Academic Labor Market Research Articles

Mid-career outcomes of doctoral graduates from German universities explained through triadic thought

ABSTRACT This article critically examines the early career experiences and mid-career outcomes of domestic and international doctoral graduates from public German universities in the social sciences and humanities over two decades. We develop triadic thought as a spatial theory to conceptualise professional careers as situated coproductions in the complex interplay of career considerations, career praxis, and career environments. Drawing on qualitative interviews and the analysis of mid-career outcomes, our theoretically informed findings identify three formative influences on career decisions: first, the discursive normalisation of an academic career; second, the practical normalisation of shifting career goals; and third, the material normalisation of a public sector habitus. To mitigate the reinforcement of a congested academic labour market and striking tensions between individual career challenges and systemic benefits of temporary jobs for institutional and national productivity, we encourage a Bologna-style reform to create compatible academic career structures within Europe.

Assessing the relation between academic talent mobility and academic output

There is a great controversy between academic talent mobility and academic output. This paper obtains the list of mobile academic talents (experimental group) from NSF. It matches them into the control group list according to the indicators of an academic institution, department, research direction, entry time, age, and NSF fund obtained in the near year. It carries out a seven-year follow-up survey on the quantity and quality of papers published by the experimental and control groups, using the "quasi-experimental research" method for the first time. The results show that, on the one hand, the academic output of Chinese academic talents is highly stable. Mobility is not the critical variable affecting academic output, indicating that academic output is more related to talents' research habits and research ability, which shows the highly stable academic quality of scholars; on the other hand, the study finds that scholars returning from overseas manifest the stability of academic output whose number and quality of academic papers remain highly stable even if the mobility happens again. This study reveals the objective relationship between academic talent mobility and academic output. It has significant reference value for China in the next stage of attracting talent from the international academic labor market.

Conditions and Specifications in the International Competitions for Academic Employment

The academic labour market in Europe and worldwide is increasingly dynamic and competitive in terms of offering positions and requirements for candidates. The competitions are public and international. The paper’s goal is to outline the parameters of these trends. The requirements and conditions for international academic staff hiring are not a subject that is often discussed in Bulgaria, and the paper’s task is to fulfil this deficiency. This is achieved through а sample of international academic job offers published between 2021 – 2022 which is followed by empirical, comparable and content analysis of them. As a result, the actual characteristics of the international academic labour market are outlined based on 105 job offers from 91 universities in 6 continents. Examples of one scientific field (political science) are used in order to achieve a higher comparability of the results

Ageism and age anxiety experienced by Chinese doctoral students in enacting a “successful” career script in academia

This paper employs the notion of a “career script” as a conceptual basis to examine how age-based academic career norms are internalized, strategized, and reproduced among PhD students aspiring to become academics. It draws on interviews with 70 PhD students at leading universities in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau that were organized and explored using narrative inquiry. The findings suggest that the tournament-like, age-based career scripts are primarily shaped by institutional policies on recruitment and funding applications and reinforced through social interactions. Doctoral students internalize the established criteria for success defined by the career scripts and stigmatize those who lag behind in the attainment of institutionally predetermined milestones, thus discouraging any attempt to rescript career norms. While enacting successful career scripts, students experience age and temporal anxiety at a fairly young age, exacerbating ageism in the academic labor market.

On the Question of the Demand for Professional Postgraduate Studies in Russia: Analysis of Data on the Thesis Defenses in Technical Sciences

