Matthew Flinders at Wiley: The relationship between academe and society is shifting. Academics are increasingly expected to work through forms of co-design and co-production with potential research-users to address state-selected societal challenges and produce evidence of “impact”. The risk, however, is that this shift incentivises a form of Faustian bargain whereby scholars trade-down their traditional criticality and independence as the price they pay for access to large funding streams and to be demonstrably “impactful”. The “impotence through relevance” thesis seeks to capture this paradoxical possibility: those scholars hailed as most relevant – the “high-impact” academic superheroes – may in fact be almost completely irrelevant; while the most relevant scholars in terms of truly transformative socio-political potential are dismissed and set aside as unproductive and therefore of little value. The “impotence through relevance” argument raises distinctive questions about co-option and control, democracy and decline. These are particularly significant for political science.
INTRODUCTION
What is the role of political science in society? How is that role changing, notably in relation to the reach of the state and the nature of democracy? Why might those changes matter in terms of scholarly standards and societal impact? How does the discipline conceptualise the “politics of” political science and what practical form might this conceptualisation take? These are “big” questions but they are not simply “academic” questions.
In a post-Covid context with increasing evidence of democratic “backsliding” and “decay” in many parts of the world the professional responsibilities of political scientists to the public in terms of nurturing democratic values, supporting policy and speaking “truth to power” has arguably never been greater. At the same time the research landscape has in recent years shifted towards an emphasis on the value of different forms of knowledge, and an awareness of the value of bringing potential research-users into the research process. The former element is reflected in a rhetorical shift away from talking specifically about “universities” or “higher education” to a focus on connective and catalysing capacities within a broader research, development and innovation “ecosystem”; the latter element reflected in an increasing methodological emphasis amongst funders towards supporting forms of co-design, co-production and co-delivery in research processes. The boundaries between knowledge-creation and knowledge-mobilisation – and between researchers and research-users – are therefore increasingly fluid and opaque. The “engaged scholar” (Hoffman, 2021) is expected to work across the nexus or inter-section between research and policy. In an increasing range of countries these engagement expectations have been formalised not only through the introduction of external audit-assessments and hypothecated research funding but also through the introduction of a variety of “incentives for impact”. This might explain why Marleen Brans and Arco Timmerman’s (2022) major comparative analysis found that no less than 80% of political scientists in Europe were active policy advisors.
The “main drift”, as C. Wright Mills (1959) might have labelled it, of political science in the twenty-first century has therefore involved a gradual closing of the traditional gap between science and society, and the aim of this article is to dissect, challenge, and (re)politicise this process. Its central argument is that in order to fulfil its societal role political science needs to retain a degree of healthy distance and independence from the state for the simple reason that distance facilitates not only scientific perspective but also ensures a degree of democratic criticality. It was for exactly this reason that public research funding has traditionally been distributed through arm’s-length agencies which enjoyed a high degree of independence from elected politicians. Arguments concerning the independence and autonomy of academics have, of course, existed for centuries. Traditional debates about the “decline of donnish dominion” – A. H. Halsey’s (1992) phrase – have, however, been replaced in recent decades by far shaper concerns about the “tyranny of relevance” (Flinders, 2013) as political scientists are increasingly expected to demonstrate their social impact and public value.
The central contextual claim of this article is that the political dimensions of this recalibration of the science-society relationship remain under-studied, under-theorised and generally under-acknowledged. The fact that political science has generally been relatively silent on such matters could be interpreted as evidence of exactly those risks and concerns regarding democracy, decline and deference that this article seeks to highlight. As the expectations of engagement and the incentives for impact increase, as is likely to occur, so too does the risk that traditionally critical disciplines or perspectives will be either co-opted into the state or squeezed out of academe. To make such an argument is not to look back to some Newman’esque “idea of a university” ([1852] 1996) with its ivory towers and wandering dons. Nor does it see engagement as necessarily involving a decline in criticality (cf. Van Ostaijen & Jhagroe, 2022). But as the pressures and particularly precarity surrounding academe increase so too does the risk that scholars may be tempted to engage in a form of Faustian bargain whereby criticality and independence are effectively traded as the access-price to state-selected research funding streams and collaborative opportunities with potential research-users.
