Keywords

Introduction

One of the most common ways to grasp the extent to which research and researchers matter is to examine, gauge, or otherwise evaluate their activities in terms of impact. Universities are expected to produce knowledge that effects the societies that surround and sustain them. Accordingly, the extent to which—and the ways in which—humanities knowledge matters to society is a classic topic of debate. How is this time-honored, yet vibrant and polycentric research area useful to the surrounding societies that sustain it? How does humanities knowledge become what Latour (2004, 242) called “matters of concern?”.

The answers to such questions are of course multifaceted, but they have also been resting on limited research and have often been quite poorly articulated. Few would deny that humanities—pivotal for the understanding of language, culture, religion, arts, values, media, politics, and ideas in societies—matters significantly for the development of a well-functioning, democratic society (e.g., Nussbaum, 2010). A significant portion of the most influential, and most cited, scholars consists of philosophers, anthropologists, linguists, or others who represent the humanities. Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Bruno Latour, and Noam Chomsky tower high in the citation tables. Apparently, research in these fields is essential to what societies think and know about themselves, and hence, is citable to a wide array of disciplines over long periods of time (Myrdal, 2009). Yet, what else might be worth foregrounding in debates on the impact of the humanities?

The notion of mattering in society elicits two perspectives: societal impact, which focuses on the outcomes of humanities knowledge production, and knowledge valorization, which concerns the process of creating value from humanities knowledge and thus involves engagement and activities from scholars and societal actors. Although these perspectives are frequently employed interchangeably, they are, in fact, distinct concepts that are intertwined in the sense that research valorization serves as a means to attain research impact (Benneworth & Jongbloed, 2010; Molas-Gallart, 2015). While valorizations may have economic value connotations, they are not limited to commercialization, technology transfer, or conventional innovation but extensively involve informing policy changes, improving societal processes, and educating the general public. We thus understand the term valorization in the humanities context as broader and more inclusive than the STEM-appropriated terms knowledge transfer (which says little about what the transferred knowledge actually does) and commercialization (which covers very little of the impact the humanities offer).

In this chapter, we focus on the valorization of humanities knowledge with the aim of comprehending the manner in which this process engenders societal impact.Footnote 1 Against the examples of Foucault, Butler, Latour, and Chomsky, one would expect new knowledge in these areas to be considered of first-rate importance and its performance and uptake in society monitored closely and constantly researched with great intensity across a range of knowledge fields. However, that does not seem to be the case. With few exceptions, the impact and valorization of humanities knowledge tend to play a marginal part in scholarly work on research policy. Thus, this is not a much-studied subject, at least not if we think of the kinds of analyses that endeavor to chart impacts systematically in pursuit of understanding scholarly behavior, inform policy, and direct investment in research. This kind of research has been conducted for the most part vis-à-vis the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and medicine) for almost a century (e.g., Bernal, 1939; Lotka, 1926; Merton, 1938, 1942). It has subsequently matured and become thematically streamlined and methodologically sharpened, especially since the 1980s, through a range of specialized journals, vast collections of book-length studies, and several handbooks and companion volumes by a substantial community of scholars (e.g., Martin, 2019) without paying much attention to the particular character of knowledge production in the humanities and its significance for society.

The humanities have hence remained a black box of undisputed presence but unclear significance. Subsequently, the understanding of value flows from the humanities is in dire conceptual straits, with merely occasional attempts being made to theorize and empirically pinpoint the ways in which humanities research matters to societies at large. As a result, the impact stemming from this area of research is not very well known, nor is it strongly acknowledged in politics and public discourse. Consequently, the level of investment in humanities knowledge and enrollment numbers in humanities programs rarely stand out as acute policy concerns, in stark contrast to the almost omnipresent engagement in STEM fields.

For a long time, not many seem to have cared much about this state of affairs, bar ritual tirades about the “crisis of the humanities” or demonstrations of their neglect by governments or university leadership (Collini, 2012; Plumb, 1964). Recently, however, policy interest in the impact of the humanities has increased substantially, as evident, for example, in the 2020 strategy for the Humanities at the University of Oslo.Footnote 2 This state of affairs reflects a more searching, probing, and embracing approach to knowledge in an era marked by an increasingly significant interest in societal challenges, mission agendas, and deepening crises of trust, truth, and even democracy—for which STEM knowledge is clearly insufficient (Sörlin, 2018). Strong calls have been voiced for greater contributions from the humanities in dealing with challenges related to climate, environment, and even “the planetary” (Chakrabarty, 2019). In this light, the lack of a comprehensive and nuanced impact and valorization analysis of the humanities is highly problematic (Abreu & Grinevich, 2013; Ekström & Sörlin, 2012, 2022). Another concern is that the lack of analysis may result in an undervaluation of humanities knowledge and, hence, skewed and misinformed investments and priorities in research and education.

The fragile and sporadic nature of the data, combined with the deeper and more demanding complexity of the challenges, should motivate a deeper engagement and a richer repertoire of methodological approaches to understand the valorization and impact of the humanities (Cassity & Ang, 2006). Previous studies have underlined the limited ability of simple output measures based on economic growth imperatives to capture the broader role of the humanities (Belfiore, 2015; Molas-Gallart, 2015). They have also shown how impacts from different fields of knowledge manifest themselves in quite diverse ways (Reale et al., 2018). This hard-to-capture and refracted nature of impacts from the humanities has prompted many scholars (e.g., Molas-Gallart & Tang, 2011; Oancea et al., 2017; Olmos-Peñuela et al., 2014a, b) to instead concentrate on valorization. Identifying and explaining what humanities scholars have been doing to put knowledge into practical use is more tangible and accountable than tracing the impact in terms of societal value.

