From productive interactions to impact pathways : Understanding the key dimensions in developing SSH research societal impact

From productive interactions to impact pathways: Understanding the key dimensions in developing SSH research societal impact Reetta Muhonen 1, *, Paul Benneworth 2,3 and Julia Olmos-Pe~ nuela 4,5 1 Higher Education Group, Faculty of Management and Business, Tampere University, Tampere FI-33014, Finland, 2 Department of Business Administration, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Møllendalsveien 6–8, Kontor, Office M6–222, Bergen, Norway, 3 Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies, Faculty of Behavioural Management and Social Sciences, University of Twente, P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands, 4 Department of Business Administration Juan Jose´ Renau Piqueras, Faculty of Economics, University of Valencia, Av. Tarongers, s/n, Oriental Departmental Building, Valencia 46022, Spain and 5 INGENIO, CSIC-UPV, Spanish National Research Council, Universitat Polite`cnica de Vale`ncia, Ciudad Polite`cnica de la Innovacio´n, Edificio 8E, Camino de Vera, s/n 46022, Valencia, Spain *Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]. Abstract Impact is increasingly important for science policy-makers. Science policy studies have reacted this heightened urgency by studying these policy-interventions meaning that policy has developed more quickly than theory. This has led to the prevalence of a ‘common sense’ impact definition: research’s societal impact are direct economic effects, such as income generated by licenses, patents, and spin-out companies. These indicators are recognized as weak proxies for research’s societal benefits, and in response, science policy has undertaken a huge descriptive effort to more precisely define impact. Social sciences and humanities (SSH) disciplines have been highly active in this because economic metrics are very poor measures of their societal impact. One interesting theoretical development describing diversity was Spaapen and Van Drooge’s ‘productive interactions’ concept. In this article, we seek to realize the potential that Spaapen and Van Drooge’s productive interactions concept offers, but which we argue has been lost through its operationaliation as a process of ‘counting interactions’. We address the need to pay attention not only to productive interactions, but to the changes they mediate. Therefore, we ask the following research question: how can we develop a typology that captures the diversity of the mechanisms by which SSH research leads to societal impact? Drawing on a comparative analysis of 60 examples of SSH impact, we develop a typology of SSH pathways to societal impact. Considering that the absence of societal impact of research is not necessarily a sign of uselessness of research in impact assessment, we address the importance of paying attention also to the conditions supporting impact processes. Key words: societal impact; social sciences and humanities; impact pathways; productive interactions; research evaluation. 1. Introduction Impact is an increasingly important goal for science policy-makers, driven by a desire to see research organizations deliver benefits in return for past substantive increases in science budgets. The pace of the growth by demands from policy-makers have resulted in a situation where science policy studies have often been lagging in creating theories to deal with situations already undergoing policymaker interaction (Donovan 2017). As a result of this, these conceptual debates have found themselves shackled by the often opportunistic decisions taken by policy-makers (Benneworth 2015). Certainly, research impact debates have been profoundly framed by the policy popularity of a very limited number of economic V CThe Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. 34 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Research Evaluation, 29(1), 2020, 34–47 doi: 10.1093/reseval/rvz003 Advance Access Publication Date: 5 March 2019 Special Section Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/rev/article-abstract/29/1/34/5369820 by Tampere University Library. Department of Health Sciences user on 28 January 2020 indicators advocated by a number of multi-organizations including the OECD, World Bank and European Commission (McCann and Ortega-Argiles 2013). While spin-offs, patents and license incomes might seem like a common-sense proxy measure for research impact, they emerged in a very specific context, of US state universities seeking to justify their public subventions and newly granted patent exploitation powers (Popp Berman 2011). Indeed, these indicators have cast a long shadow over efforts to develop better understandings and measures of the broader impact of research, most notably outside the hard sciences, and most notably in social sciences and humanities (SSH) (Donovan 2007;Morton 2015). Science policy researchers’ efforts to more precisely define impact have produced understandings that are accepted by researchers, but in turn lack traction amongst policy-makers because of their imprecision and thinness as a foundation for practical policy interventions (Benneworth et al. 2016). We therefore contend that this represents a form of irreconcilable stand-off, where conceptualization is held back by a lack of empirical and policy interest in more complex frameworks while current policy practices provide little