Tracing how arts and humanities research translates,circulates and consolidates in society.. How have scholars been reacting to diverse impact and public value agendas?

Introduction: The rise of the valorisation imperative

The last two centuries of social progress have been firmly rooted on technological advances based on new ideas, products and processes. Landes (1997: 201) ascribes the Industrial Revolution’s momentum to the parallel diffusion and unification of scientists with common practices and the freedom to inquire, becoming routinely embedded into economic activities. American’s post-war reconstruction was implicitly built on a social contract of massive investment in US university research to drive innovation and social development, remarkable for a country traditionally averse to interventionist policy measures (Etzkowitz, 2001). But recently, there has been a change in the view of the relationship of research to society, and, critically, a shortening of the time span deemed socially (read: politically) acceptable between state investments and public results.

Popp Berman argues that a new policy discourse has emerged, what she calls entrepreneurial science (echoing Kenney’s 1998 university-industrial complex), which has captured science policy funders’ attention. Research’s value is increasingly understood in terms of its immediate contributions to economic growth (Olmos-Peñuela, 2015). This change has not gone unremarked by arts and humanities scholars, clearly driving a sense of uncertainty amongst them, what Belfiore (2013) calls a ‘rhetoric of gloom’. Collini (2010) voices this uncertainty most convincingly, framing current policy demands for impact in all research projects as transforming the studied scholar into a hasty hawker of triteness.

It is hard to see a place for arts and humanities research (AHR) in this ‘entrepreneurial science’ discourse beyond simplistic notions of ‘creative industries’ (Belfiore, 2015). An emerging science and innovation studies literature has sought to quantify research’s wider utilising of simple outputs such as spin-off firms, patents and license income. Popp Berman charts how those promoting the entrepreneurial science agenda actively shaped these indicators. Collini reflects a much wider unease within arts and humanities (hereafter humanities) that simple output measures fail to capture the true breadth of humanities’ research societal contributions (see also Molas‐Gallart, 2015). Certainly, if one reduces impact to simple economic metrics, then it is hard not to feel despondent for humanities’ future (cf. Looseley, 2011; Parker, 2008).

But, at the same time, a more positive set of conversations are seeking to proactively reframe ideas of impacts, societal benefit and cultural value in terms of humanities’ own beliefs and practices. Belfiore (2013) argues humanities build societal capacities to do new kinds of things, solve harder kinds of problems and ultimately enable people to live better lives. But at the same time, she identifies the unresolved tension between this positive outlook and the more negative ‘rhetoric of gloom’. This paper seeks to contribute by deconstructing the entrepreneurial science discourse, in particular setting out the logic of why people do still believe, in the words of Crossick (2009), in the ‘power of widgets’. I explore the underlying logic of the knowledge-upscaling – valorisation model and the parallel entrepreneurial science discourse (a simplified and automated version of that model). My argument is that, to date, arts and humanities scholars have focused on criticising a heuristic and not reflected on the underlying – contingent and uncertain – upscaling model.

On that basis, I reimagine arts and humanities research impacts using this upscaling model. I trace how research projects create knowledge that transfers through what Spaapen et al. (2011) call ‘productive interactions’ into social networks and over time can deliver the ‘Belfiore criterion’, creating societal capacity for positive action and development. Using a recent research project, I demonstrate the traceability of how three pieces of humanities research created societal capacity across these different scales. I conclude by reflecting on the implications for understanding and tracing humanities research’s societal value and, in parallel, progressing to a more fruitful, creative and enlightened debate about this public value, grounded in a rational belief in the ‘power of ideas’.

The ‘power of widgets’

In 2006, Crossick gave an interesting lecture to the UK’s Royal Society for the Arts, ‘Knowledge transfer without widgets: the challenge of the creative economy’ (Crossick, 2006). Drawing on his experience as founding chair of the UK’s AHR Board, he critiqued knowledge-transfer concepts as reducing to the transfer of ‘widgets’ implicit in ‘entrepreneurial science’. Three years later, his polemical follow-up lecture, ‘Who still believes in the transfer of widgets?,’ argued that even sciences were disadvantaged when knowledge transfer was framed as ‘widget transfer’. Crossick’s (2009) invocation of the idea of ‘belief’ is highly salient, echoing the idea of ‘entrepreneurial science’ as a discourse and belief system, rather than an objective description of how science is organised in practice.

