According to the Academic Capitalism-approach, research assessments have a negative impact on research autonomy and research diversity. They urge scholars to tailor their research in order to obtain funding and positive evaluations, which are indispensable for career advancement based on a limited set of quality-criteria. This is supposed to reduce the potential to understand phenomena and to diminish research diversity by nudging scholars to tailor their research towards short-termed, applied research. Our paper seeks to analyse the impact of research assessments on research autonomy, research diversity and the adaptation of scholars to quality criteria imposed by assessments. To do so, we focus on the impact of the British Research Excellence Framework (REF) on British sociology. In line with the Academic Capitalism-approach and Habitus-Fieldtheory, we suggest that the Research Excellence Framework exerts symbolic power and symbolic dominance on scholars. This affects both habitus and working conditions of scholars. To analyse the impact of the REF, a convergent parallel mixed methods-design is applied. On the individual level, we analysed interview data of six British sociologists. On the collective level, we analysed abstracts of 2546 REF submissions using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and the Jensen-Shannon divergence. Our qualitative findings show that sociologists adapt by “focusing on mainstream topics” and apply strategies of “publication management”. Furthermore, “research profile development” and “recruitment of REFable” scholars is forced by the university management. The LDA uncovers a collective focus on a limited number of research foci including youth sociology, medical sociology, gender studies, or political sociology. The Jensen-Shannon divergence indicates research specialisation within universities, but low research diversity between universities. Taken together, the symbolic power and symbolic dominance of the REF urge scholars to use gaming the system strategies mirrored by low research diversity and high research specialisation on the collective level.
Assessing the quality of research: preparing for REF2021