Societal Impact of Research

Scientists have long since become accustomed to explaining the future value of their work. Nowadays token statements are no longer sufficient. Societal impact must be embedded in the organisation of research. The call for societal impact is most explicitly expressed in and actively shaped by trans-disciplinary research programmes. We have examined two questions related to compliance in the principal-agent relation between a programme and its projects. The first question concerns the risk of moral hazard: is societal actor involvement a token activity or a substantial component of the research process? The second question relates to possible adverse selection: does societal actor involvement produce the expected benefits and, if so, under which conditions? We surveyed members and project leaders of 178 projects in two transdisciplinary climate research programmes in The Netherlands. There is no reason to suspect large-scale moral hazard. Projects formally labelled as transdisciplinary have characteristics typically associated with transdisciplinarity but academic projects share those characteristics. Neither is there reason to suspect adverse selection. The archetypical properties of transdisciplinary research are associated with the expected societal benefits. An important finding is that there are different types of benefit, each of which requires its own approach. Benefit is achieved through informal involvement and a diversity of outputs, and much less by giving societal actors a prominent role or influence in the research process. Based on our conclusions we recommend customizing the design of climate research programmes and projects towards the needs of the specific societal benefits they aim to generate and reconsidering the emphasis on formal involvement of societal actors in funding procedures.

The analysis of the ways early career investigators from 32 countries frame the notion of 'research impact' in the Social Sciences and the Humanities (SSH) reveal some obvious commonalities. There is a convergent tendency to describe impact as an object of great concern that operates mostly through communication, while avoiding any absolute definition of the notion. Respondents associate impact to the concept of accountability and share the perception that impact does not currently belong to the dominant academic culture. Differentiations and even divergences in framing appear though in regard to the cognitive or social nature of impact as well as in the extent to which respondents associate the processes of conducting scientific research with or dissociate them from the creation of social impact. As such, five common argumentative frames of impact and six differentiated or divergent ones are brought to light. While commonalities can be related to shared socio-professional circumstances, the observed differentiations and divergences in framing are linked to the diversity of disciplinary, national and institutional contexts within which scholars are trained and conduct their research. Because of the coexistence of commonalities, differentiations, and divergences in early career investigators' framing of impact, it is argued that research impact in the SSH is best conceptualized as a 'boundary object' (Star and Griesemer, 1989). We conclude that attempts to frame impact within a narrower perspective-whether in scholarly discourse or policy making-would finally reduce the diversity of contextualized opportunities for SSH scholars to engage in any valuable creation of impact.