As a discourse, the belief shapes science stakeholders’ behaviour and ultimately has real consequences, but nevertheless remains a belief in an alluring idea, not to be mistaken for an objective understanding of knowledge transfer. A technology transfer model of small spin-off companies leading national technology rebirth is easily parodied, and indeed Crossick (2006: 2) argues that ‘the model may be caricatured as that of the “widget economy,” in which a university research team develops a widget, patents it and transfers it out to industrial enterprise’. He maintains that the widget example’s discursive power falsely persuaded policy-makers that a singular pathway exists by which research drives economic development. There are sectors where this discourse is not a bad heuristic: the pharmaceutical industry is organised around the idea of taking many promising drug ideas, trialing many of them and then marketing those that are safe and effective on humans. This process can be simplified as a kind of relay race – the university creates a ‘baton’ in the form of a patent, licenses that and passes the baton to a spin-off or start-up company. Early trial successes may lead a larger biotechnology development company to buy the license. Finally, if mass human trials are successful, then one of the ‘big six’ pharmaceutical firms might step up and bring the product to market. ¹

This is of course a heuristic that implies a causality to policy-makers, namely the ‘power of widgets’. Popp Berman argues that the discourse effectively preys on an emerging policy fear, that advanced economies are stagnating and declining against new upstart economies and that their labour forces are inefficient and their businesses are uncompetitive. ‘Entrepreneurial science’ offers a panacea for countries to transform their competitiveness and labour markets through the ‘power of innovation’, and universities, supplying that innovation, are a central part of the medicine.

The plausibility of the entrepreneurial science discourse rests on clearly traceable pathways demonstrating how university research creates those real economic effects, which are alluring to policy-makers running scared of falling behind their competitors. Whilst the university research team might just encompass a professor, post-doc and PhD student, a spin-off company might employ 10, a larger biotechnology company hundreds and ‘big pharma’ firms typically employ tens or hundreds of thousands of staff. A blockbuster drug is defined as one bringing in $1 billion annual revenue (DG Competition, 2008), and the heuristic justifies universities claiming a share of the moral credit for that economic impact.

This model’s weakness is not least that the pharmaceutical industry is a special case, structured by a lengthy and stringently regulated trial process often lasting over a decade from patent registration to approval. This requires a sharing of risk through a clear contractual division of labour among the different kinds of organizations involved in drug development. In many other industrial fields, where product development is less regulated and faster/more fluid, there is not always a clearly visible and traceable chain. Even in pharmaceuticals, the reality is much more fluid and cyclical than the simplicity of a linear model: there is a knowledge-transfer process, but it is more indirect. Policy-makers have clearly internalised the heuristic as an ideal-type model for how entrepreneurial science operates university knowledge upscaling in traceable ways to create wider economic benefits.

The ‘traceable upscaling’ vision of research impact

The entrepreneurial science discourse has an inductive consistency – a plausible logical model exists, and there is an industry where it (more or less) holds true. Whilst Crossick (2006, 2009) correctly argues that this model applies poorly to humanities research and non-market social development, he fails to address the point that the traceability offered by the model at least explains how individual research actions lead to wider social change, even if framed in a rather restrictive heuristic. But the heuristic is itself a reflection of an underlying and more neutral process whereby knowledge circulates, interacts and upscales, creating wider benefits. A problem arises when policy-makers’ simplistic heuristics are misunderstood as representing a process model: important logical nuance is lost in its translation into a policy paradigm or heuristic. I therefore contend that the ‘gloom in the humanities’ arises because humanities research has failed to develop both a coherent model of how research creates wider value and a comparably convincing argument of ‘traceable upscaling’. Developing a better model requires understanding the underlying structure of the traceable upscaling process in research in more technical fields.

