Careers of the Professoriate Academic Pathways of the Linguists and Sociologists in Germany, France and the UK 9783031252402, 9783031252419

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Graphs
List of Tables
Chapter 1: Introduction: Studying the Professoriate
References
Chapter 2: A Process Perspective on the Professoriate
References
Chapter 3: Existing Research on Academic Careers
The Market, the Organisation, and the Actors
Towards a Standard Career?
References
Chapter 4: Professors in Germany, France, United Kingdom
Higher Education in Transnational Perspective
The United Kingdom: A Liberal Bureaucracy
France: A National Status Oligarchy
Germany: A Federation of Autonomous Entrepreneurs
References
Chapter 5: Two Disciplines: Linguistics and Sociology
The Disciplinary Organisation of Academic Knowledge and Institutions
Linguistics
Sociology
References
Chapter 6: Three Concepts for the Analysis of Professorial Careers
References
Chapter 7: Working with Online Biographical Data in Research on Academic Careers
References
Chapter 8: Speed: How Fast Do Professors Reach Their Position?
The Weight of National Academic Systems
Mobility and Age as Career Boosters
Mobilities Have Different Effects in Different Systems
Emergence of the Modern Academic
References
Chapter 9: Mobility: Moving Between Statuses, Institutions and Countries
Fast and Slow Biographical Time
How Female Professors Fit into Standardised Patterns of Mobility
International Recruitments
Mobility and Speed: How to Move at the Right Moments
References
Chapter 10: Pathways: Three Career Models
Exploring Trajectories
A Typology of Academic Pathways
References
Chapter 11: Conclusion: Academic Careers between Competition and Conformation
References
Appendix A
Appendix B
References
Index

Citation preview

Careers of the Professoriate Academic Pathways of the Linguists and Sociologists in Germany, France and the UK Johannes Angermuller Philippe Blanchard

Careers of the Professoriate

Johannes Angermuller • Philippe Blanchard

Careers of the Professoriate Academic Pathways of the Linguists and Sociologists in Germany, France and the UK

Johannes Angermuller WELS, Stuart Hall Building, Level 1 Open University, LAL Milton Keynes, UK

Philippe Blanchard PAIS University of Warwick Coventry, UK

ISBN 978-3-031-25240-2    ISBN 978-3-031-25241-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25241-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover pattern © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

Angermuller and colleagues at Warwick (Coventry, UK) and Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris, UK) collected the data used in this study within the ERC project “DISCONEX. The discursive construction of academic excellence” (ERC project no. 313172). The data collection was led by Françoise Dufour and carried out together with Aurore Zelazny. Ali Asadipour created the database. They were actively assisted by Nawel Aït Ali, Johannes Beetz, Sixian Hah, Eduardo Chávez Herrera and Marta Wróblewska.

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Contents

1 Introduction:  Studying the Professoriate  1 References   5 2 A  Process Perspective on the Professoriate  7 References  10 3 Existing  Research on Academic Careers 11 The Market, the Organisation, and the Actors  12 Towards a Standard Career?  15 References  17 4 Professors  in Germany, France, United Kingdom 19 Higher Education in Transnational Perspective  19 The United Kingdom: A Liberal Bureaucracy  23 France: A National Status Oligarchy  26 Germany: A Federation of Autonomous Entrepreneurs  30 References  33 5 Two  Disciplines: Linguistics and Sociology 37 The Disciplinary Organisation of Academic Knowledge and Institutions  37 Linguistics  41 Sociology  44 References  46 vii

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Contents

6 Three  Concepts for the Analysis of Professorial Careers 47 References  50 7 Working  with Online Biographical Data in Research on Academic Careers 51 References  55 8 Speed:  How Fast Do Professors Reach Their Position? 57 The Weight of National Academic Systems  60 Mobility and Age as Career Boosters  63 Mobilities Have Different Effects in Different Systems  67 Emergence of the Modern Academic  69 References  72 9 Mobility:  Moving Between Statuses, Institutions and Countries 73 Fast and Slow Biographical Time  74 How Female Professors Fit into Standardised Patterns of Mobility  76 International Recruitments  79 Mobility and Speed: How to Move at the Right Moments  81 References  84 10 Pathways:  Three Career Models 85 Exploring Trajectories  85 A Typology of Academic Pathways  88 References 101 11 Conclusion:  Academic Careers between Competition and Conformation103 References 111 Appendix A113 Appendix B117 References127 Index135

List of Graphs

Graph 8.1 Graph 8.2 Graph 9.1 Graphs 9.2a–c Graphs 9.3a–c Graphs 9.4a–c Graphs 9.5a–d Graphs 10.1 Graph 10.2 Graph 10.3 Graph 10.4 Graph 11.1

Historical distributions of career milestones: birth, PhD graduation and professorship Speed by groups of academics Pre-professorial mobility Evolution of mobility by disciplines Evolution of mobility by genders Evolution of mobility by countries Evolution of mobility by career speed levels a–b Distribution of academic positions and degrees over time Typology of status trajectories Typology of status trajectories Average clusters’ Speed according Status, Institutional and Geographic Mobility The undefined professor

58 59 74 77 78 80 82 87 90 91 100 110

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List of Tables

Table 5.1 Table 8.1 Table 8.2 Table 8.3 Table 10.1 Table A1 Table B1

Professors in linguistics and sociology 40 Cross-country regression models of career speed 61 Country-specific regression models of career speed 66 Cohort-specific regression models of career speed 70 Characteristics of types of academic trajectories (N = 1391)92 Coding of diplomas 113 Coding of positions 118

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Studying the Professoriate

Abstract  A professorship is a career goal for many academics. Yet little is known about who becomes a professor and how. We propose an empirical, socio-historical study of the professoriate as a group that comprises all professors of linguistics and sociology in Germany, France and the United Kingdom. Drawing on online biographical presentations, our study responds to a demand for a systematic investigation of how professorial careers are constructed over time. Keywords  Professoriate • Comparative research • Empirical research • Online curriculum vitae Universities around the world are centred on their senior members, the professors. Professors are the institutionally recognised members of their scientific communities. They are not only qualified to take leading roles in teaching and management but, through their research, they also represent a disciplinary area. A professorship normally comes along with a well-paid and secure position in a higher education institution, at least in most European countries. The image of the professor has been surrounded by desires, fantasies and myths that have been disseminated and reinforced in popular culture. Think of the professor as an absent-minded creator of gadgets (Professor Calculus in The Adventures of Tintin, 1991), as a socially awkward crank © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Angermuller, P. Blanchard, Careers of the Professoriate, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25241-9_1