While such efforts to understand the valorization and subsequent impact of humanities knowledge are informative and useful, they fall short of tracing and understanding the impact in terms of how the societal effects of humanities unfold and create value, often in a complex sequence of linked processes. Voices have therefore been raised, calling for a more substantial understanding of the nature and breadth of impacts from humanities research (e.g., Pedersen et al., 2020) and of the complex feedback from “the social ecology” in which valorization of humanities research plays out (Benneworth, 2015). There are good reasons to take this call seriously. Previous research, covering multiple research areas both in STEM and the humanities, suggests that the impact that unfolds from valorization is not solely conditioned by the actions of academia but also by external actors who offer resources, infrastructure, and networks (Jacobsson & Perez Vico, 2010; Molas-Gallart & Tang, 2011; Perez Vico & Hallonsten, 2017; Spaapen et al., 2011). While this work has enriched the understanding of “the social ecology” of impacts, that is, the complex network of social and institutional factors that shape valorization, there has been little scholarly attention paid to how valorization of research is enabled or hindered by such social complexities. We posit that this enabling and hindering is conditioned not only by scholars themselves but also by societal agents who mandate the acting space in which scholars can put their knowledge to use. Acting space refers to the arena or environment that offers access to various means, such as collaborators, audiences, and channels that in turn enable researchers to make their knowledge useful to society. While this space is conditioned by others, researchers are not merely passive onlookers, and some may actively seek to create such space. However, as we will stress in this chapter, given the hard-to-predict nature of meandering knowledge flows from humanities research, which does not always hold a clear direction or preset purpose, it is of particular importance to pay attention to how and why researchers are (or are not) given access to space for valorization. Through the concepts of acting space and meandering knowledge flows, we wish to provide a richer insight into how knowledge valorization unfolds in the humanities and, by extension, how to understand the impacts that may follow from them.

Objective, Approach, and Organization of the Chapter

Set against the backdrop sketched above, the objective of the present chapter is to produce an account of how the value of the humanities can be explored empirically and grasped theoretically. To this end, we bring together the insights from three previous empirical studies that have investigated the impact of the humanities. These are Hanell (2021), Salö (2021a), and Kotljarchuk (2020)—all to be outlined in some detail in the sections to follow. Taking stock of the features highlighted through these studies, we seek to tease out an account of how humanities knowledge flows through spaces—yet interact with these spaces—in ways that enable impact. This account leads us to a two-pronged argument. Firstly—and pervasively—we argue and make the case for historical impact stories as an apt methodological inroad for the understanding of value flows from the humanities and, by implication, the societal value of humanities research. Historical impact studies are proposed as a fruitful empirical approach for investigating the contextual premises and outcomes of knowledge valorization. This approach is deemed ideally suited for this purpose, and it presents an untapped opportunity to understand these processes in a novel way. Secondly, we introduce and put to work a conceptual prism related to valorization—acting space and meandering knowledge flows—through which the dynamics brought forth by historical impact stories can be grasped. Jointly, as we shall hold, these concepts make up a useful heuristic through which to view and understand value flows from the humanities as a distinct modus operandi. The concepts thus provided prod us to recognize the meandering nature of humanities research. Moreover, it allows us to see how researchers in the humanities actively seek and are given access to an acting space, or rather spaces in the plural, that in turn enhance the societal value of their work. It also allows us to see how such acting spaces can, under certain circumstances, be closed down.

Our approach takes its cue from what has been identified as “an important next step when developing SSH [social science and humanities] impact studies” (Pedersen et al., 2020). Three cases of humanities research in Sweden pave the way for our conceptual framework. Two cases (1 and 2) are based on a wider ongoing research project on the societal effects of the human sciences (Salö, 2021b), whereas the third (3) is an independently produced study. Our cases are selected from long-term humanities research in Sweden of relevance to the politics of language and population and cover almost a full century, from the interwar period up to the present.Footnote 3 All three cases are historical; hence, we know the outcome and can gauge the impact, or importance, of the underlying humanities research much more clearly than we could in contemporary cases. They have been selected because they exemplify the phenomenon we are interested in and there is rich documentation on how the process is conditioned by external circumstances. In our rendering here, the cases are somewhat stylized to pave the way for theorizing efforts.

The chapter is organized in the following way. Firstly, we briefly review research hitherto undertaken to understand the impacts of the humanities with a particular emphasis on knowledge valorization. Secondly, we present our three cases of impact from twentieth-century humanities research in Sweden. The cases show how access and non-access to an enabling acting space conditions the valorization process as impacts unfold over time. They also demonstrate the drastic disparities in societal impact that can follow from different lines of humanities research. Thirdly, we make a case for historical impact stories as an apt methodological inroad for capturing value flows from the humanities. We argue that such an approach allows us to illustrate how impacts of the humanities unfold as meandering knowledge flows over time, conditioned by societal agents that mandate the acting space for valorization.

