Early Career Women in Academia: An Exploration of Networking Perceptions
This chapter explores women’s networking perceptions by focusing on early career women in social sciences. Within an exploratory research design it asks how early career women define the early career stage in academia, what definitions, meanings and inter
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Early Career Women in Academia: An Exploration of Networking Perceptions Terhi Nokkala, Bojana Ćulum, and Tatiana Fumasoli
Instrumental or Evolutionary? Understanding Networking of Female Academics The old saying ‘It is not what you know, but also who you know’ has a host of implications when it comes to career development strategy and one’s career outcomes. This phrase refers to the connecting of (like-minded) people, meaning creating relationships and networks that are a valuable asset as they can provide the individual with support as well as intangible and tangible benefits, like access to information and social resources (Nahapiet and Ghoshal 1998). Although building relationships and networking is not a novelty for academia, some authors argue it is the internationalization of higher education and the growing need for international activities and strategic alliances between universities that has made professional linkages and networking with other scholars worldwide essential for academics (Ismail and Rasdi 2007). Mavin and Bryans (2002), for their part, suggest that the networking process in academia has redrawn the departmental and geographical boundaries. This affects how the arena for networking is conceived: on the one hand we relate academia to the organized settings of the higher education institution where academics are located; on the other hand we understand academia broadly as a
T. Nokkala (*) University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland e-mail: terhi.nokkala@jyu.fi B. Ćulum University of Rijeka, Rijeka, Croatia e-mail: [email protected] T. Fumasoli University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 H. Eggins (ed.), The Changing Role of Women in Higher Education, The Changing Academy – The Changing Academic Profession in International Comparative Perspective 17, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42436-1_14
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transnational scientific community which researchers relate to and which is mainly defined by disciplinary fields. Much of the literature on networking and specifically gender differences in networking practices is based on studies on career advancement and success, conducted in non-academic settings, such as companies, banks, social services etc. Although such studies contributed significantly to our knowledge of the nature of networking, differences between academic and non-academic setting have to be acknowledged as well. Besides providing support for career development (Mavin and Bryans 2002; Forret and Dougherty 2004), support for attaining power within an organisation (Brass 1992), and psychological support (Kram and Isabella 1985; Ibarra 1992; Mirvis and Hall 1996), as many of the studies done in non-academic settings suggest, networking in academia seems to entail a dimension that is closer to core academic activities, particularly of research. Fetzer (2003) views networking in academia as a mechanism to build a sense of community among scholars within a specified disciplinary field. Maack and Passet (1993) ar
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