As such, co-option, deference and decline may become a very real risk for political science. The more “relevant” or “impactful” a political scientist (or any scholar) is hailed for being against instrumental state-based definitions and audit process, the less influential and challenging they might be from a more fundamental and critical perspective. This risk is captured in the notion of impotence through relevance. The irony this argument brings to long-standing debates and concerns about disciplinary impact and social value is the suggestion that: those scholars who currently appear to be most relevant may in fact be most irrelevant.
This is intended to be a strong and provocative argument. The fact that it is made by a former national ‘Impact Champion’ as selected by the United Kingdom’s main funder of social scientific research hopefully underlines both the honesty and potential gravity of the challenge being presented. There are, of course, several caveats that must be acknowledged before developing this thesis about ‘the irrelevance of the relevant’. First, the focus of this article is on research-related impacts and there is, of course, a strong argument to be made that by educating future generations on (inter alia) the existence of inequalities, the distribution of power, and the scale of societal challenges it is teaching that forms the major impact of professional political scientists on society. It is, however, possible to make and accept this argument while also recognizing that (i) what makes university-level teaching special is that it is generally research-led and therefore that (ii) shifts in the hidden politics of the research funding system are likely at some point to ripple through into teaching.
Secondly, there are many ‘pathways to impact’ that political scientists can take – such as working with the media or with non-governmental organisations, hosting podcasts or working in think tanks – and these all play a role in disseminating academic insights across and into society. And yet there is also great value in working directly with politicians and senior state officials for the simple reason that they occupy positions of power and have access to resources (financial, legal, structural, etc.) that can deliver real change. As this article illustrates, it is politicians and their officials who increasingly define the parameters of research funding, and working with government is generally seen as the ‘gold standard’ when it comes to impact case studies for national research assessments. Third and finally, the tensions and tribulations highlighted in this article create questions about career paths, avoiding pitfalls and balancing instrumental incentives with professional values and norms. Although important these career questions are beyond the scope of this article. 1 What this article does offer is a thesis about the risk of co-option and control and it is with teasing-apart and providing an intellectual framework that allows this thesis to be discussed and debated that this article is principally concerned.
This article is divided into four sections. The opening section provides historical context and suggests that the social and political sciences have always suffered from an existential concern about their societal role, and that it is this internal ambivalence which is in some ways responsible for the external imposition of incentives for impact. The second section develops this argument through a brief account of the changing international context. This matters because the increasing “shadow of the state” (Eisfeld & Flinders, 2021) may tempt political scientists into exactly that form of Faustian bargain that this article seeks to expose and warn against. The suggestion being that impotence through relevance is a very real threat to both the future of political science as a critical social science, and potentially to the discipline’s broader capacity to play a role in “mending democracy” (Hendriks et al., 2019). The opportunity this thesis reveals is for political science to take the lead in forging a broader understanding of different types of impact than has generally been adopted within state-based national audit systems, and a reconceptualization of relevance as including modes of critical thinking that do reach beyond academe and into society (the focus of part three). The fourth and final section therefore concludes with the suggestion that the impact agenda represents both a threat and an opportunity for political science. Innovation and awareness will ensure success, but continued drift towards simple compliance with political-selected and state-led audit frameworks or pure disengagement is likely to result in an even greater tragedy for political science (see Ricci, 1984).
