ABSTRACT
The fi nancial consequences of periodic auditing of research in the United Kingdom through the RAE have not received as much attention as the behavioral effects of the RAE. There has been widespread criticism of the RAE for its effect on research in general (e.g., Ball and Butler 2004; Hedgcock 1998), and for encouraging conservatism and game-playing in management research in particular (Dunne et al. 2008; Macdonald and Kam 2007a, 2007b; Piercy 2000; Stewart 2005). There have also been numerous attempts to infer journal quality from the results of the RAE as a metric to be incorporated into journal ratings and rankings (Beattie and Goodacre 2006; Easton and Easton 2003; Geary et al. 2004; Kelly et al. 2009; Mingers and Harzing 2007; Mingers et al. 2009). But the preoccupation with the accountability function of the RAE, as an assessment of research quality, has distracted attention from its resource allocation function, its original purpose, as a highly selective means of allocating research funding (Thomas 2001). In other words, there has been a preoccupation with the rating of submissions by the peerreview panels, and its effect on behavior, and less attention to the weighting attached to those ratings by the UK funding bodies. In this chapter we focus on the weightings and fi nancial consequences of the RAE.