The underlying process of upscaling at its simplest is that an individual piece of scientific innovation – a discovery in a laboratory – improves overall economic performance by circulating in an ever-increasing number of sites. Whilst easily dismissed as a trite, contingent and uncertain process, it is underpinned by three sets of internally consistent theories. The first are business and management literatures regarding university-business interaction, arguing that knowledge transfer fixes universalist academic knowledge in particular business contexts, which permit its later exploitation in innovation activities. Knowledge transfer sees innovators delineate knowledge for their own purposes, contextualise it, make it definable, define it and ultimately take ownership of it.

The second set, the business economics literatures, relates to firm innovation and productivity, demonstrating that innovating businesses have tended to be more economically successful than non-innovative businesses. There are various strategies that firms can adopt to be competitive: they can reduce their product costs, raise its quality or introduce new, superior products through innovation. Innovation gives firms what economists term temporary monopolies: other firms cannot – because they do not own the specific knowledge – compete with the innovation, and for a time-limited period, these firms can extract a monopoly price for their knowledge. Innovative firms are therefore more competitive than other firms (runs the argument), able to grow and employ more people.

A third set of macro-economic literatures chart how these latter effects change the national economy as a whole. Increasing employment, profits and expenditure has wider ‘ripple’ effects – firms’ suppliers and customers, government’s suppliers and customers (i.e. tax beneficiaries), and those who sell to employees all benefit from increased expenditure. Their income increases, and they can in turn afford to employ more people, with a further knock-on effect on their suppliers, customers, employees and shareholders. Of course, this ‘ripple’ dies out as it moves away from the original activity: economists refer to the overall net effect of additional spending on the economy as the ‘multiplier effect’.

Between each of these levels, there is a transaction linking these three stages from the level of the widget (individual) to the level of society (aggregate). The first stage is an individual transaction, between university and firm. The second stage is a network interaction, where a single firm has effects on customers, suppliers, employees and owners. The third stage is an aggregate effect, where these network effects sum up to drive national economic growth. But, at this point, it is important to make a distinction between the theoretical model, where there is multi-directionality and uncertainty and the simplistic heuristic.

Policy-makers have internalised this model assuming that there are automatic links between the stages – outputs from one stage are automatically inputs to the next – and this in turn justifies an ‘investment’ rationality from which its discursive power is drawn. Assuming this automatism simplifies the model to a heuristic of ‘university research drives business innovation which raises firm competitiveness, creating jobs and additional economic spending that drives economic growth’ or even ‘investing in university research is good for national economic wellbeing’. Despite the intellectual incoherence that arises in losing the nuance of contingency, uncertainty and partiality between the stages, the simplification mobilises a heuristic that validates the belief that investing in science policy drives national wellbeing: it is in this effect that I argue lies the power of ‘the belief in widgets’.

Humanities research impact: ‘untraceable’ or ‘untraced’

I argue that my reframing allows two things. First, the model can be reflected on from the perspective of the humanities, considering what it means for humanities research to upscale into social benefit. I then reflect on what this means for constructing an investment rationality and discourse for the humanities as a way to resolve the discourse of ‘gloom’. In the literature, I here distinguish three kinds of processes by which humanities scholars create public value from their research, corresponding to the three scales in the valorisation model (cf. Belfiore, 2013; Loosely, 2011). The first are attempts to detail activities undertaken by humanities scholars in ensuring that their research achieves impacts, for example Hughes et al. (2011) who built on Abreu et al.’s (2009) database surveying UK academics’ engagement behaviours. They undertook a separate analysis of the responses from arts and humanities scholars against other disciplinary areas. Whilst the ‘gloom of humanities’ rhetoric suggests that humanities academics would be less engaged than other areas, Hughes et al.’s (2011) findings were completely the opposite. Humanities scholars were extensively engaged with users in public, private and voluntary sectors. The ‘gloom’ was evident in identity terms, where they had a tendency to view themselves as being more engaged with blue-skies research than other disciplines (cf. Olmos-Peñuela et al., 2015), but nevertheless, UK humanities academics were no more living in ivory towers than more lauded entrepreneurial technical scientists.

