Impact in the REF: Issues and Obstacles

This article focuses on ‘impact’ as a new condition of research assessment for UK academics. It explores a history of resistance to an ‘impact agenda’ and how impact as a component of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) – a system of performance based funding – is viewed by academics as an infringement to a scholarly way of life; as symptomatic of the marketisation of higher education; and as fundamentally incompatible and deleterious to the production of new knowledge.