Citation

Mills D. Twenty-First Century Society 2008; 3(3): 263-278.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2008, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/17450140802332091

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

What influence does higher education policy research have on the shape of the academic fields it aims to support? This paper describes the generation and use of policy knowledge about the UK social sciences. It focuses on one case with which the author was closely involved: the Economic and Social Research Council's (ESRC) Demographic Review of the Social Sciences (Mills et al., 2006) that sought to address policy concerns about the age and nationality profiles of academic staff. Over the last decade there has been a significant growth in the quality and quantity of demographic and statistical data about staff working in UK higher education. Such data (and particularly that generated by the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) process) increasingly informs institutional and research funding strategies. The Review analysed and developed these data to compare more than a dozen different social science fields. Partly in order to generate ?answers? (or justify decisions) about the disciplinary allocation of doctoral studentships, the Review's comparisons simplified and homogenised the complexity of academic practice across these fields. By presuming that different fields of academic practice can be contrasted and compared, research policy ?frames? the social sciences in a way that increasingly seems to promote institutional convergence. The Review might be seen as reproducing the challenges it had set out to tackle. The 2006 Demographic Review is the latest in a stream of policy reports mapping the social sciences in the UK since the Second World War. In several cases, these policy representations, and their accompanying funding implications, have reshaped the social sciences in their own image. Placing the commissioning, writing and reception of the Demographic Review into a history of such documents, the paper explores the relationship between complexity, comparison and convergence.