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(The Nutty Professor, 1996), as a mad genius (Flubber, 1997), as a sombre figure of authority (Harry Potter, 2001), a sly mastermind (The Ladykillers, 2004) or a victim of absurd academic technocrats (The Chair, 2021). Sociology professors (Der Campus, 1998) and linguistics professors (The Arrival, 2016), who we deal with in this study, have also been the object of popular representations. Such portrayals often have little to do with the realities of academic life. Yet they convey tacit and widely shared assumptions about professors that need to be critically interrogated. First, the assumption that professors are superior to others because they are smart. Academics may be said to have talents, skills and capacities that make them stand out. But do academics move up because of their (scientific) intelligence? We will not repeat the criticism from social theorists that has been directed against the idea of education as a meritocratic institution that rewards effort and talent (Bernstein, 1971; Bourdieu, 1984; Bowles & Gintis, 1977; Goldthorpe, 1996). There is strong evidence about the role of class in academic mobility that puts a big question mark behind the idea that professional success reflects individual academic achievements. Second, the assumption that professors are lonely thinkers. Folk representations of professors are often centred on individual academics as if they were free from social constraints: the professor as an individual on a rendez-vous with Truth. The reality may be a lot more social but the ideal of the individual thinker also pervades many disciplinary fields, especially in the humanities and social sciences, where laboratory work is rare and publications are often written and signed by individuals. Yet it is easy to forget about the many ties with and debts to peers, their institutional obligations and commitments, the role of teams and students. Academics cannot take their social standing in the community for granted and they often go to great lengths to build up a unique profile and to be recognised as authors of important new ideas. Thirdly, the assumption that professorial authority knows no history. Academics are sometimes cited as sources of timeless truths with few reminders of the constructed and antagonistic nature of scientific facts, especially in public debates where academics intervene as experts. They themselves are aware of the contingent character of the social and historical place from where they speak. Who speaks is crucially important in any scientific debate. Yet the person usually does not become a topic, and even less so how one has become one. Academics occupy positions in an intellectual landscape from where they make their claims but these positions do not appear in all their dynamism and complexity. There is a tendency,

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therefore, to erase the people and their backgrounds behind abstract academic discourses that conceal the ongoing mobility of academics. Little is known about the academic profession as a whole. Existing research on professors often builds on anecdotal evidence from individuals. Biographies typically deal with the “great men” of a discipline and homage is paid to distinguished academics after their death (Hamann, 2016). This is a problem since professors are a group of professionals who share backgrounds and experiences; they work under similar conditions and their practices follow certain norms and rules. If we want to account for academics, we need to understand them as a socio-historically structured and situated population. The sociology of science has long been interested in the emergence of groups and clusters of academics in order to account for new fields, schools or paradigms (Ben-David, 1977; Kuhn, 1968; Mulkay, 1977). Such research tends to be based on historical and archival work on a few but highly visible academics. All too often, evidence remains anecdotal, often centred on individual examples and histories. Outstanding cases rather than the regular ones inform assumptions about how academics advance. Biographical events are an effect of structural mechanisms, but in the sector they are perceived as individual achievements or failures. There was an estimated number of 25,000 to 40,000 higher education institutions worldwide with around 12.5 million academic teaching staff in 2014 (Our world in data). The European Union alone counted around 1.89 million researchers in 2020 with Germany, France and the United Kingdom (UK) being by far the largest providers in European countries in terms of academic workforce size (Eurostat). In 2018, there were roughly a total of 89,000 professors in Germany (Statistisches Bundesamt), France (Kabla-Langlois, 2021) and the UK (Higher Education Statistics Agency). The professoriate comprises the members of an academic system in a discipline who have spent years and decades as students, postdocs and non-professorial academics, moving from position to position, sometimes from institution to institution and, in a minority of cases, from system to system. Titles, roles and positions have different names in different academic systems. Yet the term professor (or a close equivalent) is a standard designation for senior academics who are institutionally fully recognised all over the world. Academics with professorial status usually carry the title of Professor in English and Professor  or  Professorin (or ProfessorIn)  in German whereas in French they are called professeur.e.s (des universités) in order to distinguish them from secondary teachers, who are called

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professeur.e.s (du secondaire, a similar distinction is made in Spanish between catedráticx and maestrx/profesorx). Oftentimes, the precise rank of the academic is specified with a prefix. An American professor, for instance, can be an Assistant, Associate or a Full Professor. Some UK universities now apply the American system: Lecturers have been renamed Assistant Professors and Senior Lecturers (as well as Readers) are now Associate Professors. Since the introduction of JuniorprofessorInnen (W1) in 2002 (Zimmer, 2018), Germany, too, has three professorial ranks: JuniorprofessorIn (W1), W2(C3) and W3(C4) professors, the latter corresponding to a chair (Lehrstuhl). Professors are sometimes understood to comprise all full academics. Accordingly, Hermanowicz (2018, p. 242f.) defines professors “by a constellation of teaching, research, and service roles as part of their central occupation” and by their being “socially understood as the core academic staff in a given nation’s system of higher education”. We prefer to restrict our understanding to full professors, which includes all professors in the UK, W2 and W3 professors in Germany as well as other permanent academics with professorial status but not W1 JuniorprofessorInnen and, finally, in France the professeur.e.s d’universités and their counterparts in other institutions. Professors are those academics who have managed to be selected and move up over time from a large group of academic staff. To account for the professoriate, we have chosen a radically longitudinal approach that can reflect the variety of qualification, recruitment and promotion practices across institutions and national systems. Academic systems suggest certain pathways towards professorship, which typically include at least a doctorate followed by a few years of employment as teacher-researcher. Taking into account the lack of knowledge about career patterns of entire populations of academics, this book tackles the professoriate as an empirical, socio-historical object. We investigate the biographies of all academics in sociology and linguistics with senior (professorial) status in Germany, France and the UK as they appeared online in 2015. Institutions and ministries usually do not make available lists of professors with CVs and research areas. However, the large majority of senior academics today have professional and/or personal web pages that present their status, biographical information, research areas and publications. The DISCONEX team went through the institutional pages from all higher education institutions in the three countries to identify the members of the professoriate

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in the two disciplines and the three countries. We took the biographical information from their online CVs and coded it so as to make cross-­ institutional analysis possible. By applying sequence analysis and other multivariate statistical methods to the resulting database, we are able to extract and account for career patterns in a comparative perspective across disciplines and countries.

References Ben-David, J. (1977). Centers of Learning. Britain, France, Germany, United States. McGraw-Hill. Bernstein, B. (1971). Class, Codes, and Control. Four volumes. Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Homo Academicus. Minuit. Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1977). Schooling in Capitalist America. Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life. Basic Books. Goldthorpe, J. H. (1996). Problems of Meritocracy. In R. Erikson & J. O. Jonsson (Eds.), Can Education Be Equalized? (pp. 255–287). Westview. Hamann, J. (2016). ‘Let Us Salute One of Our Kind.’ How Academic Obituaries Consecrate Research Biographies. Poetics, 56, 1–14. Hermanowicz, J.  C. (2018). The Professoriate in International Perspective. In M.  B. Paulsen (Ed.), Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research (pp. 239–293). Springer. Kabla-Langlois, I. (2021). L’Etat de l’enseignement supérieur, de la recherche et de l’innovation en France (Ministère de l’Enseignement Supérieur, de la Recherche et de l’innovation). Kuhn, T.  S. (1968). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The University of Chicago Press. Mulkay, M. (1977). Sociology of the Scientific Research Community. In I. Spiegel-­ Rösing & D. de Solla Price (Eds.), Science, Technology and Society. A Cross-­ Disciplinary Perspective (pp. 93–148). Sage. Zimmer, L. M. (2018). Das Kapital der Juniorprofessur. Einflussfaktoren bei der Berufung von der Junior- auf die Lebenszeitprofessur, Dissertation. Springer.

