ABSTRACT
The focus of this chapter is on educational research and how it is increasingly shaped by the contemporary enterprise university that has emerged as the result of 30 years of neo-liberal higher education policy. At one level, even to ask the question ‘How is research shaped by universities?’ is counterintuitive. This is because one of the most powerful aspects of being an educational researcher is that we experience it as a highly personal affair; it is something that we want to shape ourselves; it demands signifi cant personal engagement, as well as huge amounts of personal time. That it is very personal is refl ected in how we train new researchers in education. In education, the humanities and most other social sciences, our procedures are different from many of the more traditional sciences. We encourage new researchers to fi nd research questions that are ‘theirs’. We encourage them to discover for themselves what sort of researchers they want to become. And what sort of researcher they do become – their theoretical, their methodological and their substantive commitments – is also highly personal. They become part of every researcher’s identity, part of who they are in their professional lives as academics. In short, research is something that all of us live in profound and personal ways. But while this personal dimension of research is very important, in reality, it presents only one side of the truth about the shaping of educational research in the modern university. By looking at the experience of the last research assessment exercise – the RAE 2008 – this chapter explores the institutional side of the shaping of educational research.
