The Interplay of New Public Governance Dimensions and Their Effects on Academic Outcomes

Abstract

AbstractDuring the last two decades many European universities undertook efforts to improve their doctoral education: some earlier, some later (in particular in Germany and France); sometimes voluntarily, sometimes reacting to external sanctions. Concentrating on departments of economics, we ask for the reasons of evident differences in the success of placing PhDs in academia. We examine three groups of conjectures: differences in the “production technology” differences in the endogenous dynamics of departments differences with regard to exogenous interventions and resources. Our exploratory study rests on 81 semi-structured interviews mainly with supervisors to reconstruct the respective input conditions in the years 2001–2003 and the placement success in the years 2005–2007. We rely on two samples: a large one with 26 economics departments (13 in Continental Europe (G, F, NL, I, Swi), 5 in Great Britain, and 8 in the United States, and a smaller one with only the European continental ones plus 1 in the UK). We use the various versions of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (crisp set QCA, MVQCA, fuzzy set QCA) to identify necessary and sufficient conditions for placement success in our empirical sample.Results: 1. The academic placement success rises with collective recruitment decisions retarded matching of students and advisors, and small PhD/prof ratios 2. There are indeed endogenous drivers of change: An “institutional entrepreneur” or a critical mass of younger professors with US experience a strong research orientation or reputational ambitions. 3. Resources and governance dimensions 3.1. Resource levels play an important role for the academic placement success of PhDs: Research capability, time, money are important, but institutional and organizational arrangements, governance issues, make a difference: 3.2. Among the New Public Management instruments Competition is the predominant governance dimension for academically ‚successful’ PhD programs, but there is no need for politics to mimic governance according to US research universities as long as you can realize highly competitive structures, because there are several best configurations of governance for ‘successful’ PhD education. We conclude by pointing out the limitations of our non representative sampling and the exploratory, non inferential configuration analysis via QCA.KeywordsQualitative Comparative AnalysisGovernance RegimeConsistency ScoreSuccessful DepartmentPrime ImplicantsThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.