CHAPTER 2

A Process Perspective on the Professoriate

Abstract  The making of a professor spans an entire life. This is why a process perspective is needed which accounts for how hierarchies between academics are produced and reproduced over time. Academics advance through institutional constraints and the dynamics of reputation and visibility. Academic careers are a product of events that are articulated in certain ways, such as educational degrees, recruitments, promotions, publications, roles, and collaborations. Keywords  Professorship • PhD • Process • Career Nowadays, most academics normally go through a sequence of qualifications (including a PhD) and occupy at least one academic position prior to their professorial appointment. While the career trajectories of academics are more difficult to predict than the career progression of, say, teachers or policemen, academics follow certain mobility patterns, too. They are streamlined by and embedded in an academic career regime that structures their biographical time. In the sociological debate on science, process perspectives have long been well established. Constructivist approaches to social knowledge, for instance, have placed emphasis on knowledge as a process of negotiating knowledge claims (Camic et al., 2011; Latour, 1987; Sismondo, 2010). Scientific knowledge production is seen as an ongoing practice of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Angermuller, P. Blanchard, Careers of the Professoriate, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25241-9_2

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participants strengthening some knowledge claims and, conversely, of weakening others. Rather than expressing inherent truths, scientific knowledge claims are a result of what happens among actors. Yet social approaches to science have often overlooked the crucial fact that the actors, too, are “constructed”, as members of scientific communities with reputation and resources, with roles and rights (Abbott, 2016). The making of a professor usually takes an entire life which is intertwined with the ideas, orientations and achievements that others attribute to the individual (Hamann, 2019). The construction of an academic subjectivity is key to a successful academic career. As academics move through the academic time-space, they negotiate their science identities (Carlone & Johnson, 2007; Robinson et al., 2018). They become subjects who are subjected to as well as canalised by techniques of discipline and control (Masschelein et al., 2006; Morrissey, 2013). Careers of academics result from creative choices that academics can make but also from the constraints weighing on them. Right from the beginning of their careers, academics are subject to a biographical regime that structures their progression and encourages them to develop a unique academic identity and profile. They often can choose the questions and topics of their research and teaching while they build up their reputation as specialised members of a scientific community. Aspiring for independence and autonomy, academics are never in control, at least not fully. Many academics do not pursue their careers strategically. Yet, most are aware of the value of a coherent academic Curriculum Vita that conveys the insignia of academic achievements: publications, teaching and management experience, services to the community, societal impact, and so on. Academics move along trajectories where a professorial appointment signals recognition and success. A career perspective on academia not only helps us understand how individuals enter higher education and become established as full academic citizens but also, more generally, why some academics take an interest in certain questions, objects and orientations. Academics may engage in a wide range of activities but they can hardly escape the career logic organising what they do, say and value, no matter how much (or little) they are conscious of it. By pursuing their careers, they enact the structured relationships of the academic space. Structures in academia work across the entire lifetime of an academic. And that’s why a career perspective on large academic populations can help understand how hierarchies among academics are produced and reproduced over time.

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Academics are usually engaged in academic work from early on until late in their lives. Junior academics typically start becoming serious about a career in academia before or after completing their MA and most academics who reach a permanent position will stay until retirement. Re-entering academia is difficult after having left the sector and longer career breaks are rare, except for maternity/paternity leave. Professors are usually committed to constructing and defending a long-term commitment to one or several disciplinary areas and they display their expertise through publications, conference talks, contributions to data or software repositories, online biographical profiles or curriculum vitae. Academic careers follow a two- or multi-pronged path: on the one hand, academics try to secure (or improve) their institutional places in higher education institutions; on the other hand, they build up their reputation informally as members in disciplinary communities. While they try to move up the institutional status ladder, they engage in activities in research, teaching and management that contribute to their reputation and consolidate their profile and identity. Their practices can be subject to institutional rules and constraints (e.g. legal conditions they need to fulfil to reach a permanent position) and to the dynamics of visibility on the free market of expert reputation. Academics also enjoy many freedoms, especially in how they work and what they work on. Special rewards are sometimes given to those who are perceived as making a unique and creative contribution to the wider scientific debate. The PhD is a major career event for most academics and it is defined by the place (the institution) and the expertise (the discipline). The first permanent recruitment is the second major biographical event and it sometimes, typically in Germany, coincides with the first appointment as a full professor. Countries like France and the UK usually award at least one permanent academic contract before the professorship. The professorial appointment can therefore be seen as the second or third major event in academic careers and it marks the moment when the academic is fully recognized by an institution. Institutional recognition tends to follow or precede reputation in the discipline. This is why academic careers typically follow a zigzag of institutional and disciplinary dynamics of recognition. Academia is not a system of forever fixed hierarchical positions. Academics become part of a system of inequalities that keeps evolving as academics move from studying towards a first academic degree until retirement. Their careers are organised around defining biographical events such as the award of their PhD, a recruitment or a promotion, a

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management or teaching role, publications, etc. These events take place as a result of the coordinated practices among many actors. A process perspective is indeed needed if we want to understand how social structures in academia emerge and consolidate (Angermuller, 2018). Every academic has ideas about how academics proceed or should proceed. Young researchers tend to overstate the obstacles to a permanent recruitment whereas senior academics sometimes think of their career as the only model in the sector. Such theories circulate in academic milieux untested. What is needed are systematic data-based insights into how professors move into and out of their positions.

References Abbott, A. (2016). Processual Sociology. University of Chicago Press. Angermuller, J. (2018). Accumulating Discursive Capital, Valuating Subject Positions. From Marx to Foucault. Critical Discourse Studies, 15(4), 415–425. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2018.1457551 Camic, C., Lamont, M., & Gross, N. (2011). Social Knowledge in the Making. University of Chicago Press. Carlone, H. B., & Johnson, A. (2007). Understanding the Science Experiences of Successful Women of Color: Science Identity as an Analytic Lens. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 44(8), 1187–1218. https://doi. org/10.1002/tea.20237 Hamann, J. (2019). Zum Auftritt der Figur ‘Professor’ in Berufungsverfahren. In T.  Etzemüller (Ed.), Der Auftritt. Performanz in der Wissenschaft (pp. 291–306). Transcript. Latour, B. (1987). Science in Action. Open University Press. Masschelein, J., Simons, M., Bröckling, U., & Pongratz, L. (2006). The Learning Society from the Perspective of Governmentality. Blackwell. Morrissey, J. (2013). Governing the Academic Subject: Foucault, Governmentality and the Performing University. Oxford Review of Education, 39(6), 797–810. https://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2013.860891 Robinson, K., Perez, T., Nuttall, A., Roseth, C., & Linnenbrink-Garcia, L. (2018). From Science Student to Scientist: Predictors and Outcomes of Heterogeneous Science Identity Trajectories in College. Developmental Psychology, 54, 1977–1992. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0000567 Sismondo, S. (2010). An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies (2nd ed.).

CHAPTER 3

Existing Research on Academic Careers

Abstract  Professorial careers result from the conjunction of two intertwined processes: qualifications (diplomas) and jobs (contracts). Existing research often revolves around the idea of academic mobility as a result of markets that coordinate the practices of academics. While research is often seen as a key currency, many other factors are also at play: social class background and economic resources, institutional demands (such as teaching and management), organisational practices and power struggles. Many academic careers today are characterised by certain standards with the doctorate and the first professorial appointment as defining moments. Keywords  Academic mobility • Market • Performance • Inequalities • Organisations • Standardisation • Specialisation About the early nineteenth century, higher education in Europe saw a decisive turn towards professionalisation. After the Humboldtian reforms in Prussia, Germany defined the model of the professor as an established senior academic: an intellectual and institutional leader who not only holds a well-paid, permanent leadership position within the university but also represents an educated class that has managed to shape social life at various points (Ringer, 1969). Until the early twentieth century, professors were recruited among self-funded scholars with a decisively upperclass background. While the German habilitation system still reflects that © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Angermuller, P. Blanchard, Careers of the Professoriate, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25241-9_3

