ABSTRACT
Today, researchers are obliged to identify, measure, and report the impact of their work. Many concerns have been raised regarding this development, including misgivings about the nature of research impact, how to define it, and how best to assess it. Social studies have largely focused on critically interrogating such concerns. By contrast, little has been written on the ordinary practices involved in accomplishing impact. Addressing this gap, the chapter aims to illustrate the social organisation of research impact understood as textually mediated practices. Focusing on “practice abstracts” – a knowledge exchange format developed by the European Union – this chapter demonstrates how institutionally standardised texts make impact available as a reading to diversely situated actors. It shows that impact work is organised so that it makes crucial aspects of that work invisible, while naturalising an institutionalised form of social organisation that readers must take for granted for the claimed impacts to make sense. In the conclusion, the chapter outlines the implications of this approach for the social sciences and humanities as objects of impact policies, as well as, importantly, in terms of their place in impact-making outside academia.
