How National Contexts Shape Academic Careers: A Preliminary Analysis

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to take an initial step to build upon the work of Joseph Ben-David (Centers of learning: Britain, France, Germany, United States. McGraw-Hill, New York, 1977), Burton Clark (The higher education system: Academic organization in cross-national perspective. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1983) and Christine Musselin (The market for academics. Routledge, New York, 2010) with a view toward identifying the major structural features of national higher education system and academic markets that directly shape academic work and careers, collect some preliminary data on those features across a wide array of national systems, and develop a preliminary approach to categorizing those national system differences in ways that meaningfully allow them to be brought into multivariate analysis of large survey data sets. Here five heuristic models based on these 13 characteristics are introduced.