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tradition of the autonomous intellectual turned into an academic leader, North American universities paved the way for a more predictable career model where academics could occupy tenure-track positions early on in order to build up their academic profile and become full professors. Max Weber (1988 [1921]) understood that such was the future for what was going to be the spectacular rise of higher education during the twentieth century. In European countries such as Germany, France and the UK, academic careers are nowadays fully embedded into higher education institutions: academics are expected (and they expect) to be in full and permanent contracts whereas “independent” academics with no institutional affiliation are widely seen as having a deficient career. Since the twentieth century, academics need to pursue at least two career tracks at the same time: a track of qualifications (with the doctorate becoming the central diploma during the twentieth century) and a track of academic jobs (with the professorial appointment as the expression of full institutional recognition). Both tracks are intertwined as diplomas qualify to move up the status ladder and, conversely, academics normally need jobs, grants or scholarships to get a doctoral degree or to be “habilitated” for a professorial position (Angermuller, 2013). Qualifications and jobs constitute the formal categories of recognition and they are the backbone for any academic CV. Yet academics also enjoy informal recognition: they have a reputation as members of a specialised community. Reputation can be less easily measured and compared and CVs can give only an approximate idea of whether the person is widely recognised or unknown in her or his area (through the number of publications, prestigious talks, prizes, etc.). However fuzzy a reputation can be, it makes a real difference and it is perhaps the most important currency in the game of academic distinctions. If qualifications and institutional status point to the outward insignia of academic excellence, reputation reflects the knowledge (or the belief) of members of a community about who one is and how one counts.

The Market, the Organisation, and the Actors Existing research has placed emphasis on various aspects of what drives academic careers. A first idea is that a professorship reflects, or should reflect, academic performance, that is, the individual’s recognised contributions to learning and science, and not draw from “non-academic” (illegitimate) sources of career advancement such as local networks, clan loyalties and inherited prestige. This is the meritocratic idea of academia,

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which perceives academic careers as a function of an individual’s achievements in research, teaching and other “service” activities. According to the meritocratic viewpoint, inequalities in pay, power and pre-eminence are justified if they reflect the skills, talents and the efforts of individuals. Meritocratic views of academia tend to put research centre stage, epitomised by the peer-reviewed research article and research project income. Research gives visibility and recognition to academics beyond circles of close colleagues and classes, which are among the “hard” currencies of academic recognition and weigh on career decisions. The idea of research-­ based meritocracy has been further ingrained into the mindset of many from the second half of the twentieth century, for two reasons. The first is the easy quantification of research achievements through impact factors and journal and publishers’ rankings: the more articles one publishes in highly ranked journals and books with highly ranked publishers, and the more these publications are cited by others in turn, the more one’s name becomes associated with an established body of research. The second reason is the demand for such research metrics by academic managers, by the publication industry itself and by econometric policy-makers in higher education like in other sectors. However, research performance is not all that counts in terms of career progression. Marek Kwiek (2019), for instance, discovers that with a few exceptions salaries of professors in most European (and probably most non-European) countries do not correlate with their publication intensity. Being an ultra-productive researcher does not always boost academics institutionally, which is supported by Münch, who finds that contrary to widely held beliefs “competitive” third-party funding does not systematically go to the most prolific and research-active academics (2013). While both perceive North American and British practices as more research-­ centred, their results indeed raise the question: What else drives career progression of academics, if not publications? Kwiek and Münch remind us that informal research recognition (like research-based reputation) does not mechanically translate into institutional recognition. Institutional status progression has a speed of its own which is not easily geared up or down by stardom or by oblivion. And academic careers are driven by many other factors than research. These include teaching and management, which are essential tasks for the development of knowledge and for academic institutions, and the willingness and ability to engage in power struggles in order to access the highest echelons of the organisational hierarchy.

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Even if academia was a perfectly research-based meritocratic system, performance could not be entirely attributed to individual research since “success” and “failure” tend to reflect the economic and non-economic resources that academics marshal throughout their career. This is the second idea—an idea that one commonly associates with Pierre Bourdieu (1984), who sets out to unmask the ideology of academic talent. Academics are involved in tacit struggles in which they have recourse to the economic and cultural capital from their families. For Bourdieu, an academic career is a process of transforming such resources into goods specific to a disciplinary field (such as publications, knowledge, networks). Since the pioneering work of Basil Bernstein (1971), a great deal of research has been produced in the sociology of education showing that educational success consistently correlates with class and that those inequalities are legitimated as “talent” or “achievement” by a system of exams and evaluations. And researchers not only have recourse to the “starting credits” from their families, but research communities usually amplify the visibility of those who are dominant already through what Angermuller and Hamann call the celebrity logics of academic discourse (2019). Following the Matthew principle of “whoever has will be given more” (Merton, 1968), the distribution of visibility tends to follow a negative exponential curve: Visibility is monopolised by a few academic stars at the expense of many others who are active in the community without getting credit (Angermuller, 2018). For example Angermuller’s work on citation visibility has shown that 10% of the most cited professors of a field like Discourse Studies are cited as much as all the other active professors (Angermuller, 2023). If academics are valued in terms of their reputational standing in their communities, higher education institutions do not turn celebrity automatically into status and reward. Some institutions will provide their “stars” with exceptional resourcing levels while punishing less visible colleagues with more routine tasks. Yet many institutions refrain from creating too many distinctions other than through regular promotions or external recruitment. In many cases, institutions have a levelling effect on the monopolisation of visibility in few figures. While reputational concentration is typical for most academic fields and debates, institutions usually refrain from replicating such hierarchies. The most visible professors are kept in the same status group together with the least visible ones. A similar levelling mechanism seems to apply for the allocation of funding by research organisations if one believes Münch’s results (2013). Fashionable

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public discourses about academic “excellence” notwithstanding, many European institutions resist exacerbating inequalities within status groups (American institutions, by contrast, allow for much higher disparities, Angermuller, 2017). Institutions probably have a sense that mimicking the market of footballers or show-business stars would not be the most beneficial to their core missions—delivering good teaching, managing legally and effectively, and promoting sound and diverse research. All these tasks largely, and more and more, rely on collaborative efforts. A third perspective considers academia as an arena of actors who are subject to organisational rules and who also contribute to shaping these rules. In this view, an academic system is a product of social dynamics among actors involved in ongoing power struggles. Evolving along path-­ dependent lines (Clark, 1983), an academic system is defined by the organisational framework within which academics compete and pursue their careers. French universities, for example, have been shown to undergo a cycle of organisational reform when internal imbalances and pressures grow (Musselin, 2004). New programmes are then implemented, new positions created to fix perceived problems (such as a lack of mobility), which then lead to new contradictions elsewhere in the system and trigger another round of reforms. Careers, in this view, unfold according to organisational rules that shape and are shaped by the dynamics of power among the actors. Against this view, proponents of the boundaryless career emphasise the freedom of academic actors from constraints of organisational and other nature (Arthur & Rousseau, 1996). Such claims have been criticised for their lack of empirical evidence (Dany et al., 2011). In fact, as our study will show, academic careers follow highly structured patterns, increasingly so over the last few decades and even across systems where there are no legal and bureaucratic reasons to create homogeneity. These patterns and regularities probably reflect normative expectations and cultural standards that are established in academia as a global social space.