Research on Humanities Valorization and Impact—A Brief Review

While the structural understanding of knowledge production as part of a value chain of impact and return on investment in research is largely absent in the humanities, many realize and acknowledge a priori the importance of the vaguely delineated field of inquiries that we call “the humanities.” This becomes obvious not just by looking at formative minds working in humanities knowledge fields, such as John Rawls, Hannah Arendt, and Julia Kristeva, or on fundamental topics such as the understanding of society, justice, knowledge, and power. Evidence is also overwhelming when it comes to the general impact of humanities research on knowledge, history, language, and other phenomena without which modern societies would not be possible. The same is true if we look at the attempts that exist to assess the workings of humanities on the level of states and nations. The University of Oslo, founded in 1810, has played an outsize role in the formation of Norway as a modern nation after its secession from Denmark in the early nineteenth century (Myhre, 2011). A study of the uptake of humanities knowledge in the Danish state found that humanities scholars were the single most active category of researchers to communicate with the different branches of the state. The study also found that the humanities was the most widely used category of expertise; virtually all branches of government and state were, in one way or another, supported by humanist knowledge (Gøhler Johansson et al., 2018). Yet, for most work in the humanities, the kind that gains ordinary attention and visibility, we have very little theoretical reflection on, and empirical data about, how it travels beyond academia and what role agents outside of academia play. This profound flaw in the social understanding of knowledge inhibits the development of rational policy for research and innovation, not just in the humanities but across the full spectrum of knowledge fields.

Lacking more original and context-specific approaches, impact studies of the humanities often apply innovation imperatives developed from STEM perspectives. These have typically black-boxed and concealed the empirical detail of the multifaceted work that paves the way for the societal uptake of knowledge and ideas from the humanities, as demonstrated by Belfiore (2015) and Benneworth (2015). Beneficiaries of humanities research tend to be broader, more amorphous, harder to categorize, and less articulate and demanding in their relation to knowledge production compared to, for example, branches of industry or the medical and pharmaceutical sectors. Some may partly overlap with STEM beneficiaries, but they also include completely separate domains such as the creative and publishing industries, museums and media, popular and political movements, government bodies, and the way entire societies think and act (see, e.g., Benneworth, 2015; Cassity & Ang, 2006; Gulbrandsen & Aanstad, 2013).

The multiple differences between humanities and STEM knowledge valorization have implications for the nature of the societal benefits that unfold. Impacts stemming from humanities research are typically much broader than those conventionally captured by the STEM-focused literature, such as contributions to technological innovation and economic growth (Perez Vico, 2018). Since humanities knowledge is not often turned into a new technology or product to which a quantifiable market value could be attributed, we need other methodological approaches to explain the valorization process and assess its impact, different concepts to theorize it with, and a new meta-language to articulate it.

On the latter note, “impact” may not be the right term to denote what the humanities do and achieve; “influence,” “bearing,” or “effects” may arguably better capture their significance (see e.g., Salö (2021b), where “workings” (verkningar) is used to such ends). Nonetheless, we principally utilize the notion of impact in this chapter to speak of the way in which humanities research matters. A reason for doing this is that the bolstering of humanities exceptionalism may detach the research area from other areas in nonbeneficial ways. Another reason for holding on to the notion of impact is that it allows us to profit from what is already known—albeit based on conditions of other areas. Moreover, despite being far fewer than their STEM counterparts, frameworks aimed at identifying broader impacts of the humanities have been offered. For example, Reale et al. (2018) distinguish between three types of impact from social science and humanities research—scientific, social, and political—and Pedersen et al. (2020) develop a typology of academic, policy, social, educational, cultural, and economic impacts. Some of these impact types are particularly important since they are unique to social sciences and humanities research. For instance, they include increasing cultural and historical awareness (Reale et al., 2018), stimulating critical thinking, emancipating marginalized groups, and enabling a more comprehensive understanding of complex societal problems (Pedersen et al., 2020).

In this study, we are concerned not only with identifying impacts but also deciphering how those impacts are enabled or hindered by societal actors as they are, actively or inadvertently, offering or denying acting space. That leads us to look deeper into the valorization activities that scholars perform to ensure that knowledge from research adds value beyond the scientific domain (Benneworth & Jongbloed, 2010; Molas-Gallart, 2015). We are inspired in our approach by several recent valorization initiatives in humanities institutions aimed at strengthening interactions with policy, media, and the broader public under labels such as integrative, post-disciplinary, and transformative humanities. Notable examples can be found in more than 70 Humanities Centers around the world (Holm et al., 2015) and in special initiatives to pursue medical, digital, environmental, and other integrative humanities, at Oxford, Cambridge, LMU in Munich, KTH in Stockholm, and elsewhere (Ekström & Sörlin, 2022; O’Gorman et al., 2019; Sörlin, 2018).

Studies of valorization so far show that humanities researchers interact with actors outside of academia to at least the same extent as researchers in other fields (D’Este & Patel, 2007; Olmos-Peñuela et al., 2014a, b), and often more so (Gulbrandsen, 2016; Pedersen et al., 2018). However, the collaboration patterns are different. Humanities researchers in Spain tend to not use formal kinds of societal collaboration to the same extent as STEM researchers do. On the other hand, they are more often involved in popularizing research that reaches a broader public and in other forms of collaboration with impacts that may be substantive but less traceable (Olmos-Peñuela et al., 2014a, b). Similar patterns were found in studies of British, Australian, and Norwegian humanities research. They reveal frequent collaborations through popular science books and public appearances (talks, consultations, advice) and less often through product-oriented and commercial technology transfer (Abreu & Grinevich, 2013; Gascoigne & Metcalfe, 2005; Gulbrandsen, 2016; Hughes et al., 2011). On the other hand, there are certain countries where humanities scholars are frequently used in formal roles in government and the public sector (e.g., the United States and Sweden).