opportunity to develop richer understandings of impact. One interesting development that progressed some way in bridging this gap was the ‘productive interactions’ conceptual proposition (Spaapen and Van Drooge 2011), which achieved a degree of uptake on policy communities. Spaapen and Van Drooge (2011) defined productive interactions as: ‘exchanges between researchers and stakeholders in which knowledge is produced and valued that is both scientifically robust and socially relevant. These exchanges are mediated through various ‘tracks’, for instance, a research publication, an exhibition, a design, people or financial support. The interaction is productive when it leads to efforts by stakeholders to somehow use or apply research results or practical information or experiences. Social impacts of knowledge are behavioural changes that happen because of this knowledge’ (Spaapen and Van Drooge 2011:212). In the Netherlands, productive interactions have influenced policy debates as evinced by the recent launch of the Quality and Relevance in the Humanities (QRIH) metric set. 1 But even within QRIH, we sense that individual indicators proposed for research evaluation were not based on productive interactions’ theoretical criteria, but rather for primarily opportunistic reasons (ease of gathering and deployment). In this article, we seek to consolidate the potential offered by Spaapen and Van Drooge’s productive interactions’ concept, but which we argue has been lost through its operationalization as a process of ‘counting the final interactions’ (cf. Benneworth and Olmos-Pe~ nuela 2018). Impact results not just from academics creating usable knowledge and placing it via productive interactions with users, but also from the conditions by which that knowledge is made useful (Research Council of Australia 2018:8): we infer that productive interactions can only be interpreted by looking at the contexts (pathways) within which this impact emerges. Considering that the absence of societal impact of research is not necessarily a sign of uselessness of research in impact assessment, we address the importance of paying attention also to the conditions supporting impact processes (cf. Godin and Dore´ 2005;Bornmann 2013). We ask the following research question: how can we develop a typology that captures the diversity of the mechanisms by which SSH research leads to societal impact? To this aim, we draw on a comparative analysis of 60 examples of SSH impactand develop a typology of SSH pathways to societal impact. We conclude by arguing that this typology is useful for thinking more critically about practical mechanisms and instruments for creating more nuanced tools for impact evaluation. 2. Developing a conceptual theory for evaluating SSH research impact 2.1 Societal impact in the framework of research evaluation There is a substantial interest amongst policy-makers in research impact evaluation, driven by their desire to justify allocative decisions, not least real-terms increases in science budgets in which this pressure to evaluate something has run far ahead of the development of comparative understandings (Grant et al. 2010;Martin 2011; Molas-Gallart 2015). More generally, research impact measures seek to provide two characteristics, comparability between impacts as well authenticity to individual impacts. Tensions between those two characteristics in emergent variables has seen impact indicators’ legitimacy lagging definitions of ‘scientific impact’ couched in scientometric terms of subsequent citation 2 (Spaapen and Van Drooge 2011;Petersohn and Heinze 2017). Although scientific research impact is not perfectly measured by citation scores, bibliometrics is sufficiently conceptualized and operationalized to allow citations to represent a reasonably proxy of scientific impact that Petersohn and Heinze (2017) argue can lodge a claim amongst policy-makers and scientists to be valid. This imbalance with societal impact created an urgent policy pressure to produce a social impact definition that can be operationalized and measured, and that can claim to be legitimate amongst both academics and policy-makers as comparable but authentic (Benneworth et al. 2016;Petersohn and Heinze 2017). This has been manifested in a range of research evaluation systems. From 2002 in the UK, grant applications had to include an impact statement, and from 2014, ex post impact creation featured in the REF as a specific area of resource allocation (Bulaitis 2017). In the Netherlands, from 2000, impact was a policy goal, it featured in the 2005 SEP, and from 2009, it started to be taken seriously as a policy goal (Van der Meulen and Rip 2000;Benneworth et al. 2016). But there remained an ambiguity in these assessment processes regarding precisely what need to be assessed and against which criteria (Molas-Gallart 2015). The economic indicators that initially drove impact’s rise were clearly too limited to be meaningful impact proxies beyond a guideline for funding decisions such as in the UK’s Higher Education Innovation Fund (Benneworth and Jongbloed 2013). Indeed, Donovan (2008) noted Australia’s attempts to measure impact in its planned Research Quality Framework, destabilizing beliefs of straightforward impact measurement in evaluation and leading to its complete omission from the Excellence for Research in Australia evaluation system. Several work-arounds arose in this absence of legitimate metrics: the