Organisational change in UK higher education has resulted in control of the student learning environment passing from specific disciplines such as psychology to central management teams and university-wide course frameworks. This poses the general question of how disciplines can exert influence upon broad pedagogic issues, when their control extends only to relatively local matters, and the specific methodological problem of how action researchers can investigate topics of general importance when they are only able to make local interventions. Though higher education managers emphasise accountability and evidence-based practice, their own decision-making processes rarely use pedagogic evidence. Examples from a research programme within one psychology department are described, that attempt to apply psychological research methods to generic issues of pedagogy. An important motivation for this programme is the belief that by generating evidence through research, psychologists can both intervene in debates outside conventional control, and assist management decision-making processes to move towards becoming evidence-based. (Contains 2 tables.)