The second kind of argument emphasises AHR’s various contributions to cultural and creative industries and ascribes on this basis an economic value to those outputs. Mateos-Garcia and Sapsed (2012) argue that universities make a number of contributions to creative industry clusters, including increasing knowledge stocks, building networks, supplying human capital, problem solving and supporting entrepreneurialism. The Lambert Review in the UK (2003), the Dutch Top Sector policy (2010) and Ireland’s Research Prioritisation Exercise (2012) all see considerable value in universities working with creative industries to improve their productivity and competitiveness and, in all three cases, have directed research funding to supporting those activities.

The third argument is that humanities research underpins the development of complementary capacities to more technical research and thus helps to drive a good, civilised society (Griffin, 2005). Leone (2006) argues that it is often forgotten that the scientific method produces things that are always untrue (although the ‘best’ way of understanding a situation): humanities disciplines are about dealing with that uncertainty and shaping knowledge for living good lives. Parker argues that ‘the humanities deal in discursive, communicated knowledge in creating and evaluating self-authorizing narratives’ (2008: 88). Bod (2010) echoes that point, demonstrating how the specific situated knowledge created in the humanities is necessary for effective use of any kind of scientific knowledge in society, often acting as a precondition for notionally ‘scientific’ advances.

My argument is that these three processes correspond to the three scales of valorisation in the STEM model, but have not to date been linked up discursively to demonstrate humanities research’s traceable upscalability. I do not plan to dissect the arguments that have taken place around the impact agenda on the humanities, as these are well-documented by inter alia Collini (2010) and Looseley (2013). But as Bérubé argues:

Most of the university-affiliated artists and humanists I know are profoundly ambivalent about the idea of justifying their disciplines in terms of social utility…by contrast, scientists are relatively un-conflicted about defending their discipline in terms of social utility. (Bérubé, 2003: 25)

Each of these critiques is equally valid for STEM disciplines: scientists seek to pursue research excellence, not all scientific engagement leads to economic changes, science only raises competitiveness in a few industries and certainly, not all research is economically useful. What the belief in ‘the power of widgets’ does is to trump these critiques with a multi-scale traceable chain of argument, rooted in a coherent model of how research creates value: the problem for humanities is merely that that model does not appear relevant. But intuitively, the three literatures mentioned above hint tantalisingly at a multi scalar valorisation model from which a heuristic could be derived along the lines of humanities scholars are engaged, there are impacts, and these impacts create societal capacities to do new things, hence promoting social development.

In the next section, I seek to pin down this alluring heuristic and consider a more general traceable multi-level model for understanding AHR’s social impact.

Tracing between the multiple levels of humanities research impact

To here finesse a lengthy discussion of what constitute societal benefits, I propose using Corea’s working definition of societal development, namely:

the acceleration of economic prosperity and social well-being, involving a shift away from conditions of life perceived as unsatisfactory towards those that are significantly preferable. (Corea, 2007: 50)

In the first process, academic knowledge (itself notionally a research output) is codified, fixed and transformed in ways that users find useful. AHR makes a weak distinction between knowledge generation and transfer, with the researcher often unselfconsciously performing both roles at different points in the process. In contrast to some sciences, arts (and some humanities) research can be more practice-based, merging scholar and artist roles with user-centred knowledge created first (such as an artefact), on which research is later performed or written. The archetypal example of this is literary criticism: original scholarly thinking is presented in a commercial setting (such as the London Review of Books), which itself is actively part of a wider set of scholarly conversations, without necessarily being entirely scholarly in its nature (cf. McDonald, 2011).

The second process is the circulation of that transformed knowledge within a demarcated community. Continuing the example of literary criticism, London Review of Books (LRB) has an audited circulation of 50,000, not just a passive readership who digest what they are given, but a community who interact and circulate these concepts through lectures and events organised by LRB, in its letters page, and when people respond to its content in other newspapers and blogs. LRB is not the only magazine in humanities with such a community: the Dutch monthly magazine Historisch Nieuwsblad has a similar associated community, who shape a platform by which many Dutch history scholars bring their findings to a wider public. This circulation of transformed scholarly knowledge in a community of interested participants shapes the ‘demand’ for scholarly knowledge and facilitates its uptake and circulation in society.