Towards a Standard Career? While academic systems evolve along path-dependent lines, comparative researchers have registered a number of international tendencies such as the decreasing decision-making autonomy for academics, the expansion of higher education administration (Boer et al., 2008) and the managerialisation of academic governance (Hyde et  al., 2013; Schulze-Cleven et  al.,

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2017). The great heterogeneity of academic systems notwithstanding, cross-institutional imitation sometimes takes place with surprising speed across the globe, which has led Meyer and Schofer (2007) to venture the idea of the university as a “world culture”. In this view, universities are not only characterised by local rules and practices but they are also subject to a set of world cultural norms that they conform to, sometimes even against rational considerations of “self-interest”. A prime example of the word culture hypothesis is the university as an organisational umbrella that comprises the whole range of disciplines, which is now the standard for higher learning and science worldwide. Another word-cultural examples are the doctorate (or PhD, which is a philosophiae doctor) as the standard qualification for academics and the professorship as the standard category for senior academics. It would not be surprising to see that the career progression from PhD to professorship is subject to word-cultural rather than to locally specific norms, too. The PhD and the first professorial appointment are indeed, for many academics worldwide, defining biographical events, also called turning points (Abbott, 1997). If the PhD is a qualification and the professorship a position, both are based on a mix of disciplinary and institutional recognition. While the PhD is a qualification awarded by an institution for a specific disciplinary area, a professorship designates an academic position with senior status for a given disciplinary area of specialisation. A “Doctor” and “Professor” can also be awarded as honorary titles, which are given to individuals who have pursued academic or non-academic careers and who we tried to eliminate in our database. Full professors, however, normally have a PhD based on a piece of unique research and they occupy a full and permanent academic job with professorial status in a higher education institution. Academics consolidate their positions between the award of a PhD and the first professorial appointment. Even though this biographical period is often characterised by a great deal of change and mobility, career progression is governed by some standards. Academics are subject to a career regime that deploys them in a field of hierarchical positions over time. They are no passive dupes—on the contrary, they actively build up their profiles and make conscious career decisions. Yet as they gain reputation and consolidate their positions, they need to move through a system of socially expected durations. Academic career progression sometimes follows timetables (Merton, 1984; Toren, 1993), which may be set down by organisations explicitly (e.g. the six-year rule in Germany for fixed-term

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positions in academia) or they are tacitly shared (such as French postdocs wondering whether they can still be recruited as maître de conferences more than four years after their PhD). Therefore, the progression from junior to senior positions “seems to be sliced into comparable time periods across European systems” (Brechelmacher et al., 2015, p. 41). Building on these insights, our study will be guided by the idea of academia as a social space shaped by two distinct but intertwined processes: specialisation and standardisation. Academics need to respond to the pressures of specialisation in the disciplinary space of expertise. They are encouraged to create new knowledge, to occupy a niche and to open up lines of research. At the same time, they need to organise their biographical time so as to fit with institutional standards and converging career standards. Before turning to the empirical analysis of the 2000 careers that we analysed, we will now shed some light on the three systems and the two disciplines.

References Abbott, A. (1997). On the Concept of Turning Point. Comparative Social Research, 16, 85–105. Angermuller, J. (2013). How to Become an Academic Philosopher. Academic Discourse as a Multileveled Positioning Practice. Sociología Histórica, 3, 263–289. Angermuller, J. (2017). Academic Careers and the Valuation of Academics. A Discursive Perspective on Status Categories and Academic Salaries in France as Compared to the U.S., Germany and Great Britain. Higher Education, 73, 963–980. Angermuller, J. (2018). Accumulating Discursive Capital, Valuating Subject Positions. From Marx to Foucault. Critical Discourse Studies, 15(4), 415–425. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2018.1457551 Angermuller, J. (2023). Discourse Studies as a Transdisciplinary, International and Multilingual Field An Empirical Account of a Global Academic Population. In Handbook of Cultural Discourse Studies. Routledge. Angermuller, J., & Hamann, J. (2019). The Celebrity Logics of the Academic Field. The Unequal Distribution of Citation Visibility of Applied Linguistics Professors in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. Journal for Discourse Studies, 1, 77–93. Arthur, M., & Rousseau, D. (Eds.). (1996). The Boundaryless Career: A New Employment Principle for a New Organizational Era. Oxford UP.

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Bernstein, B. (1971). Class, Codes, and Control. Four volumes. Routledge & Kegan Paul. de Boer, H. F., Enders, J., & Schimank, U. (2008). Comparing Higher Education Governance Systems in Four European Countries. In N. C. Soguel & P. Jaccard (Eds.), Governance and Performance of Education Systems (pp. 35–54). Springer. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Homo Academicus. Minuit. Brechelmacher, A., Park, E., Ates, G., & Campbell, D. F. (2015). The Rocky Road to Tenure—Career Paths in Academia. In T.  Fumasoli, G.  Goastellec, & B. M. Kehm (Eds.), Academic Work and Careers in Europe: Trends, Challenges, Perspectives (pp. 13–40). Springer. Clark, B.  R. (1983). The Higher Education System: Academic Organization in Cross-National Perspective. University of California Press. Dany, F., Louvel, S., & Valette, A. (2011). Academic Careers: The Limits of the ‘Boundaryless Approach’ and the Power of Promotion Scripts. Human Relations, 64(7), 971–996. Hyde, A., Clarke, M., & Drennan, J. (2013). The Changing Role of Academics and the Rise of Managerialism. In B. Kehm & U. Teichler (Eds.), The Academic Profession in Europe: New Tasks and New Challenges (pp. 39–52). Springer. Kwiek, M. (2019). Changing European Academics. A Comparative Study of Social Stratification, Work Patterns and Research Productivity. Routledge. Merton, R. K. (1968). The Matthew Effect in Science. Science, 159(3810), 56–63. Merton, R.  K. (1984). Socially Expected Durations: A Case Study of Concept Formation in Sociology. In W. W. Powell & R. Robbins (Eds.), Conflict and Consensus: In Honor of Lewis A. Coser (pp. 262–283). Free Press. Meyer, J.  W., & Schofer, E. (2007). The University in Europe and the World: Twentieth Century Expansion. In G.  Krücken, A.  Kosmützky, & M.  Torka (Eds.), Towards a Multiversity? Universities between Global Trends and National Traditions (pp. 45–62). Transcript. Münch, R. (2013). Academic Capitalism: Universities in the Global Struggle for Excellence. Routledge. Musselin, C. (2004). Towards a European Academic Labour Market? Some Lessons Drawn from Empirical Studies on Academic Mobility. Higher Education, 55–78. Ringer, F. (1969). The Decline of the German Mandarins. The German Academic Community, 1890–1933. Harvard University Press. Schulze-Cleven, T., Reitz, T., Maeße, J., & Angermuller, J. (2017). The New Political Economy of Higher Education Between Distributional Conflicts and Discursive Stratification. Higher Education, 73(6), 795–812. Toren, N. (1993). The Temporal Dimension of Gender Inequality in Academia. Higher Education, 25, 439–455. Weber, M. (1988). Wissenschaft als Beruf. In M.  Weber (Ed.), Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (pp. 582–613). Mohr.

