Meritocracy in Academic Labor Markets: A Comparison of Three Fields

The diversification of forms and types of doctoral programs is currently a global trend. Universities across the globe offer programs that differ in the modes of training, characteristics of the target audience, and possible labor markets after graduation. In Russia, doctoral education exists in a unified format, focusing primarily on the academic labor market. Recently, there have been discussions about the need to expand the range of programs and the types of academic degrees in Russia. In this article, we present the analysis of professional doctoral programs: in response to what challenges and needs they appeared, how they are implemented, in what forms they exist. In addition, we consider the Russian experience of implementing professional doctoral programs; analyze the existing opportunities and barriers for their development. Based on the analysis, we came to a conclusion about the relevance of the professional doctoral programs’ development in Russia, the expediency of simplifying the conditions for their implementation and legitimizing special requirements for the design of dissertations with an applied orientation.

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ON THE SEARCH FOR TALENT IN ACADEMIC LABOR MARKETS: EASILY OBSERVABLE LATER-GRADUATE STUDY OUTCOMES AS PREDICTORS OF EARLY-CAREER PUBLISHING, PLACEMENT, AND TENURE

Economic Inquiry ◽

10.1111/j.1465-7295.2011.00385.x ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 50 (1) ◽

pp. 232-247 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

MICHAEL HILMER ◽

CHRISTIANA E. HILMER

Keyword(s):

Labor Markets ◽

Early Career ◽

Graduate Study ◽

Academic Labor

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Gender and Globalization of Academic Labor Markets: Research and Teaching Staff at Nordic Universities

Social Inclusion ◽

10.17645/si.v9i3.4131 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 9 (3) ◽

pp. 69-80

Author(s):

Maria Pietilä ◽

Ida Drange ◽

Charlotte Silander ◽

Agnete Vabø

Keyword(s):

Labor Market ◽

Labor Markets ◽

Academic Career ◽

Teaching Staff ◽

Special Focus ◽

Research Staff ◽

Teaching And Research ◽

Academic Labor Market ◽

National Differences ◽

Academic Labor

In this article, we investigate how the globalized academic labor market has changed the composition of teaching and research staff at Swedish, Norwegian, and Finnish universities. We use national statistical data on the gender and country‐origin of universities’ teaching and research staff between 2012 and 2018 to study how the globalized academic labor market has influenced the proportion of women across career stages, with a special focus on STEM fields. We pay special attention to how gender and country‐origin are interrelated in universities’ academic career hierarchies. The findings show that the proportion of foreign‐born teaching and research staff rose substantially at the lower career level (grade C positions) in the 2010s. The increase was more modest among the most prestigious grade A positions, such as professorships. The findings show significant national differences in how gender and country‐origin of staff intersect in Nordic universities. The study contributes to research on the gendered patterns of global academic labor markets and social stratification in Nordic universities.

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Research metrics, labor markets, and epistemic change: evidence from Britain 1970-2018

10.31235/osf.io/yzkfu ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Juan Pablo Pardo Guerra

Keyword(s):

Labor Markets ◽

Sociology Of Knowledge ◽

Academic Departments ◽

Social Scientists ◽

Academic Fields ◽

Original Dataset ◽

Academic Labor ◽

Epistemic Change ◽

The Individual ◽

Research Metrics

In this paper, I study the effects of quantifying knowledge on the organization of disciplinary fields. Using an original dataset of about 44,000 British social scientists and bibliographic information about their published, peer-reviewed articles, I show that the introduction of standardized research evaluations disrupted local academic labor markets in British higher education, leading to patterns of interinstitutional mobility that altered the epistemic diversity of social science disciplines and the organization of their academic fields. Much like market-based interventions, research evaluations lead to a form of epistemic matching that has distinct consequences on how knowledge is generated. In particular, when evaluations affect organizational units (such as academic departments) and stress disciplinary norms, they foster forms of isomorphism that lead to reductions in a discipline’s thematic diversity and a more homogeneous structure for the field. This paper thus advances the sociology of knowledge by showing how epistemic change occurs not only through the individual realignments of quantified scholars but, as importantly, through the mediation of interinstitutional mobility.

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