The final process is when that knowledge becomes consolidated in novel societal capacities for action. Jacobs and Cleveland (1999: 1) argue that ‘social development can be summarily described as the process of organizing human energies and activities at higher levels to achieve greater results. Development increases the utilization of human potential’. That definition is useful in moving beyond a restrictively economistic view of how AHR contributes to societal development (cf. Garland, 2012). In both the Netherlands and the UK, a story can be told of how the circulation of historical research problematising slavery was a necessary precondition for creating a societal capacity to be reflexive and critical about past imperial glories. This created capacities to evolve towards a post-colonial society, in which people’s talents are not wasted because of their ethnic background: something with both a clear positive economic as well as social and ethical dimension.

This seems to suggest that it is possible to construct an ‘investment logic’ for AHR. I draw here on Bérubé:

Common to all the enterprise of the humanities…is the recognition that we are in the business of deciphering, of trying to construct and deconstruct meanings that make intelligible to us some aspects of this social world we sometimes think we know. (Bérubé, 2003: 37)

Three stories of research producing social development and capacity

I concur with Crossick (2006) on the extreme danger in uncritically transferring ideas from science to the humanities and therefore explore whether this multi-scale model I propose is applicable to and relevant for humanities research. To explore this, I confront this model with three stories of humanities producing impact, drawn from a recent research project in which I was involved, HERAVALUE (measuring the public value of arts and humanities research). The research involved case studies of three countries where there had been a public debate over that value, studying its interrelation with the practices of users, policy-makers and also humanities scholars themselves. We make no claims for comprehensiveness and use the cases to disclose the upscaling model’s shortcomings and tensions rather than to justify the approach.

The first example is the case of what is now the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD) in the Netherlands (cf. Benneworth, 2013). Formed as one of the first acts in the post‐WWII liberated Netherlands, NIOD was originally created to document and make sense of Dutch wartime collaboration and complicity in war crimes, and later the controversial decolonisation actions in what was to become Indonesia. The expertise that NIOD developed in documenting, analysing and creating public understanding of war crimes made it reasonable that the Dutch government of Wim Kok turned to NIOD in 1996. Although extending beyond NIOD’s immediate expertise in the Netherlands and its colonies, NIOD was called upon to use its historical expertise to make sense of how the Dutch UN peacekeeping mission in Bosnia became embroiled in a war atrocity within the Bosnian Genocide.

In the Srebrenica massacre, a battalion of Dutch peacekeepers failed to prevent Serbian militia storming what was supposed to be a Bosnian safe haven. Reporting 6 years after the request, NIOD placed the fault for events squarely with the Dutch government and in particular with Prime Minister Kok, who accepted his responsibility with the resignation of the government. The NIOD report provided the Netherlands with a degree of certainty to ‘process’ their complicity in war crimes. There is still an annual memorial service in the Netherlands for victims, and a stream of journalistic articles continue to debate the disaster’s facts and causes. The fall of Srebrenica was included as 1 of 50 themes in the Dutch Historical Canon (itself a substantial humanities research project), thereby passing into the collective knowledge bank. These all point to the creation of a situation preferable to the preceding state of shock and denial regarding those events.

The second example is taken from Gulbrandsen and Aanstad’s work (2013) on Norway and the case of Næss (1973). ‘Næss… was a philosopher who had great influence both in academia and society. He stimulated research far outside of philosophy and was a key inspiration for many post-war researchers and organisations within social science’ (2013: 13). His contribution came by developing a philosophical foundation for green environmentalism, moving beyond the traditional ecological way of thinking, which involved making existing structures and systems more environmentally friendly. He argued that this reasoning was intertwined with social organisational forms themselves generating the environmental crisis. The implicit acceptance of industrialist thinking led to what he called a ‘shallow’ form of green thinking, which he countered by setting out the foundations for the ‘deep’ green ecology movement (Næss, 1973) based on biospherical egalitarianism in contrast to the enlightened anthropocentric totalitarianism of utilitarian pragmatism (Luke, 2002).