Modern Russian postgraduate school is institutionally oriented towards the reproduction of the personnel potential for science and higher education. Since the career trajectories of a significant part of PhD graduates go beyond the academic labor market, the scientific and pedagogical community is discussing the prospects for the development of the so-called professional postgraduate studies in Russia, which should provide targeted training of highly qualified personnel for knowledge-intensive sectors of the economy and the sphere of intellectual services. The discourse on professional postgraduate studies is focused on the possibility of adapting the effective practices of foreign universities, and, unfortunately, is currently not supported by quantitative data on the demand for such a format of postgraduate training in Russia. The purpose of this study is an empirical analysis of the demand for professional postgraduate studies in the field of technical sciences. Using data on PhD graduates who successfully defended dissertations in technical sciences in 2019 as an example, for the first time a quantitative assessment was made of the prevalence of practice-oriented dissertations, the authors of which are employees of organizations in the knowledge-intensive sectors of the economy. The empirical basis of the study was the publicly available data on the defense of dissertations for the degree of candidate of technical sciences in Russia in 2019 (N=1663). For a detailed analysis, dissertation materials were selected, which contained information about postgraduate studies and the place of employment of dissertators (N=715). As a result of the study, parameters were determined that characterize the degree of prevalence in Russia of practice-oriented dissertations on various disciplinary groups of technical sciences, including: the proportion of PhD graduates employed outside the academic sphere; the proportion of dissertations thematically related to the professional activities of their authors; prevalence of preparation of dissertations on the basis of enterprises of the real sector of the economy; differences in socio-demographic characteristics and publication activity of PhD graduates working on dissertations at universities and in science-intensive business organizations. On the basis of the analysis, a conclusion is made about the expediency of developing professional postgraduate programs in the field of engineering and technology aimed at staffing the innovation sphere, as well as legitimizing the special requirements for these programs and practice-oriented dissertations prepared during their implementation.

Postdocs in Russia: Peculiarities of Employment and Incentives

The article presents the results of the author’s research aimed at identifying the peculiarities of employment of postdocs, a relatively new labor category for the Russian academic labor market. Due to several difficulties associated with forming a sample of postdocs (difficulty in identifying key persons responsible for the development of postdoctoral programs; direct, but not always justified, refusals to provide data, difficulties in identifying potential respondents due to their occupation of various scientific positions in Russian universities), the “snowball” method was used. As a result, the empirical basis of the study was formed based on the results of an online survey of 44 postdocs. As part of the study, tasks related to compiling a socio-economic portrait of a postdoc based on economic, socio-demographic characteristics and indicators of research efficiency, identifying the characteristics of the employment and placement experience of postdocs, objective factors and individual motives for making decisions in the field of choosing postdoctoral programs were solved, as well as diagnostics of tools and channels for young researchers to search for vacancies. The authors distinguish between types of academic mobility (educational and labor) and consider postdoctoral studies as a promising form of external labor academic mobility aimed at attracting and retaining high-potential young researchers planning a long-term career in the academic labor market.Shifting the emphasis from the inbreeding model of university development (internal labor mobility) to the model of external labor academic mobility of young specialists allows those universities that can effectively manage the flow of academic human capital to receive additional socio-economic preferences and return on investment. There are very few similar empirical studies that analyze the features of the development of postdoctoral institutions in Russia and abroad and are based on quantitative and qualitative data from surveys of direct participants in external labor academic mobility – postdocs, which determines the scientific novelty and practical value of the proposed results.

Gender, personality, and performance

This paper studies the effect of personality on performance by gender. We investigate this relationship in the academic labor market for Economists. We build a unique and novel data set from individual CVs of 2,471 faculty members employed at the Top 100 US University Economics Departments and use the facial Width-to-Height ratio (fWHR) to proxy for personality traits. We are interested in the marginal effect of personality on performance after accounting for the common drivers of variations in academic performance. We find that non-dominant females and dominant males achieve better outcomes. This effect, to some degree, is driven by the accumulation of non-cognitive skills, e.g. networks. While our data does not allow to investigate whether this is a result of choice, our results are in line with discrimination based on violation of gender norms.

Gerontocracy, labor market bottlenecks, and generational crises in modern science

Abstract Many early career researchers (ECRs) currently face long odds of attaining a full-time or tenure-track research position. Populations of graduate and postdoctoral researchers have continually increased, without concomitant increases in tenure-track jobs or stable research careers. The current hypercompetitive academic labor market is societally inefficient and often inhumane to ECRs, commonly characterized by precarious, exploitative, and/or uncertain employment terms. Compounding generational disadvantages endured by many ECRs at work, analysis of worldwide data on housing rental costs reveals that escalating costs of living are an especially acute problem for ECRs, since major research universities tend to be located in expensive cities. The unfavorable plight of today’s ECRs can be partly attributed to the disproportionate zero-sum distribution of resources to senior academics, particularly of the baby boomer generation. The uncertainty, precariousness, and hypercompetitiveness of ECR academic labor markets undermine the quantity and quality of scientific innovations, both in the present and in the future.

