Description: In Australia the Commonwealth government is about to introduce a research quality framework (RQF), along the lines of the UK's research assessment exercise. This has provoked considerable debate amongst education researchers at the national level, surfacing critiques of the strengths and limitations of education research, fuelling fears about the disciplinary effects of bureaucratic definitions of 'quality', and encouraging debates about how education might best position within the RQF environment. This paper contextualises these debates by considering the way Australian education research has been produced as a result of national cultural and institutional framing and its interface with global research policy and practice networks. Specifically, we reflect on four distinct sub-fields of education research - teacher education, curriculum, gender and VET research - in order to understand the way critical factors, such as policy and political agenda, engagement with theory, career trajectories and international dissemination and impact, have differentially driven research formation. These analyses reveal distinct patterns of institutionalisation and research cultures that have locked in particular education research practices within the Australian context. We argue that these processes of historical and cultural research formation present particular challenges in the Australian RQF environment but also provide potential resources for negotiating the broader global policy steering of education research of which the RQF is a part. On this basis we outline elements of a conceptual framework that might inform a systematic national and cross-national study of the social organization of education research investigating the global-local interface manifest in research steering and national education research formations, and the resources that might be mobilised in politics around the reconfiguration of education research.