UK (followed by a number of other countries, Sivertsen 2017a) adopted a peer-review methodology in which research centres submitted case studies that were assessed against three criteria, namely the scale, the scope and the value of the impact (HEFCE 2011; Martin 2011). Scientometrics companies’ efforts to develop societal impact measures largely lacked legitimacy (Andrews 2018). Attempts to measure behavioural or even attitudinal aspects of scientists’ orientation in SSH disciplines have also taken place (see Hughes et al. 2011 or Olmos-Pe~ nuela et al. 2014 for examples from Research Evaluation, 2020, Vol. 29, No. 1 35 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/rev/article-abstract/29/1/34/5369820 by Tampere University Library. Department of Health Sciences user on 28 January 2020 the UK and Spain respectively). The issue with these various kinds of work-arounds has been that despite these efforts, they failed to build legitimacy amongst both policy-makers and scholars (cf. Wro´blewska 2017). 2.2 Productive interactions as a concept of research creating impact Two other similar attempts to provide comparability with authenticity came through the ERIC and Siampi project diptych, which together proposed the productive interactions concept, which has been advocated by the powerful LERU University group as providing a good instrument for evaluating research impact (Van den Akker and Spaapen 2017). The Netherlands’ Evaluating Research in Context project emerged at the interface between science policy and research to create a theoretically justified operationalisable framework for research evaluation, followed by the European Commission ‘Siampi’ 3 research project (Benneworth et al. 2016). The productive interactions concept emerged from the community around these two projects as a first-cut definition of research impact, operationalizable to individual evaluation contexts through interaction’s transaction trails (Van Drooge, pers. comm.). The framework defines three kinds of productive interactions: direct (personal) interactions, indirect interactions (mediated through artefacts) and financial interactions (mediated through exchange relations), claiming these interactions imply more substantive change because interacting partners are embedded within other systems that change through these interactions. Their definition was proposed in an article within a special issue of Research Evaluation, providing arguably the first theoretical vocabulary for a new form of research impact evaluation, providing comparability with authenticity. Comparability came in terms of providing a materiality to the impact definition, the transaction, linked back to an underlying scientific process avoiding two common traps in debates around societal impact, assuming scientific research was intrinsically productive, or demanding extraordinary outcomes (Sivertsen 2017b). The definition also provided a degree of authenticity by being linked to the kinds of activities already routinely undertaken by academics. A productive interaction represents a moment where science system encounters societal actors, allowing societal actors to influence scientific actors, creating new kinds of scientific value (e.g., such as asking new kinds of research question, Gla¨ser 2012). The encounter simultaneously realises societal benefits by imbuing recipients with assets that can be leveraged and capitalized within different kinds of socio-economic systems hence contributing to ‘development’ (in the language of Corea’s 2007). This value may be financial/economic, such as when technology-based ventures are able to leverage university IP to develop spin-off companies that attract external venture capital investment. But it might also involve other kinds of sociopolitical value, such as where academic knowledge changes the ‘rules of the political game’ with the formation of new parties or is used as part of democratic renewal processes (Benneworth et al. 2016). And this might emerge, following Martin (2011), through elongated pathways lacking one-to-one-correspondence between a research activity and a societal outcome, making it hard to see whether these productive interactions are significant and antecedent to impact or mere activity. We therefore seek to look at the broader context within which productive interactions take place, ‘impact pathways’, and address the importance of paying attention also to the conditions supporting impact processes. We follow here the idea implemented in the Australian research evaluation framework; an approach, which seeks to incorporate unpredictability and random chance in measuring research impact by accounting for ‘approach to impact’ (Research Council of Australia 2018). Their Engagement and Impact Assessment (EI) approach applied to Australian universities assesses societal impact through both tangible outcomes, but also the presence of institutional mechanisms promoting or enabling research impact with outcomes based on qualitative descriptions of how the institutions facilitated impact realization (Research Council of Australia 2018:8). 