Perceived academic working conditions and career choices of Chinese PhD students

ABSTRACT Researchers have shown that the pursuit of doctoral studies is often related to the desire to become an academic, despite the constrained academic labour markets and changing (or deteriorating, as some have argued) academic working conditions (AWC) worldwide. In this study, we assessed the extent to which Chinese PhD students were aware of the changes taking place in the academic profession and, if so, whether this awareness influenced their career choices. We conducted a narrative inquiry involving 29 mainland Chinese PhD students and graduates in mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau to elicit their perceptions of AWC in their main academic labour market in mainland China and how these perceptions may have informed their career intentions. We found that perceptions of unfavourable AWC tended to dissuade the PhD students from pursuing a career in academia, but not always in the same way. This finding led us to conceptually identify four decision-making types based on the PhD students’ motivations for achievement and desire for autonomy: the materialist, academic striver, undecided and comfort seeker. We found that all of the PhD students were primarily concerned about the ruthless tenure-track system and excessive competition, especially the comfort seekers (i.e. with high and low motivations for autonomy and achievement, respectively). Most of the PhD students also perceived guanxi, hierarchical academic communities, the segmented academic labour market and low remuneration as major drawbacks for seeking an academic career, particularly the materialists (i.e. with high and low motivations for achievement and autonomy, respectively).

Academic workforce in France and the UK in historical perspectives

ABSTRACT This historical exploration of the development of the academic workforce in the UK and France was triggered by the observation of significant similarities in contemporary debates on casualisation, and segmentation despite their distinctive HE systems. We develop a quantitative history of academic staff to understand why the differences in the two HE systems are not as significant in respect to labour market and working conditions. The new data show that connected processes of casualisation, professional segmentation, and sectorial differentiation are used to manage tensions between massification and staff recruitment in both countries, in a context of declining and increasingly unequal distribution of resources, producing inequalities within institutions, as within the profession itself. The reorganisation of the academic workforce during three periods of growth of HE systems under traditional, Fordist and managerial influences has incrementally produced three groups of permanent, casualised, and precarised staff and a dual academic labour market.

Precarity of post doctorate career breaks: does gender matter?

ABSTRACT Against a background of Bologna process goals to improve employment prospects for PhD graduates, and the crisis of precarious employment conditions and prospects afflicting postdoctoral researchers – hitherto postdocs, the OECD ([2021], “Reducing the Precarity of Academic Research Careers.” In OECD Science, Technology and Industry Policy Papers. Paris: OECD Publishing,) called for research into postdoctoral careers and the precarity phenomenon. This paper responds by giving attention to career breaks as these represent a prevalent but under researched aspect of postdoc precarity in the contemporary academic labor market. Utilizing a substantial international mixed-method dataset with a sample of 950 postdocs, the study examined experiences and perceptions of the professional and personal implications of academic career breaks. Results reveal significant differences between males and females in key areas: maternity was the main reason for females’ career breaks, and redundancy/end of contract for males. Females resumed employment more with the same employer and males with a different employer. Support surrounding career breaks was mixed, largely inadequate, but not associated with gender. Perceptions of career breaks differed significantly across groups of postdocs that previously experienced a career break, those on a career break, and postdocs that had never had a career break. The latter two groups perceived negative career outcomes and positive personal outcomes more than postdocs who had previously had a career break, however, significant gender differences indicate females were more negative about the personal implications of career breaks. Discussion of the findings concludes that under neoliberalism postdocs represent a growing lumpen proletariat, leading to recommendations for policy, practice and further research into gender, precarity and postdoctoral careers.