DISCIPLINARY ANGST
The central argument of this article is that the contemporary pressure on political scientists to demonstrate their non-academic value to society risks creating a situation whereby (hyper)activity in relation to relevance could actually veil a situation of almost total irrelevance. The argument of this section is simply that political science has always tended to be divided between those who feel it should operate as a more engaged discipline working to solve societal challenges, on the one hand, as opposed to those who sought to promote a more detached, independent and “scientific” stance, on the other. The history of political science (and several other social sciences) can therefore be traced through the ebb-and-flow of debates concerning the responsibility of academics to society. In terms of disciplinary origins it is important to recognise that political science evolved out of a commitment not to science per se but to public service. The scientific study of government (broadly defined) would, it was suggested, enhance the design and delivery of public services in ways that would be of demonstrable value to society: “[to] discover…what government can properly and successfully do…with the utmost possible efficiency” (Wilson, 1887, p. 197).
As the twentieth century progressed, and especially in the wake of the Second World War, a process of professionalisation within the social and political sciences occurred which embraced a very technocratic, positivist and often behaviouralist position (i.e. “value free social science”) that militated against active involvement in society. This was the “main drift” that C. Wright Mills critiqued with a mixture of passion and venom in The Sociological Imagination, and which Bernard Crick rallied against in his The American Study of Politics (both 1959). From the late 1960s onwards a number of “dissident” professional associations were established – Association for Critical Sociology, Radical Geography, Union of Radical Political Economics (all in 1969), Radical Philosophy Association in 1972, Critical Anthropology in 1974 (see Barrow, 2022) – with the Caucus for a New Political Science (1967) leading the way but the overall impact of these “dissident associations” was arguably limited. In political science the emergence of the Perestroika movement in 2000 reflected this lack of progress and brought with it a renewed emphasis on methodological pluralism and public relevance (see Renwick Monroe, 2005). The “public sociology wars” and “post-autistic economics movement” showed that political science was not alone in possessing a significant degree of intellectual angst about its evolution and direction. A seam of post-millennium scholarship – including Bent Flyvberg’s Making Social Science Matter (2001), Sanford Schram and Brian Caterino’s Making Political Science Matter (2006), Ian Shapiro’s The Flight from Reality (2009) and Guy Peters, Jon Pierre and Gerry Stoker’s The Relevance of Political Science (2015) – all reflected a deep sense of professional concern. It is at this point possible to make a link back to Cardinal Newman’s lectures on the role of the modern university. Newman suggested that a university’s “soul” lies in the mark it leaves on students; whereas for political science it is possible to look into its origins and suggest that its “soul” lies on the mark is leaves on society.
This is an argument that resonates with Samuel Huntington’s (1988) belief that political science should be committed to both knowledge-creation and the societal application of that knowledge. Gabriel Almond (1988) would later explore this linkage and come to the conclusion that, “the uneasiness in the political science profession is not of the body but of the soul” [emphasis added] (p. 829). The various schools and sects within political science possessed their own conception of “proper” political science which had at its core a very different view about how the discipline should demonstrate its relevance (developed in Almond, 1989). Two decades later John Trent (2011) would survey the available evidence on the strengths and weaknesses of political science and conclude with the basic and rather stark impression that it is “a discipline in search of its soul and out of touch with the real world of politics” (p. 197). But this intellectual history is as well-known as it is well-documented (e.g. Collini, 1983; Ricci, 1984; Seidelman, 1985; Janos, 1986) and for the purposes of this article it is simply provided as a foundation on which to make three arguments.
