This paper argues that public accountability discourse and research quality processes designed to support it are associated with the validation of methodological approaches in social research which claim to capture the real condition of the social world and to remedy its ailments, supporting an expansion of representative modes of scholarship, and a technicist social research culture. Philosophically reflexive modes of thought in social research that offer an important check to power as knowledge are increasingly being marginalised. The paper concludes that the effects of discourse and practices of public accountability on methodological diversity in social research need to be considered in higher education critiques of power to resist this, necessarily entailing reflection upon the philosophical status of 'objective knowledge'.