of the REF, or aspects of the strategies adopted by institutions may push them to make choices about writing that they would not otherwise have made
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