Guardians of the Discipline: Institutional Maintenance through Tenure Review

Abstract

While interdisciplinary research continues to be promoted in universities, early-career researchers struggle to receive recognition for their interdisciplinary work and advance in their academic careers. Drawing on institutional work and the study of professions, we examine how professional norms around career promotion are discursively constructed and used in institutional maintenance. We conducted 59 interviews with department chairs, directors of interdisciplinary research centers, and disciplinary and interdisciplinary untenured scholars in an American university. We identify two modes of discursive institutional work—expansion and expulsion discourse—which suggest that while interdisciplinarity activated efforts to transform tenure review, it also triggered institutional work to maintain disciplinary order. The untenured interdisciplinary scholars used expansion discourse to argue that the tenure review norms should be revised. However, the untenured scholars simultaneously drew on expulsion discourse to reflect on the illegitimacy of interdisciplinary research. The senior scholars relied mainly on expulsion discourse arguing that interdisciplinary research among tenure track faculty should be renounced. We contribute to extant literature by demonstrating the discursive and performative aspects of institutional work by professionals as well as by shedding light on the discursive production of justifications for institutional practices that actors seek to legitimize and maintain. More broadly, our findings problematize the career risks that untenured interdisciplinary scholars take to accomplish the interdisciplinary aims of their universities.