Do policymakers understand something radically different by 'impact'?

The creation of 'useable' research has, for some academics, always been part of their role. The impact agenda was strengthened in 2008 when HEFCE announced plans to include impact as part of the newly created Research Excellence Framework (REF) assessment, which ran for the first time in 2014. This has led to significant cultural change in the UK's higher education sector (Manville et al., 2015; Manville et al., 2015). Despite this, there are significant challenges for academics and research users in seeking to maximise the effects of the impact agenda. This research, in seeking to understand impact in more detail, is therefore important and timely as impact becomes further embedded in REF2021 and more widely.
We are in the early stages of understanding the ways in which impact is created, especially in multi-causal, multi-actor environments such as policymaking. My previous work with colleagues (funded by HEFCE) (Bastow, Dunleavy and Tinkler, 2014; Dunleavy and Tinkler, 2018) took a disciplinary look at how social science research achieves impact. This PhD will scrutinize how policymakers see the impact agenda, and whether it is driving an increased take-up of research by policymakers, either through different types of research being undertaken or more targeted dissemination methods. This PhD will examine the problems, contradictions and ethical constraints for academics trying to create impact. The research will also look at two routes to impact: the use of academic blogging - as a short-term first step to creating impact; and the building of partnerships - including co-production of research as a long term impact creator. I will seek to answer four questions:
Q1: What do policymakers understand by impact? Are current theories of impact useful to them and their work?
Q2: What does it mean to be an academic in the age of impact? How do impact activities fit with the other roles and characteristics of being an academic?
Q3: Is social media (particularly academic blogging) a useful channel in disseminating academic research for policymakers, as a first step to creating impact?
Q4: What does the work involved in creating long term partnerships with research users, including co-producing research, tell us about the contradictions between the roles and responsibilities of being an academic and the push to create impact?