His thinking proved extremely influential; Luke charts his participation in a community producing a series of seminal texts that underpinned the green movement’s emergence. The rise of green parties across Europe dates to 1970s, a time marked by an increasing awareness of environmental problems, in part made possible because deep green thinking reframed these problems as more than the inevitable price of progress. Green Parties in the European Union currently account for 45 out of 754 seats in the European Parliament and 189 out of 7100 seats in EU member states’ lower houses. Through the uptake of Næss’ ideas (1973) by the Green Political movement, his ideas provided a language through which a visible percentage of EU citizens is able to communicate their political ideas and express their democratic preferences.

A third example, also of a politically influential philosopher, is taken from Hazelkorn et al.’s (2013) Irish HERAVALUE case study (q.v.). Pettit is an Irish philosopher currently working at Princeton University, having previously studied and worked in Ireland. His philosophical research works at the interface of moral and political philosophy as well as the philosophy of the mind. He specialises in using philosophical architectures well-developed in one philosophical domain to provide insights into less-explored philosophical problems. His work concerns in particular the idea of republicanism as a structural means for ensuring freedom from interference, ‘drawing on analytic theory of mind to develop political philosophy’ (Hazelkorn et al., 2013: 94). His academic influence is indicated by his role as author of the reference work Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy’s 2003 entry for Republicanism.

This academic understanding was leveraged into a wider public role through his involvement with the Spanish Government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, which undertook a substantive reform programme in the 2000s. Reisz (2011) notes that Zapatero read Pettit’s 1997 volume Republicanism in Spanish translation and decided then to use it as the basis for a reform programme should he come to power. Following his election as Prime Minister, Zapatero invited Pettit to speak to his government following its election to set out how to build a well-functioning republic, as well as to come back before the following elections to chart the progress made (Marti and Pettit, 2012). Although the global financial crisis affected Spain very severely, forcing neoliberal state restructuring that undermined some of the freedoms advocated by Pettit (2003), clearly his ideas were translated, codified and institutionalised in ways that created new social capacity in Spain.

Whilst these three examples are drawn from just two fields of the humanities, Bate (2011) makes it clear that similar cases abound across the range of the arts and humanities, including classics, archaeology, literature, language, linguistics, landscape, arts and design, music, law and art. In all these cases, there is some kind of traceable translation and upscaling of the research into the public domain (sometimes involving the concerned scholar, sometimes not) and subsequent circulation of the artefacts and ideas to achieve a wider societal impact. The three stories of impact can also be used to reflect more critically on the traceable upscaling model and its relevance to humanities research’s particularities. It is not merely that an investment discourse can be invoked to justify humanities research to policy-makers, but this traceable upscaling process may itself be a useful way of structuring our thinking about the public value of humanities research. At the same time, this translation–circulation–consolidation model poses a number of wicked issues for understanding the relationship of research and impact.

The tensions of an investment logic in humanities research

The three preceding stories highlight some of the ‘wicked issues’ hidden by the model about which more clarity is certainly required. The simple version of the model is that research is absorbed into a societal structural architecture that drives forward the circulation, absorption and institutionalisation of that knowledge. In this reading, Næss (1973) was active in mobilising a ‘deep green’ activist community, whilst NIOD and Pettit (2003) made their knowledge available on terms which stimulated its diffusion. The sudden resignation of the Kok cabinet, and the political earthquake this brought, can be interpreted as a signal that the report has resonances for Dutch society as a whole rather than merely signalling capacity for functionally dealing with Srebrenica’s psychic consequences. Likewise, Pettit (2003) was publically invited by the Spanish PM to make pronouncements with extreme political value at a time of their greatest visibility, in the aftermath of and run-up to general elections. I appreciate that if my message is to be more than arguing arts and humanities researchers should work more often for Prime Ministers, then understanding this social circulation and institutionalisation process – and its tensions and problems – is important.