Perspectives on doctoral education in the United States: Challenges and paths forward

ABSTRACT Despite its lengthy history and relatively stable structure, evidence shows that the US system of doctoral education has been in a continual state of change. This change is reflected in disciplinary contexts, student demographics, professional outcomes, and the investment of external stakeholders. While the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted issues of concern and weakness in the system, change elements have existed for some time. First, the cost that some individual students pay for their doctoral degree, resulting in high debt and low salary, requires attention. Second, the importance of international students to the system has not been met by corresponding federal immigration policies and support mechanisms. Third, many doctoral programmes are still designed as if students will secure a permanent faculty role after graduation. The change in the academic labour market has not been matched by a change in the doctoral curriculum. This article considers the issues and related influences.

Closing the gender gap in academia? Evidence from an affirmative action program

This study investigates a unique incentive-based affirmative action program in Germany’s academic labor market. By analyzing a sample of business administration professors, we document that the probability that a newly tenured professor is female increases at universities that participate in this government program compared to universities that do not. By delving deeper into the mechanisms of the program, we show that program universities lowered the entry barrier for tenured professorships regarding publication records for new female professors. While favoring women, we show that the program had no harmful effects on male professors regarding the entry barrier to tenured professorships. Overall, we provide evidence of the effectiveness of financial incentives as a means of reducing female underrepresentation in academic labor markets.

Cross-national variations in postdoc precarity: An inquiry into the role of career structures and research funding models

Insecurity and intense competition for permanent academic positions appear to be common experiences for early career researchers across the globe. With academic precarity now firmly on the international research and policy agenda, this article looks comparatively at postdoc precarity in three European countries: Ireland, Norway and Switzerland. It suggests that the career prospects and status of these early career stage researchers depend to a large extent on societal variations in academic career structures and research funding models. The article underlines the implications of an increasingly competitive academic labour market on postdoc precarity and identifies both common and specific (national and/or disciplinary) challenges facing postdocs in these different contexts.

A gender perspective on the global migration of scholars

Although considerable progress toward gender equality in science has been made in recent decades, female researchers continue to face significant barriers in the academic labor market. International mobility has been increasingly recognized as a strategy for scientists to expand their professional networks, and that could help narrow the gender gap in academic careers. Using bibliometric data on over 33 million Scopus publications, we provide a global and dynamic view of gendered patterns of transnational scholarly mobility, as measured by volume, distance, diversity, and distribution, from 1998 to 2017. We find that, while female researchers continued to be underrepresented among internationally mobile researchers and migrate over shorter distances, this gender gap was narrowing at a faster rate than the gender gap in the population of general active researchers. Globally, the origin and destination countries of both female and male mobile researchers became increasingly diversified, which suggests that scholarly migration has become less skewed and more globalized. However, the range of origin and destination countries continued to be narrower for women than for men. While the United States remained the leading academic destination worldwide, the shares of both female and male scholarly inflows to that country declined from around 25% to 20% over the study period, partially due to the growing relevance of China. This study offers a cross-national measurement of gender inequality in global scholarly migration that is essential for promoting gender-equitable science policies and for monitoring the impact of such interventions.

Government Failures in The Implementation of Effective Contracts

The paper examines the results of reforms in the remuneration system of university lecturers. Two stages of the transformation process have been considered: the transition to the new remuneration system in 2008 and the introduction of effective contracts in 2012. The paper explains how the political and bureaucratic mechanisms of the formation of the remuneration system have changed. We have made an attempt to describe the government failures in the implementation of effective contracts. It is assumed that the new mechanism remains over-regulated and is based on the idea of the local nature of the academic labor market. The imitation regulation is considered to be one of the most important reasons of the state failures. On the one hand, the government manifested the establishment of understandable and achievable indicators, on the other hand, the authorities failed to solve real problems of the production and transfer of the new knowledge. Governmental stakeholders in education are interested in maintaining and further expanding of their functions. Meanwhile, insufficient professionalism in decision-making and short-termism become the reasons for inefficient waste of budgetary resources for the indicators production and elaboration of various of insurance procedures. The study shows that for many universities the achievement of the target salary level is associated with serious difficulties. There are also significant differences in remuneration systems between universities. Interregional differences in the level of wages of university staff create different conditions for investment in the human capital of university lecturers and incentives for interregional staff turnover that weakens the resource potential of universities in a number of regions.