CHAPTER 4

Professors in Germany, France, United Kingdom

Abstract  The UK, France and Germany represent three major European academic systems with distinct organisational traditions. Against the background of existing research and drawing on our insider knowledge about these systems, we present a comparative overview of the British academic system as a liberal bureaucracy, centred on departments, of France as a national status oligarchy, and of Germany as a federation of autonomous entrepreneurs. Members of these systems are subject to career regimes organising professional advancement through the interplay of salary rules, qualifications, evaluations, recruitments, promotions, and more. Keywords  Academic systems • France • Germany • UK • Career statuses • Bureaucracy • Oligarchy • Entrepreneurship

Higher Education in Transnational Perspective Germany, France and the UK are Europe’s largest countries in terms of academic workforce with 432,000, 316,000 and 306,000 researchers and scientists in 2018, respectively (Statistisches Bundesamt). Germany has produced around 26,000–30,000 PhDs a year over the last decade (Statistisches Bundesamt), more than in the UK (20,000–23,000, Kehm et  al., 2018) and France (13,000–14,000, Ministère de l’Enseignement supérieur et de la Recherche): 48,000 professors were counted in Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Angermuller, P. Blanchard, Careers of the Professoriate, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25241-9_4

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in 2018 (Statistisches Bundesamt), 18,000  in France in 2019 (Kabla-­ Langlois, 2021) and 21,000  in the UK in 2019 (Higher Education Statistics Agency). The number of PhDs awarded has been steadily increasing over the last few decades with the French doctorates plateauing over the last decade, probably as a response to institutional restrictions of uncontrolled enrolments. Many think that it is getting harder for young researchers to land academic jobs (Kwiek & Antonowicz, 2015, p. 47) but the number of academic jobs has also been increasing even though some fields such as sociology in Germany have probably done better than linguistics in the UK. These countries are big enough for academics to have a chance to get academic jobs in the country of their PhD and change between institutions without having to change countries. Even for many small fields, there is a critical mass of academics and jobs within the country, both on junior and senior levels (Goastellec, 2016). As a result, national epistemic tendencies, traditions and schools have emerged in many fields of the social sciences and humanities; sociology and linguistics are no exceptions. Career statuses vary subtly between countries (France: Angermuller, 2017; UK: Brennan et  al., 2007; Germany: Lörz & Mühleck, 2019; Waaijer, 2015), which makes cross-national comparisons a challenging task. The most universal position, the professorship, is a robust category, which can be used as a point of reference for an international comparison of careers. In our definition, academics have professorial status (i.e. they are “professors”) if they are seen as established, independent experts in their field and occupy a senior position in a higher education institution. A full professorship is seen as the most senior position that academics can reach in higher education institutions. After the professorial appointment, career differentiation takes many other shapes which are less transparent, comparable and measurable, that can be expressed by scales, pay and funding, administrative roles or responsibility for teams. As many academics from these countries are trained and recruited nationally, professors are likely to hold a PhD from the same country. Academic careers tend to be bounded by the academic system whose implicit and explicit rules and practices remain often opaque to observers from outside, especially when it comes to understanding the dynamics of institutional power, which organise the way how academics are appointed and promoted. Since academics need a fine-grained command of language, academic mobility is also strongly constrained by linguistic barriers. German is used by 130 million native speakers mostly based in Germany,

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Austria or German-speaking Switzerland. There are 270 million speakers of French in France, Belgium, French-speaking Switzerland, Luxemburg as well as in around 25 other former French colonies. English has as many as 430 million native speakers on the British Isles and the white settler colonies (United States (US), UK, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand) and there is probably over a billion speakers who use it as a lingua franca in over 35 other former British colonies (e.g. India, Pakistan, Philippines, Nigeria, Uganda) and as a language of science and trade around the world (20–90% of other Europeans and 2–10% of Latin Americans speak English as an additional language). The UK, France and Germany are centres of those linguistic spaces and they define models of academic governance for many other systems in the world. The UK’s is a “liberal” system with autonomous departments led by a strong Head, similar to those in Australia, New Zealand and Canada and, to some degree, in the US (Baker, 2012, p. 3). The French academic system is centred around a corps of enseignant.e.s-chercheurs.e, who are civil servants, and created by the central government, not unlike Spain and Scandinavian countries. In Germany, the system is focused on the chair as an autonomous organisational unit led by a professor like in Belgium, Switzerland, Austria and, to some degree perhaps, in Italy. France, UK and Germany represent systems with sufficient resources to produce and reproduce the academics staffing their institutions. Careers in these countries are different from what one can observe in more precarious academic systems outside Western and Central Europe, where salaries are sometimes insufficient for middle-class lifestyles, teaching takes precedence over research and “locals” clash with “internationalists”, as has been reported from Argentina (Medina, 2014), Poland (Kwiek, 2013) or Russia (Sokolov, 2019). In comparative studies from Ben-David (1977) to Musselin (2005a), higher education in Germany, France, the UK and the US appear as the four major models of higher education that have been taken up by academic systems around the world since the nineteenth century. Accordingly, Chanphirun and Sijde (2014, p. 893ff.) distinguish between four models of higher education: first, a research-focused Humboldtian (German) model that places emphasis on the free co-discovery of knowledge between professors and students; second, a Napoleonic (French) model of centralised training that imparts defined skills on a technocracy; third, a personality-focused (British) model of liberal education where students acquire general culture through close contact with professors and, fourth, a hybrid Anglo-American model that combines the features of the three European

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models (Shin & Teichler, 2014, speak of an Oxbridge model rather than an Anglo-Saxon model). The problem with Chanphirun’s and Sijde’s four models is that they are normative. They reflect elite imaginations of what higher education should be rather than give an empirical account of what higher education is in these countries. That is why we prefer to characterise the UK academic system as a liberal bureaucracy, the French one as a national status oligarchy and Germany as a federation of autonomous entrepreneurs. We follow attempts to theorise the varieties of academic systems as a result of academic actors who bring about and respond to organisational arrangements on the level of institutions and academic systems (Musselin, 2005b). Clark’s triangle of coordination (Clark, 1983, p. 143) provides a comparative angle on academic systems in terms of three distinct aspects of academic power: authority, academic oligarchy and market. In this view, French professors are part of a corps of academic state intellectuals who are placed between the authority of the centralised nation state and the academic oligarchy. British professors are members of departments that have increasingly been subjected to market forces since Thatcher. The German academic system is characterised by an oligarchy of professor entrepreneurs who compete for funding and resources under conditions of decentralised authority. More than the American system, where institutional heterogeneity can be significant, the three European systems know a set of common rules, standards and benchmarks on a national level. In all three countries, salaries for junior academics are determined following national salary scales (whereas senior salaries only in France). Qualifications are accredited according to national and European rules. Academic research and activities are evaluated by national evaluation agencies in the UK and in France. Academics enjoy universal health coverage and they benefit from various other public services such as mostly free education until the PhD, especially in France and Germany. Following Bourdieu, the three countries can also be seen as fields with specific hierarchies and types of recognition that are internal and external to the field (such as the conflict between “pure” and “applied” science which is fed by the competition between groups defending their capital and position in the field, Bourdieu, 2018). In this view, French and especially German professors are probably more committed to “pure” (theoretical) research than their British counterparts in the social sciences and humanities  who follow a more pragmatic understanding of scientific

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knowledge. French and British higher education can be perceived as having centres and peripheries whereas the institutional pecking order is less important in Germany. From a career theoretical point of view, biographical events can be seen as an enactment of structural forces within these systems and fields. Yet career decisions do not mechanically translate a given place in a triangle or a field. They are complex effects that need to be seen in their sequential context. For this reason, our typology places emphasis on the way academics in the three systems can (or cannot) move through a structured academic space in which career events take place at certain points.