A framework for understanding valorization introduced transformation-circulation-consolidation processes that set out to capture how individual pieces of arts and humanities research are translated upwards through first-order users, circulated through networks, and consequently create societal improvements. This study contended that valorization is mostly non-linear with disordered and complex feedbacks in a “social ecology” (Benneworth, 2015). Similarly, Bozeman and Sarewitz (2011) present a flexible case-based approach to map the public value of research through value analysis chains. These observations of contemporary or relatively recent interactions echo historical accounts suggesting that scholarship from the humanities, at least in some countries, hold multiple formal and informal links to public agencies, media, and societal institutions of many kinds, sometimes with pervasive influence on society through education, media, or politics (Myhre, 2011; Sörlin, 2021).

To investigate how this conditioning plays out for the humanities is a research endeavor of central importance. Our premise is that the impact downstream depends on whether external actors upstream endorse and support the research and valorization process and, consequently, on how desirable they judge the potential benefits of interaction to be. The intention and willingness to offer such acting space to knowledge from the humanities have not been much studied in previous research.

Based on their comprehensive literature review, the study by Pedersen et al. (2020) identifies a number of methods for research impact assessment in the social sciences and the humanities. The methodological procedures they describe range from interviews to surveys, expert review, bibliometrics, and user evaluation—as well as a number of other methods described in the literature. However, a method that is rare in that literature (but see Bod, 2020) is the historical impact story, here understood as case studies tracking the ways in which knowledge production and exchange eventually affect policy or in some other way yield change. Such studies detail the impactful pathways of mobile ideas of the humanities that, under favorable social conditions, morph into actionable or otherwise useful knowledge in decision-making processes and thus render policy impact visible (Salö & Karlander, 2018; see also Bertilsson, 2021). In the following, we aim to explore how historical impact stories can help us gain a comprehensive understanding of the premises of valorization of humanities knowledge, and consequently, its impact on society.

Three Historical Impact Stories

In this section, we present three historical impact stories. At its heart, the approach aligns with seminal work within the history of science and historical epistemology, particularly work geared toward addressing the slow and culturally conditioned production and reception of scientific knowledge (e.g., Fleck, 1935/1979; for a useful overview, see Rheinberger, 2010). In a similar vein, more recent work has opted for a historical approach to explore how humanities knowledge “travels” (Howlett & Morgan, 2011) and how the effects thereof have brought about societal and technological change (Bod, 2020).

As applied here, historical impact stories involve examining the prehistory of tangible outcomes such as steering concepts, policies, and the like with a view to tracing the conditions under which impact was able to emerge. It explores the often-unnoticed labor of central entrepreneurs who have contributed to the development of new concepts over time, highlighting how the concepts were launched and dispersed, and how they morphed and fused with other concepts, eventually to become impactful—or to be rejected (Ambjörnsson & Sörlin, 1995, p. 7). Notably, however, the three studies we present mobilize their own approaches to historical impact stories, and fleshing out a comprehensive methodological procedure is beyond our objectives here.

Case 1: “Cultivated, Simple and Comprehensible”: Plain Language in Sweden

The language of the public sector in Sweden is required by law to be “cultivated, simple and comprehensible.” This is stipulated in what is commonly called the “Plain language section” of the 2009 Language Act of Sweden. In the first case study, by Hanell (2021), this juridical requirement is analyzed as a product of a process that stretches more than 100 years back. In this process, the notion of “plain language” (Swe: klarspråk) was established as a particular ideal for language use which, in turn, was bound up with specific academic expertise. Hanell demonstrates how the plain language ideal emerged from the common-sense idea that the core function of language is to transmit information between people, and that the best use of language, therefore, is that which transmits information with as little disturbance as possible, rendering clarity a prime communicative-ideological virtue (cf. Hanell, 2017). As Hanell’s study shows, this common-sense idea was appropriated in the late nineteenth century by Swedish linguists, most notably Adolf Noreen, who successfully claimed that linguistic expertise is necessary to fulfill this ideal (Noreen, 1885). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, linguistic expertise was commonly acknowledged as necessary for the education of school pupils, and several academic linguists wrote handbooks on the use of the Swedish language for such an audience. However, for a long time it was entirely unheard of that linguists might have something to say about language used by adults in the public sector.

This state of affairs was upended as the Germanist, public intellectual, and former student of Noreen, Erik Wellander, wrote a report about language use in public inquiries, published as a public inquiry itself in 1950 (Wellander, 1950). Wellander’s work paved the way for further engagement by linguists in language use in the public sector. Hanell’s study shows how Wellander became a key agent in the establishment of a Swedish infrastructure for what came to be known as language care (Swe: språkvård; the phenomenon is also known as language policy and planning), most notably by shaping the institution The Board for Swedish Language Care (Nämnden för svensk språkvård), founded in 1944. Through Wellander’s public inquiry, the language of the public sector gradually came to be seen as a central object for such “language care,” the core purpose of which was to modernize the written language of the state by making it more similar to everyday speech. This idea resonated well with progressive ideas in the formative years of the Swedish welfare society; accordingly, over a period of several decades, it became implemented in a cautious, yet determined and institutionally solid fashion, step by step.