2.3 The holy grail of impact evaluation: comparisons between incomparable epiphenomena In this article, we are concerned with the challenge of evaluating and measuring the societal impact created by SSH research, and in particular, a problem that arises when attempting to compare between very different kinds of impact. There is in science and technology studies (STS) an extensive set of literatures on describing the associations between socio-technical change and more basic research activities (Penfield et al. 2014). In this article, we omit an extensive discussion of this literature because it has not proven influential in shaping research impact evaluation policies (Donovan 2017), something we see as being linked to the desire to take allocative decisions (see Section 2.1) rather than to understand research impact. The ground-breaking TRACES study in 1968 attempted to link the emergence of technologies to what it called ‘critical moments in science’ (Kostoff 1994). From this has been inferred that there are a set of manifold ways in which research activities create impacts in the wider society, whether positive or negative, but also that there was no simple one-off relationship between discrete research activities and societal outcomes (see Martin 2011 for a lucid summary of this situation). Early attempts to measure these were often opportunistic and based on eye-catching and easy to measure indicators, such as numbers of patents or spin-off companies rather than effectively representing this diversity of activity (Benneworth 2015). More recently, there have been substantive efforts to develop general concepts of research impact and we here highlight two of them, namely the Payback Framework (Donovan and Hanney 2011) as one of the most commonly referred concept in the context of impact evaluation, and Rowe & Frewer’s participatory framework (2005) presenting not only three applicable engagement concepts, but also one of the most comprehensive list of science-society participation mechanisms. Rowe and Frewer (2005)’s study on the role of public engagement in regulating the flow of knowledge from scientists to societal users introduced three different engagement concepts, namely public communication, public consultation and public participation. The concept of public communication refers to a situation where information flow is one-way: conveyed from the sponsors (the term they use to refer the party commissioning the engagement initiative) to the public. Regarding the concept of public consultation, the direction of the flow of information is instead from members of the public to the sponsors of the initiative; however, the process is initiated by the sponsors and no formal dialogue exists between these two parties. The public participation differs from the other two previous concepts of public engagement, because it includes the idea of information exchange between members of public and sponsors including some degree of dialogue (Rowe and Frewer 2005:254–255). They listed ca. 100 participation 36 Research Evaluation, 2020, Vol. 29, No. 1 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/rev/article-abstract/29/1/34/5369820 by Tampere University Library. Department of Health Sciences user on 28 January 2020 mechanisms identified in previous studies (Rowe and Frewer 2005: 257). To outline the results from previous studies and describe how to enable effective involvement in any particular situation, they suggested a typology of public engagement mechanisms based on the three versions of the concept of public engagement described above. However, they did not pay attention to the mechanisms between engagement activities and impacts (Rowe and Frewer 2005:276–282) as productive interactions do. The ideology behind the Payback Framework derives from the need to demonstrate the ‘payback’of public investments to research, and thus, it is one of the core discussions from where the branch of impact literature derives. The original idea of the Payback Framework consists of two elements: a logic pathway representation of the research processes done for the purposes of research impact evaluation and a variety of categories aiming at to classify paybacks from research (Donovan and Hanney 2011). Thus, in the context of the Payback Framework, both research processes and impacts are taken into account. Differences compared to the concept of productive interactions derives from the fact that where the concept of productive interactions includes the idea of impact or change, in the Payback Framework the aim is to identify a full range of benefits of funding, but not to provide analysis of how impacts arise. The Payback Framework (Hanney et al. 2004) is mostly used in health services research, but it has been applied also for the needs of social sciences (Wooding et al. 2007). In the chapter two, we have discussed earlier studies on research impact addressing particularly the audience in research evaluation. There are numerous studies on impact, studying for instance impact modes or participation mechanisms, like Rowe and Frewer (2005: 257) has demonstrated, or dimensions of impact (Academy of Finland 2016). However, the gap between them—area of impact mechanisms providing analysis on how impacts arise—remains as an overlooked area both in STS and research evaluation literature. In addition, previous literature—whether it is about research impacts, impact modes, mechanisms, or drivers—is mainly discussed only from the viewpoint of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) (e.g., Morris and Rip 2006;Jensen et al. 2008; Hessels 2010;Lam 2011;De Jong et al. 2016). 