The United Kingdom: A Liberal Bureaucracy The UK is an example of a liberal-bureaucratic system led by strong institutional decision-makers such as Heads of Department, Deans and Vice-­ Chancellors who are in control of strategic decisions such as recruitments and promotions. Academics are organised in departments that enjoy some decision-making and financial autonomy. Their members work with a largely home-grown bureaucracy (in the Weberian sense) where all tasks and roles tend to be broken down into explicit definitions, workloads and numbers. Academics are fungible cogs of a teaching and research machinery, micro-managed through a host of explicit institutional rules, guidelines, procedures. Yet as clerks of an academic bureaucracy, they enjoy a certain degree of freedom and autonomy and independence from personal loyalties and networks. British academics are individualists who serve value-for-money oriented students whose intellectual interests are less likely to be for the long term. Rules are rarely the immutable products of a centralised ministry; they can be changed by competent members within the organisation if they no longer serve the purpose. Academics are recruited by universities to fill positions whose requirements are laid down in precise job descriptions and detailed rule books. They carry out tasks following the needs and templates of their department. The functions members of a university have in teaching, research, management can be  flexible. Careers of UK academics revolve around their changing roles in the department and the university. Therefore, when the academic embarks on a career in the UK, he or she will have a sense for bureaucratic rules and act as an individualist outside the institutional realm.

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For those embarking on a professorial career in the UK (just as in the other two countries), it is common to start with a fixed-term contract as a postdoc researcher or teaching fellow before seeking recruitment as a permanent academic after a few years. As Lecturers, Senior Lecturers and Readers, academics are paid according to defined salary scales that are negotiated between unions and employers nationwide. Lecturers are on track for promotion to Senior Lecturers and Readers, which is a fairly standard process in some institutions. Unlike the salaries of lower grades, professorial salaries in the UK and in Germany are “negotiable”, which means that professorial salaries can be set anywhere above a minimum threshold. Just like their German counterparts, British professors will not automatically move up to a higher spinal point unless they renegotiate their contract with the university (e.g. after a job offer from another university). Salary spreads between professors can be significant. Some professors (e.g. those with high management responsibilities or in business schools) can earn many times more than regular professors (Angermuller, 2017). Permanent academics in the UK usually have teaching, research and (some) management tasks but the departmental managers are free to decide on allocating workload as they see fit. Most full academic staff have permanent contracts even though they do not enjoy US-style tenure. and they are not civil servants either, like their counterparts in France or professors in Germany. Permanent academics can be made redundant if departments are restructured. Yet most will never see their job at risk and the few who have to or want to leave have a chance to get recruited elsewhere. Permanent Lecturers can be appointed even before the doctorate but this is less common than in Germany. Permanent academics cannot expect to become professors automatically and many retire as Senior Lecturers or Readers. It is not common for academics to change institutions before or after the professorial appointment. It is not uncommon for pre-professorial academics to move to another institution when there are conflicts in the old institution or the job situation is better. Unlike professors, they cannot improve their salaries, however, which are set by a national grid from Lecturer to Reader. Some academics are promoted to professors internally (from Senior Lecturer or Reader), others are recruited from other institutions. Departments can recruit a professor externally, especially when a specific requirement cannot be met by internal staff, for example, to fill a position in senior management or to attract research money.

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Institutional prestige hierarchies have an influence on career options available to UK academics. The most prestigious universities are Oxford and Cambridge, which are the oldest universities with their unique organisational division into colleges and local academic traditions. They are followed by around 20 other recognised research universities which are known as the Russell group. Student fees are broadly the same across universities. Yet PhDs from low prestige institutions may have more difficulty in finding good academic jobs in high prestige institutions (Paye, 2013). In the early 1990s, the applied universities (polytechnics) were given the status of universities and they are still known as post-1992 universities. Like applied universities in Germany (Fachhochschulen), post-1992 universities have managed to succeed in some research areas. Since the 1980s and 1990s, UK universities have seen a decisive turn towards commercialisation and managerialisation (which Brennan describes in terms of a move towards the market pole, 2010, p. 232) and since 1998 they have also been charging fees that rose to 9000£ for domestic and to 20,000£ for overseas students or more by the late 2010s. British students usually follow tightly defined schedules with little flexibility and they are closely followed by their teachers. Many universities at the upper end are decisively focused on attracting fee-paying students from the large international market of mobile Anglophone students willing to move to the UK for a one-year master’s or a three-year PhD. British universities are also rather open to recruiting international staff even though the exit from the European Union has made it more difficult to recruit Europeans and led to a decline of research cooperation with other European countries. Elaborate evaluation technologies such as the Research Excellence Framework (REF) have been developed since the 1980s to assess the quality of research output so that institutions get research funding from the government. REF (formerly RAE) has been organised in cycles of five or seven years since 1986. To participate in REF, universities have to prepare submissions that present the research output and achievements of all (or most) research-active staff. As a consequence, a research bureaucracy has emerged within universities that monitors researchers, encourages them to increase their research intensity and also to produce impact in non-­ academic contexts (Angermuller & Wróblewska, 2023). Such management dispositifs are now being extended to the areas of teaching and knowledge exchange.

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While British universities have been undergoing major changes since Thatcher (Brennan et  al., 2007), existing research knows little about effects on or changes in academic careers. The total number of UK professors has been steadily increasing in line with other ranks (HESA), as a result of which professorial status is no longer traditionally restricted to a few senior managers (such as Vice-Chancellors, Deans or Heads of Department) but it has become a career target for many academics in teaching and research. As in many countries of the West, the academic workforce is ageing and universities are increasingly turning to promoting deserving academics internally. After all, for Senior Lecturers or Readers having reached the end of their salary scales a professorship does not cost the university much and is little more than a title for deserving colleagues.

France: A National Status Oligarchy French academics form a corps funded by the state and grouping in informal networks. As civil servants, they enjoy a state-backed status as teachers and researchers (enseignant.e.s-chercheurs.ses) or as researchers (chercheurs. ses), which gives them a secure position, a stable salary and a state pension and it also defines their rights and obligations (such as a certain number of teaching hours). Once they have entered the corps of (enseignant.e.s-) chercheurs.ses, they share the same inalienable rights, which underpin their critical independence and intellectual autonomy. They are placed into the elementary hierarchy of professorial and non-professorial academics (e.g. MCF [maître de conférences] and PR [professeur.e]). Yet their status as teachers and researchers makes them equal in certain ways—they are all citizens of the French Republic of Science. As an organisation, the French university emerged only in 1968 (Musselin, 2004). The 92,000 academics who are nowadays engaged in teaching and/or research are not employed by the 74 French universities (France Universités). Rather, they all have one employer, represented by the national Ministry of Higher Education and Research. It is not difficult to see the complex dialectical dynamics between norms and reforms from the top and their creative application, appropriation and subversion by the actors on the ground, between centralising policy forces and the oligarchic representations of the academic corps. Academic identities and loyalties, therefore, can be defined by collectivities other than universities and departments: While economic and political interests are organised by unions, disciplinary and intellectual orientations congeal in circles, groups