Book Review of Vatansever, Asli 2020. At the Margins of Academia, Exile Precariousness and Subjectivity. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 189 p

This is a book review: Ali Ali’s reading of Asli Vatasever’s ethnographic book on political and academic exiles. Asli Vatansever shows how the two forms of exile and precarization: 1) under state authoritarianism and 2) in the academic labor market are constitutive to each other. They are only separate in the rationale of precaritizing political and social governance. That rationale is premised on assumed individualization of precarity and separation, if not antagonism, between different struggles. Vatansever’s calls for, and shifts towards, new methodology of/and academic community-making that exposes the connection between theory and embodied politics and politicizes/mobilizes privatized struggles.

Nothing but publishing: the overriding goal of PhD students in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau

ABSTRACT Publication pressure is perceived to be filtering down into doctoral education worldwide. We explore the causes and effects of the perceived centrality of publishing among doctoral students, emphasising the impact of publication pressure on students’ identity trajectories. We draw on a qualitative analysis of 90 mainland Chinese doctoral students at universities in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau. We find that the credentialisation of publications in the increasingly competitive and publication-dominant academic labour market results in publishing-centred doctoral journeys. Our key finding is that the centrality of publishing affects every aspect of identity trajectory development: it causes doctoral students to commodify knowledge production, devalues coursework, conference participation, and teaching assistantships, encourages students to regard their supervisors as publishing facilitators and their peers as rivals rather than collaborators, and marginalises engagement with external stakeholders. In discussing these dimensions, we emphasise the need for a more comprehensive evaluation of candidates’ abilities and honours in academic recruitment and call for policies to curtail the overemphasis on research output in academic evaluations.

Research on the Optimization of College Teachers’ Flow Management Strategy under the Support of Artificial Intelligence Technology

In recent years, with the establishment and improvement of the academic labor market system, the flow of college teachers has become more frequent. On the one hand, the rational and orderly flow of teachers, as a social construction, is of great significance for deconstructing the solidification of academic structure and promoting academic development and progress. But on the other hand, we should also see that the disorderly flow of teachers also has a strong destructive effect on destroying the inherent academic structure, leading to vicious competition in the academic labor market, and weakening the willpower of teachers to devote themselves to learning. Therefore, it is of great significance to analyze the dynamic factors of college teachers’ mobility, scientifically explain the internal mechanism of college teachers’ mobility, promote the improvement of college teachers’ mobility policies, and defend against disorderly mobility such as “poaching wars.” Based on the mobility dynamic model in colleges and universities, this paper puts forward some thoughts on promoting the mobility of college teachers. Colleges can improve the promotion and development channels of teachers and optimize their working conditions. The study also emphasizes on developing basic salary standard of teachers thereby establish a remuneration system for distribution on the basis of their performance. For good measure, they can also stabilize the current teachers while attracting more outstanding talents by exploiting the advantages of location, making more efforts to build high-level disciplines, and offering more favorable conditions for talent introduction.

Changes in the South Korean academic labor market and labor struggle

ABSTRACT This study examines the characteristics of and changes in the Korean academic labor market and labor struggle. The strategies of three agents (government, capital, and universities) and the resulting response of labor drive the evolution of the academic labor market, which can be analyzed based on market stratification, employment status (tenured vs non-tenured and full-time vs part-time), wage level, and availability of performance-based systems. The growth of Korean universities starting in the late 1970s, forcing universities to recruit larger numbers of low wage part-time lecturers and resulting in the segmentation of the academic labor market. Following the 1987 democratization movement, part-time lecturers established organizations that called for improvements in labor conditions, but few things changed. After the 1997 financial crisis, capital and the government implemented a neoliberal agenda and the government and universities made wages flexible, and the new category of non-tenured full-time faculty started to replace tenured full-time faculty, creating a three-tiered labor market. This aggravated the hardship that part-time lecturers had faced and drove them to engage in the labor struggle. The Korean example shows that the academic labor market emerges, evolves, and changes through strategic interaction and strife among the parties involved, and reminds us of the importance of workers’ organizational capabilities and counterstrategies.