In the 1960s and onwards, the modernization argument was complemented with arguments for democracy: a clear use of language was thought to help bridge the distance between citizens and government agencies. Several books and booklets from this era propagated a clear use of language, among them a booklet in 1979 that started using the term klarspråk (plain language) to refer to the ideal. The infrastructure for implementing this ideal continued to grow in the 1980s, after which it became common for public institutions to employ language experts who received standard training at the Language Consultancy Programme at Stockholm University. In the 1990s, the concept of “language politics” emerged as a contender to that of “language care.” A number of key agents became involved in formulating a politics of language in Sweden; here, the plain language ideal was included among the key issues. Therefore, as the idea was formulated to legislate linguistic issues such as the right to use Swedish in contacts with public officials, the plain language ideal was also granted space, resulting, in 2009, in a Language Act that declared that “The language of the public sector is to be cultivated, simple and comprehensible.”

There are several observations to make from this brief summary of a profound change in public language norms and practices in Sweden. The first is that it has been a reform of immense significance that has likely speeded up the modernization of society and indirectly rendered the state and all its institutions a partner and a change agent in the process. The impact was rooted in close interaction between individual linguists and a long sequence of public agencies and commissions—many more than those mentioned above. In the 1980s the issue had become mature enough to be conducted mostly within state agencies and government departments, without much push or effort from the linguistic community, although they remained involved. Another important factor is that individual scholars were, more than once, assigned to rather loosely defined inquiries where the scholars were expected to work for the betterment of the nation and its democracy by focusing on language.

A further characteristic of the main protagonists of this story, chiefly Erik Wellander, is that their roles as experts and advisors lasted over a very long time. They were persistently valuated by peers and influential agents as significant contributors. This positive valuation was assisted by the institutionalized system of public inquiries that allowed the generous time necessary to arrive at a satisfactory and useful result that most actors in society could agree on. We may also note that this profoundly successful impact of linguistic knowledge was not about the application of a particular research “result” or “innovation.” Rather, it was an entire social philosophy of language that made its way from common-sense, ideas, through scholarship, to a more specific social norm. In retrospect, it seems instrumental that these developments took more than a century to unfold. Contrary to a fast and direct process from knowledge to impact, the slow, meandering route of knowledge was allowed acting space for a thorough construction of societal infrastructures that could both legitimate and execute the Language Act as it was put into place.

Case 2: Bilingualism Research and the Introduction of Mother Tongue Instruction

Salö (2021a) offers a second example through a study of the formation of mother tongue instruction (MTI) in Sweden. Since the 1970s, municipalities in Sweden have been required to provide linguistic minority children and adolescents education in and about their mother tongues. As a school subject in its own right, MTI is currently offered to speakers of more than 160 languages. The school subject is, as the study posits, an educational innovation.

From the late 1960s, the MTI policy was realized through an interwoven process of scholarly knowledge valorization that emerged under favorable contextual conditions. The immigration policy of postwar Sweden had been characterized by more or less explicit assimilation efforts. Immigrants were expected to adapt to Swedish culture, language, and ways of living, and scant efforts were made toward catering to the particular needs of minorities. However, from the mid-1960s, a critical debate on assimilation brought about a new climate of opinion in which the quest for assimilation was considered to be irreconcilable with that of equality. The public and political stance was gradually characterized by a will to acknowledge and support categories of difference—including the rights of immigrants and minority groups—in Swedish society at large. Throughout this process of mobilization, activists, politicians, and scholars from the budding field of international migration and ethnic relations—notably social psychologist Arne Trankell and sociologist Harald Swedner—were united in the task of bringing about change. Among others (see Schwartz, 1966), the Swedish linguist Nils Erik Hansegård contributed by pointing to the purportedly detrimental effects of disallowing the teaching of minority children in and about their mother tongues. More specifically, Hansegård’s (1968) theory on so-called semilingualism became a particularly impactful policy driver in the years to come, although the concept as such was unequivocally rejected only a decade later (see Karlander & Salö, 2023; Salö & Karlander, 2022).

In 1968, the Swedish government launched an ad-hoc “Immigrant Commission” (IC) with the task of compiling and producing relevant knowledge on the matter. Its mandate also included the presentation of policy recommendations within immigrant and immigration-related areas. Throughout the next six years, the commission served as a platform for mutual knowledge diffusion between politicians, bureaucrats, school representatives, and enrolled experts, many of whom were scholars who had previously shown an interest in the questions at hand (e.g., Trankell, Swedner). The inquiry also served as a means to build collective legitimacy for a shared vision and goal—the rights of minorities and a pluralistic immigration policy. Identifying solutions within the area of bilingual education was one of the critical issues discussed in the commission’s work. This opened up a space for the valorization of an emerging group of bilingualism researchers, among them Hansegård and Tove Skutnabb-Kangas. Some of these scholars had previously acted as opinion leaders and thus played a part in enabling their own valorization by creating a market—or acting space—for their expertise.

Nevertheless, many arguments put forward were underpinned by early research pointing to the value of immigrant children’s right to maintain and cultivate their multilingual repertoires through state-mandated teaching. These efforts, in combination with aligned input from other stakeholders, contributed to establishing a policy for so-called “home language instruction” for immigrant children, launched as a national policy since 1977.