3. Operationalization To address this research question, we conducted a narrative metaanalysis of impact case studies drawn from the SSH (in some cases also involving fields from STEM in multidisciplinary partnerships). These case studies were gathered within the COST ENRESSH Action (European Network for Research Evaluation in the SSH). This network draws together interested scholars in research evaluation, including 55 primarily committed to understanding societal impact in SSH research evaluation. Our data collection approach involved co-creating the instrument together with this expert network to allow them the opportunity to articulate what they felt was important in depicting SSH impact. The method involved circulating a data gathering instrument among these 55 members (the fiche presented in Appendix I) into which they had had the chance to shape the questions and prompts, providing SSH researchers with the opportunity to describe cases of how impact had resulted from research activities in their own words. Instrument design began with an expert meeting of 10 lead participants from these 55 scholars (April 2016) to agree on a number of key dimensions regarding SSH impact definitions. From that first approach, 13 potential questions were elaborated and distributed among all 55 participants for comments, receiving 29 responses. These responses were analyzed and discussed at a second meeting in July 2016 to determine the questions to be asked in the final circulated instrument (as presented in Appendix I). The definitive instrument asked nine open questions, covering a general description of the case along with more specific elements, including identifying key actors, interaction modes, stimuli, barriers, and hurdles of impact generation and evidence of relevance of the research at hand. We defined scientific research, broadly, merely requiring the originating researcher to have a material link to a higher education institution related to the impact production. Respondents were provided with an example of how to answer the questions and asked to provide answers of approximately 100–200 words per question. A pilot was undertaken in September 2016 and following its successful completion, the first round of data gathering took place in autumn 2016, resulting in 47 completed fiches; a second round in spring 2017 produced 18 more impact cases, giving a total of 65 fiches. The fiches were filled in by members of the expert community who had codesigned the instrument and therefore were aware of the need to avoid taking a non-linear perspective on impact creation. Empirically, our data covers a range of cases, from the exploitation of decades of research experience in expert settings to publishing a scientific book to popular acclaim. We subsequently excluded 5 of these 65 cases, two for lacking an academic input, one because it was a prospective analysis of research that might create impact, and two that were provided outside the fiche format in a language other than English. The 60 cases included and analyzed in this study are from 16 different European countries and they cover a wide range of SSH fields, includingartsaswellasSSHresearcherscollaboratingwithSTEM fields (see Table 1). The responses varied greatly from lengthy and rich descriptions to summaries using bullet points, although in all cases there was sufficient information to undertake a comparable analysis. 4. Implementing the meta-analysis approach 4.1 Type of knowledge The first element of the meta-analysis and typology-building was deriving some basic descriptives of the cases under consideration, looking at three main issues, namely the place of the impact in the research process, the vectors by which the productive interaction took place, and the kinds of beneficiaries involved (see Table 2 below). Activities associated with impact creation were found throughout the research process, for instance, where researchers and research funders choose which research questions are worth asking (Ronkainen et al. 2014;D’Este et al. 2016), where the decision to study a topic can generate societal impact, for example around neglected minorities or institutional child abuse (case 10: Child abuse and neglects). In some cases, impact emerges from the content of research, such as the messages from research finding that social background is more critical for school achievement than ethnic background (case 1: Young descendants of African immigrants). Impact also emerged in terms of the creation of new products (case 8: Voice passport) or new methods dealing for instance with terrorism (case 7: 11 M Mourning archive). Sometimes research opens up new ways to look at things, new approaches, like suggesting sign language as equal to spoken language (case 11b: Sign language). Some impact derived from decades of research experience and expertise (case 4: Professor of philosophy). Impact generation in social Research Evaluation, 2020, Vol. 29, No. 1 37 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/rev/article-abstract/29/1/34/5369820 by Tampere University Library. Department of Health Sciences user on 28 January 2020 sciences also came about through conceptualization of different phenomena (case 3: All male panel), and could even come through theory oriented research, such as with the application of Hegelian notions of evilness in a contemporary court case (case 4: Professor of philosophy). Impact creation in SSH emerged through different kinds of interactions, through scientific and popular publishing, media, and public engagement, interaction with different stakeholders and disciplines, policy, legislation, and epistemic training (Table 2; cf. Molas-Gallart et al. 2002:21). Although commercialization was not typical for SSH impact generalization, the study did include cases where impact emerged through commercialization (e.g., case 9: Natural tincture techniques). There was a great variety of beneficiaries in the examples ranging from citizens (e.g., theatre audience in the case 2c: Theatre) and professionals (e.g., Spanish scientific police in the case 8: Voice Passport) to business and industry (e.g., fashion industry in the case 9: Natural tincture techniques). 