Being ‘REF-able’. The impact agenda. The student experience. These terms did not always exist in UK higher education (HE) and yet now they are central concerns for university workers, functioning as ideological codes or conceptual schemata that organise everyday academic life. They are used to assess the value of academics and their work in relation to key audit processes that inform the distribution of funding and prestige in UK HE. Using Institutional Ethnography (IE), I analyse three audit processes in detail – the National Student Survey (NSS), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Research Grant application process, and the Research Excellence Framework (REF) – through autoethnographic reflections, interviews, and extensive text analysis of publicly available audit-related texts. I consider two key questions: How is UK HE organised by audit-related texts and discourses? And how much agency do academics have when (re)producing institutions, through the reading, writing, and performing of audit processes? As IE is a feminist approach to research, I also consider how these seemingly neutral audit processes (re)produce intersecting inequalities.

For those who are unfamiliar, the NSS is the annual undergraduate student satisfaction survey for UK universities, used in league tables, course comparison websites, and the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), which assesses teaching quality in universities primarily in England.1 The ESRC is one of seven UK government research councils2 and the largest funder of social science research in the UK, and its generic research funding application process is the Research Grant (ESRC-RG).