Figuring out Non-Academic Research Impact With(out) Figures A European Exploratory Study

While a growing number of research in management and organization studies interrogates the influence of the impact agenda on universities' organization and management, in particular in the United Kingdom and Australia – two countries that developed impact assessment frameworks -, empirical investigations of how researchers themselves define and evidence the non-academic impact of their works are scarce. In particular, the influence of the evidence-based approach and the primacy given to quantification both in this approach and in public administration institutions on the way researchers conceive evidence of non-academic impact remain to be scrutinized. Relying on 22 case-studies based on in-depth interviews conducted with researchers in management and organization studies in a broad sense from Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Poland, our research reveals three understandings of non-academic impact that sharpen current definitions of non-academic impact: as solving practical, real-life problems; as giving people means to develop through feedbacks or reports; and/or as changing or inspiring people's thoughts on important issues. The analysis also shows that researchers establish diverse relationships between their definition and evidence of non-academic impact: from a muscular relationship in which both non-academic impact and evidence are defined through numbers, to looser relationships where definition - that may be defined with qualitative underpinnings, and evidence that may be quantitative -, are either disconnected from one-another, or loosely coupled when impact is hypothesized and evidence defined as indirect signs of interests from potential audience. These diverse relationships between definition and evidence of impact are interpreted as tensions between research ethos – in which accounting rigorously for a process or a cause-and-effect relationship is of primary importance – and the impact agenda and concomitant influence of evidence-based management approach – which tend to give more value to evidence that can be expressed in numbers.