Segmentation in the Academic Labor Market

Abstract

The constituent determinants of faculty careers have been subject of much scholarship since Logan Wilson [44] introduced concept of self-study to profession fifty years ago. Structural analyses have traced career pathways from entry into profession through retirement, so much so that novices who aspire to replicate successful careers of their research-oriented mentors have an almost complete map to guide them. For graduate students who aspire to toptiered positions, securing entry into professorial system means relying on sources of prestige external to themselves; prestige of their institutions, graduate departments, and mentors plays a combined ascriptive role in securing first academic position [12, 22, 25, 37, 38]. Following entry, responsibility for success reverts to individual within context of his or her academic environment [33]. Productivity, in form of publications and especially citations, takes over as primary mechanism to insure appropriate rewards and, when feasible, mobility [1, 22, 36, 39]. Faculty have been alerted also to modifying effects of fluctuations in academic labor market on institutional recruitment and retention [12, 13, 32, 38, 43] and on institutional incentive and reward systems [33]. As supply of faculty increased in seventies, institutions demanded a higher price in their exchange with faculty of resources for prestige [39, 45] and boosted recruitment and retention standards. Clearly, paths by which faculty realize success in research careers have been demonstrated to be normative. To obtain career counseling from these various lines of research, however, research-oriented faculty of faculty wannabes must synthesize for themselves varied empirical results of the individual determinants of career outcomes [5, p. 37]. But careers are dynamic; they result from compounded individual choices and accomplishments. They also do not evolve in a vacuum. More than a compilation of singular incidents, actions, or interactions with institutions, faculty careers result from ongoing simultaneous impact of external societal factors, such as academic labor market, and internal organizational factors. Moreover, number of positions available in research-oriented universities are limited. Does limited number of positions automatically mean that most faculty settle for positions other than their preference? What of careers of faculty who play out their professional lives in other types of institutions? If factulty careers are a composite of continuous interactions with labor market and with institutions that employ them, then essence of missions must be taken into account. The quid pro quo faculty/university prestige compact that Sorensen [39] suggests drives academic careers in research universities is virtually inoperative in organizations that proclaim themselves as teaching institutions. Rather than relying on mutually beneficial exchange of resources (to faculty) for prestige (to university), teaching institutions orient their missions to and acquire prestige from student-related factors, such as enrollment, student retention and postgraduation success. Do career aspirations of faculty who spend their lives in colleges and universities that are primarily teaching institutions match mission and objectives of these organizations or have they been frustrated as a result of placing lower on a meritocratic line of candidates? Existing knowledge about professional life of faculty in non-research university contexts is scanty [16, 24, 35, 46] and provides few answers to these questions. The purpose of this article is to broaden study of faculty careers by exploring career patterns of faculty who are currently employed in two comprehensive universities. I will argue three points. First, labor market is segmented by institutional type as suggested by Brown [11] and Clark [15], in that majority of faculty in study have chosen deliberately to work in this sector. …