The case illustrates how a valorization process encompasses mutually reinforcing knowledge diffusion and legitimation. Through emerging consensus, the different actors involved in the process legitimized and enabled each other’s actions in terms of knowledge valorization and policy development. The importance of contextual conditions is salient. However, the case also lays bare a logic through which producers and users of knowledge co-contribute to each other’s rise and success.

On the one hand, the shifting climate of opinion to some extent came about through the scholarly efforts of linguists, whose perspectives were increasingly seen as policy-relevant (Widgren, 1982). The IC might not have launched without the push of scholarly agendas; at least, it would not have embarked on the progressive directions it did without the signposts provided by research accounts produced within the humanities. On the other hand, it appears that the visions embedded in burgeoning fields such as bilingualism research could not have been valorized, if developed at all, a couple of decades earlier. The actors who jointly made up the IC, in this regard, created the conditions for the scholarly agenda to gain salience by making the field’s thus far rather rudimentary findings actionable.

Case 3: Allan Etzler and the Demise of Racist Roma Studies

We could also find instances where the same innovative institutional structure produced problematic results with less, or a less lasting, impact, although failure is sometimes also a kind of a blessing in disguise, as we will see. The point to make here is on the restricting of acting space for valorization. We will use the example of Allan Etzler, a Swedish historian originally focused on medieval history who later, partly following his fieldwork in prisons, took up an interest in the Roma people and also learned the Roma language. Etzler’s winding career from the 1920s through the 1940s has been carefully researched by historian Kotljarchuk (2020), whose inquiry we mainly follow below.

Etzler was a doctoral student at Stockholm University who, at the age of 42, defended his dissertation in 1944 after protracted study. He had used his newly acquired knowledge of Roma to gather information from Roma prisoners. Combining his prison research with extended travels to Finland, Norway, and Denmark, he studied penitentiary systems and especially how these countries dealt with the so-called “gypsy problem” (Montesino, 2001). He also studied the German Nazi system and found inspiration in the work of Robert Ritter, who was the leading state official responsible for Roma policies in the Third Reich and was later sentenced in the postwar trials. At first, Etzler’s work had a considerable impact in its own right. His valorization included liaising with key public officials in the penitentiary system and in legal circles, and building networks among museum intellectuals and in academic circles of race biologists in Sweden (Wiklander, 2015). His articles for the news media were printed and circulated widely, and his policy recommendations to limit personal freedom for Roma and separate them from other parts of the population in special camps drew a lot of interest (Montesino, 2001).

By the end of the war, at the time of his doctoral defense, the previous, generally favorable climate for his ideas in wide official circles in Sweden had turned around. His research and his policy advice in particular became increasingly unpopular, explained by the demise of the German war effort and the growing awareness of the Nazi extermination camps, including the atrocities that affected the Roma people. The “pseudo-scientific racism” (Kotljarchuk, 2020) that had previously been largely accepted in academic circles was by now swiftly going out of fashion across the entire political spectrum, whereas in the past it had been criticized mostly by liberals and the left.

Kotljarchuk presents Etzler as “a clear example of déformation professionnelle.” Using his network, which covered both academia and law enforcement agencies, Etzler contributed to anti-Roma discourse. On further scrutiny, however, his research was methodologically weak and easy to critique. The evidence he had presented in support of regarding the Roma as inherent criminals did not stand even elementary critical, empirical examination. His downfall as a trustworthy scientific expert and advisor, however, lay chiefly in the fact that the value structure of society changed, and so his acting space for valorization became restricted. This also comprises several social institutions, which had an interest in linguistic, historical, and social science knowledge of the Roma in Sweden. One can say that precisely the kind of progressive, welfare-state-oriented public machinery that facilitated the success of plain language reform in this particular period also worked effectively to halt the career of Etzler and stop his favorite ideas of anti-ziganism.

Meandering Knowledge Flows Through Acting Spaces

What do the examples we have presented tell us about the processes in which scientific knowledge—aligning with the core theme of the present book—comes to matter? In this section, we draw out some of the features found in the three historical impact studies and discuss them—first individually, then jointly—through the two concepts of acting space and meandering knowledge flows. This will lead us to a discussion on how the winding features of knowledge flows form an essential part of the conditions that allow value to be ascribed to humanities research and enables it to matter.

Meandering Knowledge Flows: The Winding Features of Valorization

As noted earlier, like the human sciences more generally, the humanities benefit from developing their own ways of conceptualizing the impact of the knowledge they produce—based on the ways in which such knowledge moves. In this spirit, Carol Weiss (1979, 1980) invoked decades ago the idea of “knowledge creep” to capture the slow-moving tempo that characterized informed decision-making in mental health care. Her argument was, essentially, that decision-makers often do not know why and how humanities and social science knowledge came to influence their way of reasoning, ultimately because of the diffuse ways it had been absorbed. Weiss’s work has since developed (e.g., Weiss, 1995) and proved inspirational for new generations of scholars seeking to account for knowledge utilization in the interaction between the human sciences and policymakers. For example, Meagher et al. (2008) proposed a method to assess science–policy interaction by utilizing the notion of “flows of knowledge” so as to capture the long-term, indirect, and serendipitous character of the impact stemming from social science research.