4.2 Interaction modes and beneficiaries of SSH research The second element of the analysis was to structure each case study in terms of the societal and scientific advances involved, the interactions between scientific and societal partners and the emergence of networks and new institutions. We produced a case architecture for Table 1. Overview of the distribution of the cases: countries and fields (n ¼60) a Countries Social Sciences Arts and Humanities STEM •Belgium (9) •Spain (7) •Croatia (7) •Switzerland (6) •Portugal (5) •Italy (5) •Norway (3) •UK (3) •Netherlands (3) •France (2) •Finland (2) •Iceland (2) •Serbia (2) •Slovakia (2) •Germany (1) •Estonia (1) •Sociology (1) •Educational sciences (3) •STS (3) •Administrative law (2) •Criminology (2) •Economics (2) •Gender studies (2) •Political science (2) •Psychology (2) •Psychology of work (1) •Public finance (2) •Communication sciences (1) •Cultural Anthropology (1) •Cultural studies (1) •Ergonomic science (1) •Human geography (1) •Immigration Studies (1) •Innovation studies (1) •Management research (1) •Media Studies (1) •Minority Studies (1) •Journalism (1) •Occupational health (1) •Political communication (1) •Religion studies (1) •Scandinavian Studies (1) •Social work (1) •Statistics (1) •Strategy and entrepreneurship (1) •History (7) •Linguistics (5) •Law (3) •Classical Studies (2) •Ethnology (2) •Philosophy (2) •African studies (1) •Anthropology (1) •Applied linguistics (1) •Archaeology (1) •Architecture (1) •Art History (1) •Classical studies (1) •Documentarism (1) •English Philology (1) •Forest History (1) •Music (1) •Musicology (1) •Philology •Psycholinguistics (1) •Theatre in education and development (1) •Theatre studies (1) •Chemistry (1) •Entomology (1) •Ergonomic science (1) •Forest Engineering (1) •Industrial engineering (1) •ICT (1) •ICT phonetics (1) •Medicine (1) Source: own elaboration from the case studies’ analysis. a In brackets are the number of cases that fall into each category. There are more than one field included in 35 cases; therefore, 25 of the cases are based on one single discipline. Table 2. Meta-analysis of the narrative impact cases (n ¼60) Type of knowledge Modes of interaction Beneficiaries •Research question •Content •Product •Method •Approach •Expertise •Concept •Theory •Scientific publishing, publishing for wider audience •Media engagement, public engagement, research engagement •Policy •Legislation •Regular interaction with stakeholders and other disciplines •Epistemic training •Citizens •NGOs •Professionals & practitioners •Business •Industry •Policy makers •Cultural industry Source: own elaboration from the case studies’ analysis. 38 Research Evaluation, 2020, Vol. 29, No. 1 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/rev/article-abstract/29/1/34/5369820 by Tampere University Library. Department of Health Sciences user on 28 January 2020 each of the 60 cases, and grouped cases on the basis of similarity of these stylized architectures. This produced a total of 13 distinct case study architectures for the elongated interaction pathways, presented in Figure 1 below. Specifically, Figure 1 seeks to visualize the relationships between the elements brought together through a productive interaction and how that progresses over time. These architectures provide a degree of comparability (between elements) but also authenticity (in terms of reflecting the individual research contexts). The starting point for the architecture is what we call the pipeline pathway, involving a scientific development, a productive interaction, and a transfer producing a discrete societal benefit. The remaining 12 SSH impact pathways each reflect an additional divergence from this linearity, with the emergence of impacts involving interplay and feedback loops between social and science partners, within increasingly complex networks, the formation of intermediary activities and even the emergence of new kinds of social structures. We grouped those pathways according to the dominant mechanisms by which impact has been produced, and identified four high-level groups for the ways SSH creates impact in society, namely dissemination, cocreation, reacting to societal change, and driving societal change. As a creative visualization, we have to be careful in claiming these pathways actually exist, rather they are ideal type constructions of SSH pathways to societal impact. One impact case could have features from our different repertoires sequenced in parallel or consecutively, meaning that one impact case can have features from different pathways, which can take place simultaneously or in different phases of impact processes. In the following section, we present each of the pathway architectures illustrated with cases selected to most clearly show the impact mechanisms. 