Becoming an Impact-Driven University: A Socio-Technical Analysis of the Reconfiguration of Relevance During Institutional Transformation

The age-old debate about the relation between science and society has, in the last two decades, materialized in novel forms at many universities. In this article, we follow the reconfiguration of relevance at one institute of higher education that aspires to become an impact-driven university. We employ a socio-technical instrumentation perspective to this institutional transformation so that we can follow how relevance is being enacted in terms of impact at different organizational levels. To grasp the links between organizational changes and the conditions for academic practices, we analyze three policy instruments in-the-making and in-use: impact narratives as novel evaluation tool, the creation of impact profiles as part of human resource policy and new data infrastructures to monitor impact on the sustainable development goals. We investigate their problematizations and imaginaries through qualitative methods, namely document analysis and semi-structured interviews with researchers at various career levels and faculties at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Through the cases, we analyze how these new impact-oriented instruments open up or close down opportunities for academic practices. Our observations show that the reconfiguration of relevance as impact implies the advancement of a strategic approach to relevance and to academic work and institutions more generally. Ultimately, the site-specific case also includes bottom-up problematizations of impact that lead us to reflect on the limitations of a policy instrument approach and stress the importance of addressing the politics of the social relations of ‘relevant’ scientific work.