Within many nation states research assessment schemes rank the research performance of individual universities, often as a basis for performance-based research funding (Wright et al., 2014). Such schemes are highly contentious (Rowlands & Gale forthcoming). However, in spite of burgeoning literature on the impact of research assessment on the nature of research outputs, on academic identity, on higher education institutions and individuals and on individual disciplines, there has been little consideration of the impact, if any, on the research practices of academics themselves (Oancea 2014). This presentations seeks to respond to this gap by reporting on case study research undertaken in Denmark in late 2018 on the impact of the Danish points system of research assessment on academic research practice. The research generated data through interview, document analysis and meeting observation, comparing and contrasting the experiences of academics from two different disciplinary backgrounds (natural sciences and humanities) within one research intensive university. Research participants within each department ranged from full professors to PhD students and early career researchers, and also included heads of department and department administrators. The research builds on earlier work (see Wright 2014) undertaken soon after research assessment was first introduced in Denmark, enabling comparison over time. The research found that, for a range of reasons, the national system of research assessment had disproportionately greater effects on research practices and researchers within the humanities department, and on precariously employed early career researchers in particular. Moreover, although the scheme is designed to assess research outputs only at the level of universities and not at the level of departments and individual researchers, some early career researchers reported strategically ‘hunting for points’ through their research choices to maximise perceived employment and promotion opportunities. At the same time, our data show that few researchers had hitherto reflected on the ways these choices affected their research practice. The presentation draws on Bourdieu’s theory of practice (Bourdieu 1977) and on the notion of strategy as practice (Lamaison 1986; Chia & Hold 2006) to theorise these complex relationships and their implications for developing understandings of how instruments of research assessment are not benign but are instead regimes of epistemic governance that can generate significant changes to the nature of academic research practice. In turn, this has implications for the changing nature of research itself, for academic knowledge production and for both creating and addressing epistemic injustice.

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