5. SSH pathways to societal impact The main details of the 12 additional impact pathways are presented in Table 3 below, and more information is provided in this section stylising the ways SSH creates impact in society (dissemination, cocreation, reacting to societal change, and driving societal change), along with providing more information on impact exemplars from which the pathways have been derived. 5.1 Dissemination The first pathway, interactive dissemination, involves stakeholders becoming aware of research results via various dissemination channels, including publications, social media, websites, databases, and broadcasts, with typically, no other interaction being reported. In this pathway, there is a sequencing of developments, with scientific progress preceding societal progress, but with a feedback loop through the dissemination in which the societal response to that research validates the scientific research. The case demonstrating the first pathway comes from the field of sociology (case 1: Young descendants of African immigrants). The research aimed to relaunch a debate on social inequalities in secondary education and to challenge local cultural perspectives that regarded ethnicity rather than social inequality to be a major determinant of non-white students’ educational performance. The scientific study demonstrated that when controlling for social class and gender, ethnicity was not a significant determinant of education outcomes. The channels used by the actors to generate societal impact from the research conducted were mostly scientific articles (no other interactions were reported). The public response to that research in turn created the basis for the social change in seeking to eliminate an acceptance of underperformance by certain ethnic groups in education. 5.2 Cocreation The next four pathways in our typology concern cocreation. What the cocreation pathways (collaboration, public engagement, expertise, and mobility) all had in common was repeated points of contact (productive interactions) between scientific and societal partners mediating wider changes. There is a mutuality of the relationship: on the scientific side there is the appearance of new practices and the playing of new roles which are not always strictly defined scientific roles. In all cases, wider changes driven by productive interactions are visible within science in terms of creating new infrastructures and concepts, which open new avenues of scientific exploration, while the societal changes were visible by changing the way that societal partners understood a particular situation. The collaboration pathway is divided into three versions: (a) the first stresses the regularity of collaboration; (b) the second focuses on open access approaches, including open access publications and citizen science; and (c) the third covers multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary approaches. Our example of regular collaboration (case 2.a History Lab) was the History Laboratory of the Institute for Contemporary History (IHC), NOVA University of Lisbon, founded to create impact more applicable to secondary school students. The unit formed part of the IHC’s communication and dissemination strategies and developed a regular programme with schools, local libraries and other institutions engaging students and other stakeholders in historical research and history contents dissemination. After 2 years, IHC was collaborating with Escola Secunda´ria de Cam~ oes (involving around 200 students and 2 history teachers), involving about 20 researchers, with two new schools having joined the collaboration. The Laboratory mediated with the academics to help them work with teachers and deal flexibly with the schools’ needs, calendar and particularities. All three varieties of the collaboration pathway involve a degree of dialogue in the process serving to transform opinions between both parties. In the public engagement pathway archetype there is no formal dialogue. Impact is generated with the active participation of the public, using society effectively as a laboratory and spreading ideas through publicity. Our example (case 3: All male panel) involved political science and gender studies, where a Finnish feminist researcher sought to increase societal awareness of gender issues in society, particularly ‘a problem of men dominating the conversation’. In 2015 she began the blog ‘Congrats, you have an “All male panel” to publicise scientific and expert panels, board of trustees, and committees consisting exclusively of male members’. Whenever she encountered a photo of such a panel, she published that picture with a photo of the white male actor, David Hasselhoff giving a ‘thumbs up’ sign inserted. Her work spread quickly via social media, and the story itself spread rapidly from Finnish into international media including the Guardian, The Times, Telegraph and Al Jazeera. Her blog attracted a total of 180 m page views, and turned into a space where people could themselves publically denounce allmale panels, spawning a number of country-specific sites. Her work did much to make all-male panels in academia and policy circles unacceptable, with many subsequently conferences adopting a no-male panels rule. Research Evaluation, 2020, Vol. 29, No. 1 39 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/rev/article-abstract/29/1/34/5369820 by Tampere University Library. Department of Health Sciences user on 28 January 2020 Figure 1. The pipeline model