Bureaucracy and audit are an increasingly pervasive fact of scientific and academic life. In this article, I examine this bureaucracy through the perspectives of non-faculty staff at a Chinese research institute: the Institute for Farms and Forests (IFF). I build upon the lament of a staff member called Tao that inflexible bureaucracy is the…[Read more]

Expectations that research should not only generate real-world impacts but do so in a way that provides “value-for-money” pervade academia and the contemporary knowledge economy. In agricultural research for development, this imperative has spawned “tools” that promise rapidly scalable scientific knowledge on everything from gender inequal…[Read more]

Demands for research to generate impact, along with proliferating institutional regimes for evaluating impact, are a ubiquitous aspect of contemporary scientific practice. Based on participant observation at an agro-environmental research institute in southwest China, this article explores three iterations of a tool for planning and evaluating…[Read more]