Impactful work as a business academic: Understanding the implications of an institutionalised ideal of impact

The aim of this paper is to elucidate the institutional landscape of business schools in the United Kingdom in order to understand how the impact agenda is perceived and exercised by actors operating in the academic environment. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with fifty-nine academics across ten business schools, we conceptualise impact as a distinct institutional logic, existing within a wider constellation consisting also of the publication and student logics. We find that institutional prescriptions related to publishing academic outputs are dominant, with markedly less emphasis put on being an externally impactful scholar. Furthermore, the impact logic follows a narrative that has manifested from the introduction of impact case studies and reflects a metric-driven environment. Consequently, there is evidence of a lack of institutional drive for what we term organic impact – impact that is not easily measured or evidenced.