Are evaluative cultures national or global? A cross-national study on evaluative cultures in academic recruitment proces
- PDF / 1,024,721 Bytes
- 21 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 90 Downloads / 165 Views
Are evaluative cultures national or global? A cross‑national study on evaluative cultures in academic recruitment processes in Europe Ingvild Reymert1 · Jens Jungblut2 · Norway Siri B. Borlaug1 Accepted: 17 November 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Studies on academic recruitment processes have demonstrated that universities evaluate candidates for research positions using multiple criteria. However, most studies on preferences regarding evaluative criteria in recruitment processes focus on a single country, while cross-country studies are rare. Additionally, though studies have documented how fields evaluate candidates differently, those differences have not been deeply explored, thus creating a need for further inquiry. This paper aims to address this gap and investigates whether academics in two fields across five European countries prefer the same criteria to evaluate candidates for academic positions. The analysis is based on recent survey data drawn from academics in economics and physics in Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the UK. Our results show that the academic fields have different evaluative cultures and that researchers from different fields prefer specific criteria when assessing candidates. We also found that these field-specific preferences were to some extent mediated through national frameworks such as funding systems. Keywords Evaluative cultures · Recruitment · Cross-national study
Introduction Academia has always been an international endeavor as disciplines transcend national borders, and scholars collaborate internationally. However, this trend has increased in recent years, and academia has become even more globalized, with flows of international students, researchers, and an international academic job market in which universities compete for the best researchers. Not only are universities actively recruiting foreign faculty to build their international reputation, but also individual researchers are actively using their international network to recruit highly qualified postdocs and PhDs to fill their research and teaching needs outside their country (Ortiga et al. 2020). In Europe, the Bologna Process * Ingvild Reymert [email protected] 1
Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Education (NIFU), Oslo, Norway
2
Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Higher Education
was initiated to integrate national research and higher education systems into one European entity, and most national research systems encourage and support international research mobility (Chou and Gornitzka 2014). Additionally, universities around the world are moving toward organizational similarities, and national university characteristics are decreasing (Krücken and Meier 2006; Ramirez 2006). These global trends have also affected national career systems as countries have introduced tenure tracks (Henningsson et al. 2017), and universities worldwide have implemented more professional approaches to staff management partly a
Data Loading...