and other SSH pathways to societal impact. Source: own elaboration 40 Research Evaluation, 2020, Vol. 29, No. 1 (continued) Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/rev/article-abstract/29/1/34/5369820 by Tampere University Library. Department of Health Sciences user on 28 January 2020 In the expertise pathway archetype, a researcher plays a role of an expert in wider societal contexts on the basis of expert knowledge that the researcher has already developed in scientific contexts. This may be in a range of roles, from open-ended roles (such as a public intellectual) to more specific projects (such as committees and working groups supporting policy makers, professionals, or other stakeholders). Our example case was a professor of philosophy who had a crucial impact on the Norwegian discussion of the legal concept of mental sanity and accountability (case 4: Professor of philosophy). The court trying Anders Breivik for the mass slaughter on Utøya received two conflicting psychiatric reports regarding the extent of the defendant’s criminal culpability and fitness to stand trial. The government established a committee to explore this issue of evil and criminal culpability with the professor being appointed to it, studying the case from the Hegelian perspective, taking stands based on his own philosophical research, and ultimately contributing significantly both to the report and the resultant societal healing. Figure 1. Continued. Research Evaluation, 2020, Vol. 29, No. 1 41 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/rev/article-abstract/29/1/34/5369820 by Tampere University Library. Department of Health Sciences user on 28 January 2020 Table 3. SSH pathways to societal impact SSH PATHWAYS TO SOCIETAL IMPACT General pathway Pathway Mechanism Example case Possible conceptual justification The pipeline pathway fifi Dissemination 1. The interactive dissemination pathway Stakeholders become aware of the results of research through publications, social media, websites, databases, television or radio. Young descendants of African immigrants, Portugal ‘Public communication’ (Rowe and Frewer 2005). Cocreation 2. The collaboration pathway a. A researcher collaborates regularly with stakeholders History Lab, Portugal Working across organizational and disciplinary boundaries on common problems (Klein 2010) b. Impact is gained through open access ideology (or citizen science) Brussels Studies Institute, Belgium c. Impact is gained through interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary approach Theatre, Spain 3. The public engagement pathway Results of research are taken into action by using society as a laboratory. Publicity is a necessity for impact. All male panel, Finland ‘Public participation’ (Rowe and Frewer 2005). 4. The expertise pathway Researcher plays a role as an expert, makes policy recommendations, conducts an evaluation study or other kind of contract research. Professor of philosophy, Norway Category of ‘advisory work and contracts’ (Molas-Gallart et al. 2002 p. 21) 5. The mobility pathway Knowledge and skills of a researcher are taken into use in a new context. Myanmar, UK Policy impacts occur via secondment (Wooding et al. 2007) Reacting to societal change 6. The ‘anticipating anniversaries’ pathway Researchers are preparing themselves to coming issues discussed in the media. Holenstein, Switzerland Hybridization (Dogan 1996) 7. The ‘seize the day’ pathway Something happens ranging from ongoing policies and hot topics brought up in media to coincidences like, natural catastrophes and terrorist attacks, which makes suddenly some topics more relevant than others. 11 M Mourning archive, Spain Changing what counts as evidence and frame (Maguire 2002) 8. The social innovation pathway Work starts independently and then at some point two sides come back together. Voice passport, Spain (Benneworth and Cunha 2015) 9. The commercialization pathway Research results are taken into use by developing the product based on the idea research brought up and making the product available on the market. Natural tincture techniques, France Commercialization as typical science-society collaboration (Hughes and Kitson 2012) Driving societal change 10. The ‘research engagement as a key to impact’ pathway Research process increases awareness of the topic at hand. Targets of the study get recognition and sense of empowerment through the research process. Child abuse and neglects, Finland Testimonial justice and Hermeneutic justice (Fricker 2007) 11. The knowledge ‘creeps’ into society pathway Research results ‘creep’ into daily life and political arena. In parallel or later on, some changes take place in relation to Research provides understandings that creep into policy (Weiss 1980)a. public opinion or b. legislation. Nation State, Iceland Sign language, Iceland 12. The building ‘new epistemic communities’ pathway Researcher introduces a new way of thinking and this changes institutional practices (like curriculum) and provides professionals with new resources to cope with. Pfenninger, Switzerland New ways of thinking that alter institutional practices (Molas-Gallart et al. 2002: 25) Source: own elaboration from the case studies’ analysis. 42 Research Evaluation, 2020, Vol. 29, No. 1 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/rev/article-abstract/29/1/34/5369820 by Tampere University Library. Department of Health Sciences user on 28 January 2020