Context is everything: national variation in societal impact assessment

Abstract Publicly funded research universities are increasingly required to demonstrate their societal value through detailed reporting mechanisms. In several national contexts, this has taken the form of narrative impact case studies submitted for formal assessment. This paper examines the extent of convergence in constructions of societal impact across case studies from the United Kingdom, Australia, and Hong Kong. Topic modelling was applied to the full corpus of impact case studies ( n = 7275) to identify thematic patterns; lexicon analysis was used on a stratified subset ( n = 1514) to assess alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals; and qualitative coding was conducted on a sample of high-scoring cases ( n = 631) to examine how value is articulated in cases deemed successful by evaluators. The article explores differences in the prevalence and emphasis of topics, as well as variations between high- and low-scoring submissions in each context. While the similarity of performance measurement frameworks across these contexts might be expected to narrow research topics and practices, the analysis reveals cultural differences in how societal impact is performed. Despite substantial standardisation in the production and assessment of impact narratives, the influence of national policy settings and local contexts is clear. These location-specific factors appear to override the development of a universal understanding of what is highly valued as societal impact. This suggests that impact case studies are less amenable to the standardisation and narrowing of research typically associated with metrics-based measurement.