‘The student experience’ did not exist when I first started my undergraduate degree at the University of Edinburgh in 2008. People may have used those words, but they did not have a ‘thingness’ to them; it was not yet management lingo or survey material. We did not measure it, compare it, or discuss it in such weighty and reified terms. How do you measure something so amorphous as ‘the student experience’? An experience at university is very particular, influenced by biography, expectations, identities, the people one is (un)lucky enough to be surrounded by, and wider events, like COVID-19. Many aspects of the student experience have nothing to do with the quality of the teaching, the general provision of support services, or the supposed value of a degree. And yet, measuring and ranking the student experience is a yearly pursuit in UK universities through the National Student Survey (NSS).

The NSS has been surveying final-year undergraduate students in the UK since 2005, gathering opinions about degree programmes and broader experiences at university. Student (dis)satisfaction is measured through a series of statements, tick-box responses, and the option to include written responses at the end of the survey. Numerical NSS results are then used as a proxy measure for quality of provision, informing university league tables, course comparison websites, the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), and university branding. The survey results continue to be used to rank and compare universities and courses as if factual, accurate reflections of university and course quality, informing prospective student decisions about where and what to study.

Being ‘REF-able’. The impact agenda. The student experience. These terms did not always exist in UK higher education (HE) and yet now they are central concerns for university workers, functioning as ideological codes or conceptual schemata that organise everyday academic life. They are used to assess the value of academics and their work in relation to key audit processes that inform the distribution of funding and prestige in UK HE. Using Institutional Ethnography (IE), I analyse three audit processes in detail – the National Student Survey (NSS), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Research Grant application process, and the Research Excellence Framework (REF) – through autoethnographic reflections, interviews, and extensive text analysis of publicly available audit-related texts. I consider two key questions: How is UK HE organised by audit-related texts and discourses? And how much agency do academics have when (re)producing institutions, through the reading, writing, and performing of audit processes? As IE is a feminist approach to research, I also consider how these seemingly neutral audit processes (re)produce intersecting inequalities.

For those who are unfamiliar, the NSS is the annual undergraduate student satisfaction survey for UK universities, used in league tables, course comparison websites, and the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), which assesses teaching quality in universities primarily in England.1 The ESRC is one of seven UK government research councils2 and the largest funder of social science research in the UK, and its generic research funding application process is the Research Grant (ESRC-RG).

Why do academics spend so much time preparing funding applications? What do these highly competitive funding processes do to academic working conditions? And who decides what is ‘fundable’? Since finishing my PhD, I have unsuccessfully applied to four postdoctoral research funding schemes and three university-specific postdoctoral fellowships. These applications carried not just the promise of a funded research project, but more importantly paid work, job security, and imagined lives in new places. It was crushing to repeatedly dream up detailed research plans, sometimes up to 5 years long, which were attuned to the university, the department, and potential future colleagues and then … rejection. Sometimes one does not even get a formal rejection; one postdoctoral scheme for which I interviewed did not contact me post-interview to let me know the outcome. Such unnecessary cruelty in the academic job market is intensified for those who are precariously employed, because one's job and ability to stay in academia often depends on highly competitive funding processes.

This chapter is about the extensive work that goes into writing research funding applications within a highly precarious UK higher education (HE) sector. To do this, I examine how social science applicants navigate the Economic and Social Research Council Research Grant (ESRC-RG) funding application process, focusing on the multi-layered strategies required to translate research ideas and researchers into ‘fundable’ formats.

Institutional Ethnography (IE) is a feminist approach to research developed by English-Canadian sociologist Dorothy E. Smith (1922– 2022) in collaboration with colleagues and students (D.E. Smith, 1987, 1990a, 1990b, 1999, 2005, 2006b; Griffith and Smith, 2014; Smith and Turner, 2014a; Smith and Griffith, 2022). It largely focuses on how people's everyday lives are coordinated with others (Smith and Griffith, 2022, p 3), beginning in people's experiences and examining how they are organised by institutional texts and language, including audit processes.

Confusingly, given the name, IE is not simply an ethnography of institutions, but rather provides a comprehensive ontology of the social, concepts to help describe the dynamics of the social, and a methodological framework for doing research. IE has become an expansive interdisciplinary, international field, with researchers taking up Smith's work and the IE approach in vastly different ways, as I discuss in my thesis (Murray, 2019, pp 43– 64), and as shown through IE edited collections (Campbell and Manicom, 1995; Frampton et al, 2006; Smith, 2006b; Griffith and Smith, 2014; Smith and Turner, 2014a; Reid and Russell, 2018; Lund and Nilsen, 2020; Luken and Vaughan, 2021, 2023). As such, it is difficult to succinctly describe and so for those who are unfamiliar with IE, I recommend Smith and Griffith (2022) and Smith (2005), which provide a comprehensive overview of the approach.