Following this line of thinking we ask: What do the cases we have briefly recounted tell us about the ways in which humanities knowledge moves? Without a doubt, the argument in Weiss’s (1979, 1980) work gels nicely with the slow pace and twists and turns evident in the impact stories recapped here. We take from Weiss, accordingly, the idea that knowledge valorization in the science–policy interaction of the humanities is often creep-like; it is slow and easily goes unnoticed. However, based on the three examples we have provided it would seem that knowledge creeps into the empirical realities not in a sense of advancing within a neutral space but rather in a vein where the space itself had a decisive impact on the direction and speed of that knowledge. As such, the cases pinpoint that a flow of knowledge depends on the surrounding “terrain” or space as a conditioning feature of knowledge use in and of itself.

Accordingly, through our three historical impact stories, we consider it apt to depict the ways in which humanities knowledge moves in terms of meandering, taking up the image of the meander from natural watercourses such as creeks and rivers. In these natural contexts, the winding, or meandering, course that water takes is instrumental for natural processes that allow water purification and the absorption of vital nutrients. By drawing on the image of the meander we do not suggest that knowledge functions like water in the sense that it becomes “purified” as it streams, nor that there is a general force of gravity that propels it forward. However, we do suggest that what characterizes the exchange between the humanities and society is that knowledge “runs unevenly” rather than as a steady flow (Salö & Karlander, 2022, p. 134). In precisely this vein, meandering knowledge may move slowly at times and faster at other times, and sometimes it is cut off from the mainstream in what becomes a blind alley oxbow lake of still-standing water. Just as for natural watercourses, the unpredictability and the “shaping” character of this meandering process of knowledge flowing through institutions and communities can be instrumental in building fruitful exchanges with users and partners in impact-making. This insight renders necessary another set of reflections on how impacts come about or how research comes to matter. Because even if humanities knowledge is constantly flowing in a meandering way without being utilized, valorization will always encompass meandering knowledge flows.

Acting Space: Conditions of Value Ascriptions

Against the unpredictable character of the meandering process in which knowledge flows and impact unfolds, one might assume that it’s “shaping” is autonomous. Yet, the insights from the three cases tell us in concrete terms about how actions and inactions of valorization partners and beneficiaries shape the meandering process. One may be tempted to say about Etzler’s case (3) that it was the low quality of his pseudo-scientific racist research that ultimately toppled it. In reality, that is only part of the explanation; after all, racist research had remained hegemonic for decades across the Western world despite severe and justified criticism. We need to look instead at the institutional structures that ascribe value to the research and based on that valuation open a space for valorization. As long as the established societal institutions and the “ethical environment” (Blackburn, 2001) of language and communication allow it, a particular kind of knowledge can continue to hold sway. Both case 1 (Wellander) and case 3 (Etzler) should rather be seen as examples of instrumental expertise. The term has been proposed by Steven Shapin, who has observed the ever-closer connections during the twentieth century between the state and expert-based knowledge: “instrumental expertise, not knowledge but knowledge-power, not truth but competence in predicting and controlling” (Shapin, 2008, p. 40).

Talking of instrumental expertise is useful because it leads away from the notion of the universal virtue of applying “knowledge” to society, as if knowledge is inherently and always a good thing that brings desired outcomes. In all three cases, the scholars representing the “new knowledge” receive moral encouragement and institutional support from significant actors external to the knowledge production itself that allow them to make their knowledge useful. In cases 1 (plain language) and 2 (mother tongue instruction), the linguists continuously enjoy this support. The support creates repeated spirals of success, similar to the “internal credibility cycle” in the sciences (Latour & Woolgar, 1979/2013), where valuation (peer appreciation) is positively linked to increased material support, which in turn enhances opportunities to create more knowledge, enabling further research for more positive valuation, etcetera.

Correspondingly, understanding how the impact of research unfolds thus requires an understanding of the processes through which a diversity of societal actors attribute value to a piece of tangible or intangible knowledge, a research activity, or an individual scholar, and consequently provide or deny acting space. The societal view on the research is thus closely linked to the potential of valorization, and, ultimately, of impact. The ability to generate the impact of research through changing public perceptions will depend on the acting space given to a scholar by various societal actors, such as through the granting of access to advisory boards for public inquiries, interview occasions, and public debates. Whether an acting space will be granted will in turn depend on how desirable a societal actor judges the knowledge, the action, the potential benefit, or the scholar to be. Some decisions to grant or deny such space will, ultimately, be political.

Although these cases reveal how acting space and valorization intertwine, their connections have not been acknowledged in the study of research impact. It is already increasingly established that research quality must be understood according to the particular mission of the institutional framing and purpose of the research under evaluation and consequently the outlook of the agents that valuate the research (Langfeldt et al., 2020). In the same spirit, we argue that understanding the societal impact of research requires accounting for how agents mandate the acting space based on their valuation of the scholar or knowledge. Hence, we need inquiries and methodologies that can systematically identify, analyze, and make sense of the impact of the humanities.