The most obvious tension is that this transformation, circulation and consolidation process depends on a wider social ecology of networks, structures, actors and organisations that use – and are willing to use – those research ideas (cf. Parker, 2008). But what if – as Næss (1973) argued was the case with shallow green thinking – this wider social ecology is part of the problem? If social structures regulate how knowledge circulates and is institutionalised, then how can humanities research improve the situation? Certainly, an absence of immediate users does not imply that the research has no value – indeed, it might suggest that the research is urgently needed to address those issues that society otherwise has no capacity to address. But at the same time, in pluralistic societies, even the most excluded groups have voices; if knowledge is useful, one would expect it to find some kind of user. Even if these arenas of its public (as opposed to scholarly) use are largely invisible – such as asylum seeker centres, domestic violence refuges or illegally squatted communities – the circulation process of scientific concepts in these places needs further exploration and understanding. ²

The second tension relates to potential as opposed to realised value and scholars’ responsibilities for realising that value. All three stories involved an element of serendipity – in two cases, the good luck for researchers to be approached by a Prime Minister, and in the third, to be active in a disciplinary field addressing a novel area of social interest, environmental politics. We must avoid the sense that impacts are solely the result of the research’s characteristics, and hence that scope of immediate impact should necessarily be a funding consideration, encouraging researchers to restrict themselves to immediately usable subjects. But as I argue above, identifying that societal need can itself be difficult, and in part, scholars themselves are responsible for uncovering and disclosing those needs and problems. Part of the translation–circulation–consolidation process requires a recognition that it is the scholarly dialectic of researchers pursing many research trajectories, which ultimately produce a set of societal benefits. By way of illustration, the venture capital industry requires thousands of biotechnology projects to produce a handful of business plans of which only one may produce a real return. Of the thousands of humanities research projects undertaken, only a handful will produce visible societal returns, but these returns validate the less visible but still consequential impacts made by many more research activities. And whilst governments have invested billions in knowledge transfer strategies to benefit corporate interests, there is barely any understanding of what kind of policy measures might support an investment pipeline for wider societal development.

Third, a tension arises if the model is interpreted so that only research with an immediate audience or user group is societally valuable (cf. Collini, 2011). The ‘academic knowledge’ transformed and fixed for users is produced in wider academic conversations, and much research has indirect impacts (John, 2013; Molas-Gallart, 2015). Fundamental research may feature in that conversation, without ever being evident or visible to the users. The NIOD Srebrenica report cites 81 pages of literature almost entirely invisible in the contemporary societal discussion. ³ Yet that evidence base informs the reflective discussion by sifting, refining and including evidence then brought together by the Commission and translated through Parliamentary debate and its coverage (Blom and Romeijn, 2002). Likewise, Pettit (2003) positions himself firmly within a discourse of philosophy of the mind, using methods established by fundamental philosophers to develop a political philosophy at least partly implemented within Spain (cf. Brooks, 2013). Clearly, such underpinning fundamental research also has a societal value, as the building block for realising potential for social capacity, without those initial scholars having actively disseminated their ideas beyond the scientific community.

The translation–circulation–consolidation model is not entirely unproblematic. If one seeks to understand the social value of a piece of research, it must not be judged exclusively on its take-up, but on its potential to be taken up, either by users who transform it into useful knowledge or by others in the academic community who embed it within their own ideas with later impact. But the model also provides a useful means for a heuristic framing of humanities research’s public value in a way comparable to that of STEM. Certainly, more understanding and reflection is needed on the social ecology and architecture by which scholarly ideas produce societal improvements, the forums where users express their preferences for research, the communities where these ideas circulate and are institutionalised, and how this creates wider societal capacity. When related to Belfiore’s perennial ‘gloom of the humanities’, the model suggests that arts and humanities researchers could be more sanguine, as it argues for the value of autonomous research as part of a mass generation of ideas, some of which will ultimately make substantial societal differences. More important is the implication that academics and policy-makers can each in their own way afford to have a belief in ‘the power of ideas’ rather than the transfer of widgets, as a foundation for laying a broadly scientific basis for investments, which drive societal development, well being and progress towards a better life for us all.