SOCIAL IMPACT
the structure and operation of the institution of which we are part. Public value provided a collegiate ‘glue’ that was instrumental in enabling Cardiff Business School to manage the Covid-19 crisis and will again prove pivotal in the current circumstances. Delivering public value remains our purpose as an organisation; what will change is how we go about achieving that. Public value is not reducible to simple metrics, such as the number of high-quality publications we produce, the external funding we attract, or the employment destinations of our students. However, we must still find metrics to demonstrate the worth of public value to our students, research funders and accreditation bodies. We need to turn our efforts into consistent and measurable outcomes that somehow capture our contribution to societal wellbeing and ecological health. While we have many compelling and diverse narratives, we need ways to capture these stories empirically. Presently, the items measured by entities such as QS for the purposes of rankings do not always play to our strengths, but how much should an institution change simply to ‘improve’ its performance in these systems? Fundamentally, we believe public value contributes beyond Cardiff Business School. In our view, our public value education provides students with the core skills, knowledge and personal values to forge great managerial careers in a diversity of organisations. Crucially, it also allows them to develop the moral compass and social awareness to apply those skills for the wider benefit of society. In an era in which risk takes many non-traditional forms, our students’ grounding in public value also provides them with the sensitivity needed to manage complex reputational challenges to organisations.
Living Wage in Wales and other vital initiatives that enable us to collaborate with our local communities. The result has been some compelling narratives and a genuinely distinctive voice among the global business school community. Cardiff Business School was highly commended in the best overall school category of the FT Responsible Business Education Awards in 2024. Public value was also pivotal to the impact cases and research environment statement submitted for REF 2021 and will be again for REF 2029. It has been equally important to our existing accreditation awards, including the Small Business Charter, AMBA and AACSB, as well as our ambitions for EQUIS. The value of public value Public value is – and must remain – a work in progress, as this is key to its inclusive and evolutionary character. Ever-sensitive to the changes around us, our priorities in the short to medium term revolve around three central themes: adjustment to rapidly shifting requirements; measuring our impact; and proving the ‘value’ of public value. There are few higher education institutions that have not been touched by the global economic climate and trends in student recruitment, the public funding of universities and the support given by research bodies. As with other institutions, Cardiff University has engaged in wide-ranging changes to
Peter Wells is pro-dean of public value at Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, where he is also director of the Centre for Automotive Industry Research and a professor of business and sustainability
Business Impact • ISSUE 2 • 2026
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