Scandinavian Journal of Management Precarious postdocs: A comparative study on recruitment and selection of early-career researchers (original) (raw)
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In: Tatiana Fumasoli, Gaele Goastellec and Barbara M. Kehm (eds.), Academic Careers in Europe – Trends, Challenges, Perspectives. Dordrecht: Springer, 41-68, 2014
The academic career in Europe used to be much more unstructured and much less competitive than today. Currently, as reflected in interviews carried out throughout Europe, “each step in a career is competitive” (CH_18-MAN), from doctoral and postdoctoral to junior academic and senior academic positions. There are significant variations across the European countries studied regarding the level of competition, often different in different places occupied in the academic hierarchy. But increasing competition has come to the academic profession and is bound to stay: the competition for part-time and full-time academic positions, for research grants and research funding, and tokens of academic prestige. The academic progression today has to be made systematically, in increasingly clearly defined timeframes, and the academic career seems to be sliced into comparable time periods across European systems. Usually, the timeframes are doctoral studies, employment in postdoctoral and junior positions, employment in lower-level senior positions and, finally, in higher-level senior positions (such as traditional chair holding and/or full professorships), and all career steps have to be reached within a certain time period. The competition in academic settings means most often measurable research outputs expected from academics for particular time periods or for particular stages of the academic career. Expectations from academics in the same stages of their careers are becoming largely similar throughout Europe. There seem to emerge an interesting combination of career progression requirements linked to age and/or specific time frames in academic careers. Increasing competition in all stages of careers is reported, and the competition is related to both employment (securing a post in the system; or retaining a post in the system; or progression up the academic ladder in the system) and securing research funding. The link between research funding and employment is viewed as strong as never before. In many cases, external funding generation actually means employment, especially for younger academics. A growing number of positions in universities are fixed-term, externally funded and project-based, especially at doctoral and postdoctoral levels.
The Hard Path of Academic Stabilisation into a Neoliberal European Academic Framework
Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference of the Journal Scuola Democratica “Reinventing Education”, VOL. 3, Pandemic and Post-Pandemic Space and Time, 2021
ABSTRACT: In the past two decades, the early career academics have faced increasingly difficulties to stabilise their position in the European academic systems. Currently we can identify similarities in the academic recruitment as results of neoliberal policies (Deem, Brehony, 2005; Ball, 2012; Bozzon et al., 2018) adopted by the European governments that contribute to the academics precarity. The process of entering and stabilizing the academic career has always been long and complex. Spending reduction policies have also exacerbated the difficulties and competition among aspiring academics. In UE countries, the ‘new academic regime’ (Normand, 2016) produces a new stage of academic capitalism. This situation has produced various effects. The push to ‘publish or perish’’ has strongly raised average productivity, placing aspiring academics under tremendous pressure. Furthermore, it is possible to identify several effects at the individual level: the fragmentation of the career path has reflected on life paths, on forced mobility, on parenting choices, on psychophysical well-being. Starting from a set of semi-structured interviews carried out in the fields of education sciences, sociology, physics, biology and medicine, this paper shows the effects of the changes listed above, also taking into account the differences between the various research sectors. The interviewees live and work in Italy, several European countries and the United Kingdom. We investigate the figure of ‘new european researcher’ who build is academic and private identity (Djerasimovic, Villani, 2019; Colarusso, Giancola, 2020) following the ideas of mobility, new mode of knowledge production (Gibbons et al., 1994), performativity, accountability. The early career researcher (ECR) has to face several trials such as: the balance of private and professional life, instability, penury of fundings and jobs vacancy, the managerialization of academic profession (Normand, Villani, 2019). In addition, ECR needs to combine individual strategies for academic survival in a context that impose the oxymoron of competitive partnership. Finally, we analyse the path of the real researcher that struggles constantly with all difficulties imposed by the new academic regime. KEYWORDS: Academic research, European higher education space, Academic careers, Work-life balance in academia, New academic identity.
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Neoliberalism has had destructive effects on the academic profession. While fulltime academic employment has always been a privilege for a few, the academic precariat has risen as a reserve army of workers with ever shorter, lower paid, hyper-flexible contracts and ever more temporally fragmented and geographically displaced hyper-mobile lives. Under the pressure to 'publish or perish' a growing stratification between research and teaching has emerged. It has made academic work more susceptible to market pressures, and less -to public accountability. Focusing on a recent call for 'casual researchers' issued by Oxford University the paper indicates how the growing competition for scarcer resources has made academics finally aware of the inequalities engendered by neoliberal capitalism, but still incapable to mobilize.
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The terror of the neoliberal markets and the terror of politics both threaten academic freedom – sometimes subtly, sometimes more openly. In this Forum, we ask our contributors to reflect on the entanglements between economy and politics and how they contribute to the ongoing precaritisation in academia, how they shape individual researchers’ biographies and how they influence academic research. But more importantly, beyond analysis, this Forum also invites its contributors to reflect on concrete interventions from their respective positions.
2019
In my PhD dissertation, I study postdoc positions and tenure-track assistant professorships. These are the first positions after completing a PhD and before obtaining a more stable, permanent position in academia. Both positions are precarious in nature and for both positions senior researchers (gatekeepers) are responsible for recruitment and selection of candidates. I aim to achieve a better understanding on how inequalities come to the fore in the recruitment and selection of early-career researchers and in particular how hiring committee members construct inequalities in the recruitment and selection process.
Higher Education, 1997
Interest in the status and functions, the potential and the vulnerability of the academic profession has grown in recent times. International comparison is of special interest in this context: are the problems experienced more or less universal, or are there options and conditions in individual countries which might suggest solutions for the future? The paper analyses some findings and implications of the 'International Survey of the Academic Profession' with a special focus on the various subgroups of academics in the European countries involved in this empirical study. The analyses focuses on the employment and working conditions, as well as the way academics handle their various professional tasks and functions. Considerable differences between the university professoriate, middle-rank and junior staff at universities and staff at other institutions of higher education are noted. At least in the majority of European countries surveyed, one would hesitate to consider them part of the same profession. By and large, however, the relatively independent nature of their jobs allows most academics to find areas of professional activity which are the source of professional attachment and satisfaction.