Firstly, debates concerning societal relevance, policy impact and public value have always existed within political science. Secondly, the underpinning rationale for different “schools and sects” within the discipline is itself very often based on claims to social relevance. This is an important point. The behavioural revolution was itself designed to respond to concerns that political science had become increasingly irrelevant. David Easton’s arguments in The Political System (1953) concerning “the decline of modern political theory” and the “malaise” of political science, David Truman’s sweeping critique in his Impact of the Revolution in Behavioural Science on Political Science (1955) on the alleged failure of the discipline to keep pace with the other social sciences, and Robert Dahl’s Epitaph for a Monument to a Successful Protest (1961) were each in their own ways crafted with an emphasis on the need for political science to demonstrate a more ambitious and explicit social relevance. Political science evolved as “a discipline divided” – to use Almond’s (1989) description – on the basis of an almost fundamental disagreement about what being “relevant” meant and how it could best be achieved. The third argument is that for several reasons the “push” factors emanating out of political science in favour of engaged scholarship remained weak. By far the most astute review and analysis of this situation is provided by David Ricci’s excellent but generally overlooked 1984 book, The Tragedy of Political Science. The main argument of this section is that debates about non-academic impact and relevance have existed at the core of political science since its earliest formation as a self-standing discipline. This is an argument that would place its roots in Woodrow Wilson’s 1887 article on “The Study of Administration” in Political Science Quarterly with its emphasis on the role of the discipline to “discover, first, what government can properly and successfully do, and, secondly, how it can do these proper things with the utmost possible efficiency and at the least possible cost either of money or of energy” (p. 197). It is also an argument that resonates with the Perestroika movement within political science during the first decade of the twenty-first century. This is not to suggest that the latter were arguing in favour of a Wilsonian model of service-orientated public administration, but it is to suggest a shared emphasis on the active role of political science in society. The next section reviews the external imposition of incentives for impact as a driver of cultural and behavioural change.
INCENTIVES FOR IMPACT
The previous section provided a very brief history of political science. Critics might suggest that it provided a rather Americanised view of the discipline and to some extent that is correct. Nevertheless, longstanding debates concerning relevance, impact and social value are also to be found within European political science and British political studies (see Flinders & Pal, 2020). The framing of this second section revolves around “push” and “pull” factors. Its argument is that the disciplinary angst observable within political science was not a core factor in the emergence of the contemporary “impact agenda”. It was the societal context that shifted in ways that placed new expectations on academics and demanded an increased disciplinary emphasis on non-academic social impact. Around the world political science, like all disciplines, is increasingly required to demonstrate its relevance. The paradox this article seeks to explore is that the more relevant political science tries to become the more impotent and irrelevant it might be. This section charts the emergence of academic impact regimes as a global trend. It makes five arguments:
- It is possible to identify a rapid and still unfolding shift towards “impact assessment” regimes.
- The United Kingdom was an “early innovator” and many of its frameworks, insights and assumptions are now being replicated in different countries through processes of policy transfer.
- A high degree of contestation and “strategic ambiguity” tends to surround the definition of impact and its measurement, with different countries adopting different approaches.
- Achieving non-academic societal impact is increasingly seen as not separate to but a component element of “research excellence”.
- The impact agenda is increasingly complemented by a shift towards prioritising the funding of projects that are co-designed and co-produced with non-academic research-users.
Taken together these five arguments focus attention on (i) the increasing “shadow of the state” in terms of politically-selected rather than scholar-selected research priorities (discussed below), and (ii) the creation of incentives that might serve to co-opt political science into established policy frameworks in ways that undermine independence and criticality (thereby relating to the core impotence through relevance thesis this article seeks to explore). Taking each of these arguments in turn, Bandola-Gill and her colleagues (2021) have provided the first graded comparative mapping of impact assessment regimes covering 33 countries (see Table 1, below). What this review reveals is not only the emergence of an international trend towards impact assessment regimes but also the role of the United Kingdom as an “impact innovator” vis-à-vis research that has then helped inform and shape similar initiatives around the world. From 2023, for example, each Japanese national university will be required to produce a form of impact case study in a process that has been explicitly shaped by the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the UK. What Table 1 veils, however, is the existence of significant ambiguity in relation to exactly how non-academic impact is defined and measured, which, in itself, reflects a range of complex theoretical, practical and institutional challenges. In the Netherlands, for example, the debate tends to focus on “knowledge utilization” and “valorisation”; whereas in Italy the focus is on “knowledge transfer” and “exploitation”, and in Luxembourg the dominant framing revolves around “target groups” or “beneficiaries”.
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