Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
This chapter considers how UK university audit processes work, how much interpretive agency academics have in implementation, and the possibility of doing higher education differently, including through being bureaucratically cheeky. Using feminist abolitionist and university abolition work as inspiration, this concluding chapter then imagines what universities might look like after audit, providing four principles for audit abolition and an encouragement to fundamentally reimagine universities in the pursuit of liberatory learning spaces.
This chapter provides an overview of how UK higher education and university audit culture work, situating the project in the broader critical and feminist literature about how UK universities are neoliberalising and exclusionary institutions. The governance and funding structure of UK higher education is briefly explained and put into an international context and the key concepts of precarity, meritocracy, and accountability are introduced.
This chapter examines UK higher education government research funding through an in-depth analysis of the Economic and Social Research Council Research Grant application process. Institutional Ethnography concepts are used to analyse the key guidance texts in this application process, alongside interviews with social science applicants. The concept of intentional institutional capture is used to analyse how applicants translate their research into fundable applications using a mixture of technical and academic literacies with the support of professional research officers. The precarious UK higher education sector and the myth of meritocracy are examined as key contextual factors which inform the imperative to apply for highly competitive, low-success funding schemes.
This chapter discusses the impact agenda, examining the use of impact case studies in the Research Excellence Framework and impact elements of UKRI research funding application processes. Through a consideration of how research-informed change has been organised by audit processes in UK higher education, this chapter considers if there is space to use the impact agenda for feminist or critical purposes and how much interpretive agency lies in the implementation of such audit processes.
This chapter examines the Research Excellence Framework as both an official process for assessing the ‘excellence’ of UK university research and discourses around REF-ability which function as ideological codes organising value judgements around academics and their work. Through interviews with physicists implementing the REF in their departments alongside extensive text analysis of the REF guidance texts, mythologised interpretations of the REF are identified and the gap between the official rules and varied local-level implementation across different universities.
This chapter examines the concept of ‘the student experience’ through a close reading of the National Student Survey and a consideration of how its results are used in university league tables, course comparison websites, and university marketing materials. The student experience is examined as a key ideological code in UK higher education, whereby institutional life has been reorganised, including the introduction of new jobs and areas of work aimed at gaming the survey results in order to improve university reputations.
Being ‘REF-able’. The impact agenda. The student experience. University audit culture has infiltrated academic life, but how should we respond?
Drawing on a five-year Institutional Ethnography of UK universities, the author provides a feminist take on the neoliberal university and abolitionist reflections on audit culture.
For feminist and other critical academics, the interpretative power involved in audit processes provides an opportunity to collectively challenge and subvert, re-read and re-write institutions. This book challenges the myths and misinterpretations around how academic audit processes work, arguing that if we are complicit then we have agency to do them differently.
This chapter introduces Institutional Ethnography as a feminist approach to research which conceptualises university audit culture as people’s textually mediated activities. Beginning with an explanation of how Dorothy Smith conceptualised Institutional Ethnography, the chapter situates this study within a broader Institutional Ethnography literature on higher education, audit culture, and new public management, before explaining the methodology and text analysis methods used. It finishes with a reflection on what constitutes feminist research and how to do feminist text-focused Institutional Ethnography.