The dynamics highlighted through the three cases resonate with impact frameworks that account for the interdependence between a wide set of effects that unfold in sequences over time (e.g., Benneworth, 2015; Spaapen & Drooge, 2011). One example of particular relevance to the concepts of acting space and meandering flows of knowledge is the framework of sequences-of-impact (Perez Vico, 2014; Perez Vico & Hallonsten, 2017), which captures value flows as long-term, unpredictable impact sequences where the valorization of academic research is highly dependent on the actions of others. This frame highlights that the impact of research unfolds depending on whether external actors, whether public, private, political, or governmental, have the intention to participate, support, or in other ways enable such a process (Perez Vico & Hallonsten, 2019). By conceptually linking valorization to a market where value is assigned, our approach connects to the emerging field of valuation studies and the ambitions of previous scholars to explore the relationship between valuation and valorization in order to gain a coherent fine-grained understanding of how value is created from knowledge (Vatin, 2013).

Concluding Discussion: Humanities Matter

Our focus on the valorization of humanities knowledge, with the aim of comprehending the way this process engenders societal impact, teaches us that there is a social logic according to which research comes to matter. Our three cases add to the existing literature by emphasizing i) that valorization does not necessarily unfold in a straightforward or even manner, but rather in what we have here called a meandering way, and ii) that this meandering process is significantly conditioned by societal agents that mandate what we have called the acting space of valorization.

There are three critical implications of this insight for the study of impacts of the humanities, but also arguably for the study of the impact of all types of scholarly knowledge. Firstly, this means a shift in perspective regarding who we want to direct our attention to when we search for the effects of research. Rather than just focusing on the actions and non-actions of academics, this perspective shift obliges us to look at the external actors, how they valuate a certain piece of scientific knowledge, its promise, or its originator(s), and whether the outcome of this valuation hinders or enables the propulsion of impact by mobilizing different types of spaces and resources. For example, influential voices in research and innovation policy rather counteract humanities knowledge and seek to replace existing networks between humanities knowledge and public beneficiaries with ones that better serve their purposes. In Sweden, such a strategy has been pursued by the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise (e.g., Fölster et al., 2011). Impact is not just about applying new knowledge in a constantly benevolent social environment. It is also a competition among societal actors for values they wish to see realized, and these actors select knowledge that they believe offers favorable conditions according to their interests. Nevertheless, rather than being a passive actor whose ability to create benefits depends entirely on the enabling actions of others, scholars contribute substantially to creating their own acting space. As all three cases signpost, researchers have been able to exert an influence on those contexts, not least by equipping those who act therein with “tastes in harmony with the products these producers offer them” (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 252).

Secondly, this leads to a more serendipitous view on valorization, and consequently, on impact since timing becomes a significant conditioning element. Academia and scholarly knowledge are in many respects slow-moving institutions. Thus, society’s values will change at a pace that academic endeavors struggle to sustain. What is highly valued today will be less valued tomorrow, and this will influence the conditions for valorization. Given this circumstance, it is hard to judge the usefulness of scholarly knowledge only from its impact at a certain point in time. As apparent in all three cases, but most evidently in the case of Allan Etzler, this interactive valorization process unfolds in an acting space that is provided or denied as a consequence of a climate of opinion that conditions the market, ascribing value to mutually created knowledge.

Thirdly, our historical take on impact and effects implies a shift of responsibility for impact from academia. Rather than appraising the usefulness of research based solely on the traces of impact we can observe, we instead need to understand effects as a mutual process where both sides bear responsibility. We need both research that provides new knowledge, and societal agencies that allow acting space for knowledge to become used, affective, and effective. Considered jointly, the three historical impact stories invite us to grasp a multidirectional set of relations involved in directing the value flow from the humanities. Notably, to invoke the direction “from” the humanities ought not be used to suggest that knowledge simply moves from research to society. On the contrary, interaction lies at the heart of valorization, ultimately because it requires some part that is positioned to impart value to the knowledge produced.

To fully perceive and do justice to the profound impact that humanities research has on societies and cultures, a historical modus operandi is necessary. We show how the use of historical impact stories is an effective method for short- and middle-range periods alike. The cases we offer illustrate the ways in which impacts of the humanities unfold as meandering knowledge flows over time, conditioned by societal agents that mandate the acting space for valorization. We argue for the need for an approach that captures such hard-to-predict, nested, long-term, and complex value flows, and makes the case for historical impact stories as a methodological inroad. We thus propose that historical impact stories provide an apt addition to the literature on methodological approaches to mapping the impact of the humanities (e.g., Benneworth, 2015; Pedersen et al., 2020). We hold that exploring impact historically provides a way of detailing knowledge effects as undisputable facts—“witnessing their birth, their slow construction, their fascinating emergence as matters of concern” (Latour, 2004, p. 242).

In all, the inclusive, context-dependent, and long-term framing and methodology we suggest is particularly useful from the perspective of humanities research that is characterized by slow, diffuse, and multifaceted ways of societal uptake of scientific knowledge and ideas (Belfiore, 2015; Benneworth, 2015). Nevertheless, we also see a significant opportunity to leverage the humanities’ views to capture many of the long-term and less visible impacts that appear in other disciplines.

By observing the impact of the humanities through the concepts of acting space of valorization and meandering knowledge flows, we find that the influence of humanities scholars is profound through “generic ideas” on fundamental issues such as how human culture and societies are conceived and how they work and function. We find it rather remarkable that the prominent position of humanities scholarship is hardly acknowledged within innovation research, science policy, and the broader debates on how universities matter. However, we also acknowledge that it is in the hands of humanities scholars to address the current lack of perspectives thereof. Humanities scholars ought to find ways of articulating their own modes of mattering, for if they cannot do it, who can? Through this chapter, we hope to have contributed to this end.