‘Environment’ submissions in the UK’s Research Excellence Framework 2014
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There has been much debate about university research assessment exercises. In the UK, a major element of the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF2014) has been the research ‘Environment’. Here we analyse 98 REF2014 ‘Environment’ submissions in Business and Management Studies. We explore whether there are distinctive language-related differences between submissions of high and low ranked universities, and conclude that submission writers have a strong incentive to exaggerate strengths and conceal problems. In addition, innate biases such as the ‘halo’ and ‘velcro’ effects may distract the attention of assessors from a submission’s strengths and weaknesses, since they are likely to influence their pre-existing impressions. We propose several changes to improve how ‘Environment’ is evaluated. We also argue that the research ‘Environment’ would be more likely to be enhanced if the number of outputs submitted in future were an average of two and a maximum of four per academic, rather than the maximum of six currently being considered.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 571-587 |
Number of pages | 17 |
Journal | British Journal of Management |
Volume | 29 |
Issue number | 3 |
Early online date | 11 Dec 2017 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Jul 2018 |
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- BJM post print
Rights statement: This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Thorpe, A., Craig, R., Tourish, D., Hadikin, G. and Batistic, S. (2017), ‘Environment’ Submissions in the UK's Research Excellence Framework 2014. Brit J Manage, which has been published in final form at DOI: 10.1111/1467-8551.12248. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.
Accepted author manuscript (Post-print), 642 KB, PDF document
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