Audit culture has transformed academic life into textual and discursive ‘things’ to be assessed, ranked, and differentially funded. This has created enormous amounts of new bureaucratic work, including entirely new jobs in universities – impact advisors, Research Excellence Framework (REF) managers, student survey teams, student experience officers – which redirect money and time away from doing teaching, research, and other front-line services, towards auditing them. Audit processes affect who gets to be an academic in UK higher education (HE), informing hiring, firing, promoting, and funding decisions. Doing meaningful research and teaching does not mean much if one's ‘outputs’ are not REF-able or if one's teaching does not ‘satisfy’ students. Thus, interpretations of the National Student Survey (NSS), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funding processes, and the REF are profoundly important as they inform who gets to stay and who has to leave the sector, how bearable their working conditions are, and what kind of academic work they can do. And so, while academics might experience audit as a nuisance to get through as quickly as possible so they can get back to their ‘real work’, audit is a key mode of reproducing UK HE and academic culture in which we are complicit.

As my research has shown, academics have interpretive power in the translation between audit rules in institutional texts and actual practice. We are required to do audit processes in exchange for universities receiving public funding, alongside requirements for accountability, and these are implemented within deeply managerial and undemocratic university structures.

What is the point of academic research? Should it be a pure pursuit of knowledge, protected from the whims of government and the zeitgeist? Should we be following Marx's oft-quoted maxim that the point is to change the world? And how much say should governments have on the direction of academic research? Throughout my PhD, I was pre-occupied with these questions around the ‘point’ of academic research, fuelled by an impatience around the slowness of change, the horrors of the world, and a worry that doing a PhD was a luxurious, selfish pursuit. While these impulses have not gone away, I have made my peace with the position of the academic and try to think carefully about the consequences of my research in a humble and accountable way. My theory of change is informed by what I have learnt from Institutional Ethnography (IE) and examining UK higher education (HE) audit processes, acknowledging how difficult and complicated it is to change complex bureaucratic organisations. Political life in the UK and beyond is also instructive; the world is a mess, and the best-laid plans often go awry, but slow and steady organising can produce profound and unexpected change. And so, in this final substantive chapter, I will examine the ‘impact agenda’ in UK HE and consider practices of measuring, tracking, and rewarding ‘impact’.

In UK HE, impact refers to the effect that academic research has on the world, often focusing specifically on changes that occur because of academic research.

We are delighted to have this book in the series. As the author explains, it has been a long and difficult journey to completion, which makes the outcome even more welcome. It also means that the book is both up-to-date and extremely timely, given that the HE sector is now publicly in crisis. We hope this book will be valuable to anyone trying to make sense of the complex world of UK HE. For many academics, engaging with bureaucracy can seem boring and take us away from the ‘real’ work, but, as the author points out, ‘not knowing the rules can leave us vulnerable to mythologised (mis)interpretations of how audit processes work and thus complicit in reproducing an academia which could be done differently’. The book has sector-wide and cross-disciplinary relevance, but we would like to see a well-thumbed copy on the desks of vice chancellors and other senior leaders and even on that of the Minister for Education – if only she had the time.

The author begins from her standpoint as a precarious early career feminist academic and used this to inform her analysis of everyday textual practices of academics in UK HE, in the context of an audit culture, and their differential impacts. Órla Murray makes a case that few in the HE sector would disagree with:

I almost did not write this book. A mixture of ill health, a global pandemic, and the postdoctoral job market made it impossible to focus on writing a monograph. I received the book contract in April 2020 just after the first COVID-19 lockdown began in the UK. I’d been applying for lots of academic jobs and fellowships and was still hopeful that I would get a book-writing fellowship or a research job with personal research time to allow me time to write this book. This did not happen, and so instead I tried to squeeze in writing alongside my paid academic work and kept delaying the manuscript submission deadline. My job was initially 4 days a week on a 1-year contract, and so I continued applying for jobs and fellowships, feeling disheartened and exhausted by repeated rejection. While my tiredness was in part due to the imminent end of my employment contract and the global pandemic, increasingly it became apparent that I was also ill. Near the end of 2020, I was hospitalised due to undiagnosed ulcerative colitis and had emergency surgery which saved my life. Thankfully, I had some sick pay, a supportive line manager, and free access to the NHS. But it was notable that while I lay in my hospital bed, I worried about my job. I worried that time off work and my new chronic illness and disability would stop me from surviving the academic rat race.

Why is this relevant to a book about UK university audit cultures? Academic working conditions in the UK are awful. They make us sick and exclude those of us who are already sick, and rely on ableist and classist assumptions about what is possible.

Am I REF-able? This question plagues UK-based academics, whether they are permanently employed or stringing together temporary posts. The REF – the Research Excellence Framework – is the much discussed (and widely hated) UK-wide research assessment exercise, which judges the ‘excellence’ of academic research. The REF results carry prestige and determine research funding for departments and universities. However, the REF has become more than just an audit process: it has produced a powerful discourse around who or what is ‘REF-able’, shaping the way individual academics and their work are judged as valuable or not. Being perceived as REF-able is incredibly important due to the impact on the hiring, firing, and promotion of individual academics and the funding and staffing of departments and research centres. However, REF-ability is an amorphous concept, mixing the formal eligibility criteria of the official REF process with broader value judgements about what will score highly and therefore bring higher star ratings in the REF results and associated funding and prestige. The REF process and notions of REF-ability are deeply mythologised, with (mis)understandings circulating among academics, professional services staff, and university management. This chapter examines the REF as both an official audit process and a discursive framework used to judge the value of academics and their research.

Through a comparison of the official REF 2014 and 2021 guidance and interviews with physicists responsible for REF 2021 submissions, I show how the REF works in practice.