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and networks that can be formalised in research teams (laboratoires) and study centres (centres d’études). Once recruited on a full academic position, many French academics will no longer leave the institution. French academics often stay together for a long time, which allows for personal ties to grow and for informal groups to emerge. French academics may not have too much respect for their local management but they are aware of who gets along with whom and they know which are the local and national networks they belong to (Frank, 1977). They also have a keen sense of being part of a corps of national academics whose interests need to be defended collectively. A pivotal point in French careers is when academics enter the corps and secure the status of enseignant-chercheur.se if she or he is appointed as a maître de conférences at a university or the status of chercheur.se if he or she is appointed chargé de recherche at CNRS. They are expected to be recruited on such positions within four years after the doctorate and many will attain a secure position in their early 30s. To apply for a position, candidates normally need the green light (i.e. the qualification) from the Comité National des Universités (CNU), a national gatekeeping committee that checks the eligibility of applicants for the rank of MCF or PR. Therefore, to become a professor, French academics typically need to pass the CNU two times, just after the doctorate to get qualified for MCF positions and around 10–15 years later to obtain the qualification for a professorial position, the habilitation à diriger des recherches (HDR). Local job committees will select qualified academics. The life of a French enseignant.e-chercheur.se is typically divided between the department (département), which organises the teaching, and the research centre (laboratoire), which comprises an interdisciplinary group of specialists some of whom may come from other universities. The reputation and public profiles of many academics are more likely to be defined by the research centre, which can give visibility in a national space. The research centre can give important informal support when it comes to recruitment and promotion decisions. The department is often seen as the place where academics have to pay their teaching service to the institution—no wonder we often found little biographical information about them on departmental webpages. There is a strong boundary between those who have the status of (enseignant.e-)chercheur.se and those who do not. Most higher education resources go into permanent jobs with few possibilities for academics to pursue careers on non-permanent jobs. Once they have secured the status

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as (enseignant.e-)chercheur.se, French academics can work towards internal promotion or seek a professorial appointment elsewhere. It will often take them many years to attain a professorial position: The candidates do not have to be in a particular hurry as they can continue on the initial job until retirement. Institutional decision-making tends to consider deserving colleagues lining up for promotion. Pay scales for all ranks are fixed and they progress with seniority. Therefore, French academics are unlikely to experience major salary hikes as they move from student contracts (ATER) to MCF (classe normale/hors classe) and the three salary PR classes (Angermuller, 2017). The French system gives no incentive to academics moving between institutions and there are few possibilities to move the salary up other than by becoming a professor. French academics can apply for research projects (e.g. from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche, founded in 2005), distinctions (such as a CNRS buy-out or an appointment at the Institut Universitaire de France, IUF) or other perks (such as paid roles or travels). Yet while a considerable amount of time and energy can be consumed by such opportunities, they normally do not have a significant impact on salaries. They can incite academics to compare each other in an atmosphere of competition. Under such pressure, many academics turn to their personal circles and try to seek support from networks and alliances. Institutional decision-making power is not always located in a clearly demarcated place, person or board. It can be spread out across the academic milieu and is sometimes perceived to be informed by visible or invisible loyalties between certain actors. Therefore, academics who want to advance in their careers need to assess their relationships and position themselves on the checkerboard of academic alliances. The French system is characterised by the division between universities and other more specialised academic institutions, which have been founded to meet specific demands at various points in history, such as elite training for civil servants (e.g. Sciences Po, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Ecole Nationale d’Administration) and specialised expertise in certain sectors (e.g. INSERM, Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale; INSEE, Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques; INRAE, Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement). Therefore, institutional heterogeneity in France has been growing over time as more and more institutions have been created as an alternative to the Sorbonne and the French universities. This variety is reflected in the titles endowed by these institutions: academics with

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professorial status are called professeurs des universités in universities, directeurs/directrices de recherches in the national scientific research centre (CNRS) or directeurs/directrices d’études at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). The heterogeneity of non-professorial roles is even higher and the nomenclature has varied over time (maîtres-assistants, for instance, existed between 1960 and 1984). Many other European systems are centred on the university as an umbrella for teaching and research across all disciplines, with departments (UK) or chairs, that is, research teams led by a professor (Germany) as central organisational units. The difference between universities and other academic institutions constitutes one line of differentiation. The relationship between both is one of complementarity rather than of hierarchy. Universities do not attract the most brilliant students, who go to elite schools. But they offer the most job opportunities for early career researchers by far. Therefore, professors and graduates from elite institutions such as Ecole Normal Supérieure (ENS), Science Po and the Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l’Administration Economique (ENSAE) need to find their place in fields and institutions they do not always know from the inside. While in many cases this is not a disadvantage, the doctorate as a research-based diploma has become a standard route of entry in most disciplines, including in philosophy, letters and the humanities, where, traditionally, some academic jobs can be secured through agrégation on the basis of an exam (concours). In the 2000s, écoles and universités gradually started to converge institutionally and they have even merged in some cases, an evolution that should reinforce the role of French universities as key research institutions, in line with other countries. The other line of differentiation is the relationship between the capital and the “province”. The concentration of academics in France is such that Paris is the place where many  can see others and be seen by others. Therefore, many students and academics come to live, study and work in Paris. Many academics who have their positions elsewhere in the country prefer to commute and live in Paris, where they can liaise and network more easily. Parisian institutions, which have resulted from the break-up of the Sorbonne in 1968, have long been the number one destination for many ambitious academics even though some areas and fields also have important centres outside (Angermuller, 2015, p.  41ff.). “Excellence” programmes, which have been introduced since the 2010s, have reconfigured the hierarchy of institutional prestige. Higher education institutions

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have since been encouraged to form clusters, which has led to enlarged units, changing names and new layers of governance.

Germany: A Federation of Autonomous Entrepreneurs Centred on master–apprentice relationships between professors and their students, the German academic system can be characterised as personal entrepreneurialism. A professor leads a group of early-career researchers plus secretarial staff, sometimes comprising many dozen people including a circle of close students. He or she represents intellectual leadership and acts as an employer (Dienstherr) who extends formal contracts to members of the group and line-manages them. Such groups are also known as “chairs” (Professuren, previously Lehrstühle) and cover the whole range of disciplinary areas of a university. Depending on tasks and resources, chairs can comprise a few doctoral students or many dozens of people with different levels of experience, the majority on fixed-term contracts and few permanent sub-professorial academics (Mittelbau). As an entity, a chair has responsibility for certain teaching areas and members are also likely to cooperate in research. Departments are essentially a collection of chairs from the same discipline, each representing a sub-disciplinary field. One of the professors heads the department as a primus inter pares and with no special resources or powers. The same applies for Faculty deans (DekanInnen) and university presidents (RektorInnen), who have little strategic control. Most resources are distributed through the chairs since academics are employed by the chairs. And that’s why the power lies with the professors as holders of the chairs. In order to pursue a career, the German early-career researcher normally needs to be recruited by a professor at some point. The professor fills non-professorial positions from the university (Planstellen), which are mostly fixed-term contracts, as well as positions from external funding, which are always fixed-term contracts. There are scholarships and fixed-­ term contracts available to early-career researchers in order to fund PhDs and to work as a postdoc. Most young academics will not find a permanent academic job before obtaining a professorship (Höhle & Teichler, 2016). Therefore, they will work as non-permanent members of a professor’s chair team until they have built up a research profile and obtained the

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Habilitation (or an equivalent qualification), which makes them eligible for a professorial position. Before the professorship, academics have the choice between various types of contracts, which are broadly comparable: a Wissenschaftliche/r MitarbeiterIn position is available to all academics in research and teaching, even to those who are preparing their doctorate. It is the standard employment for the many third-party funded projects. Teaching positions (Lehrkraft für besondere Aufgaben) have recently multiplied. Both types of contracts are normally fixed-term and can be part-time. The Akademischer Rat/Akademische Rätin is a civil servant position for postdocs and it is limited to three plus three years. The latter contract is less precarious, paid slightly better and as a civil servant the academic is entitled to private health care. Exceptionally, a Rätin/Rat or a wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter can be made permanent if the recruiting professor has a good negotiating position within the university. Yet as long as they haven’t secured a professorship, most academics remain on one- to three-year contracts that depend on a professor (Enders, 1996). While most contracts for young academics are between one and three years, they can sometimes stay a long time with a chair team: as BA and MA students, they may have already been in the orbit of the chair for five to eight years. Students can then stay as doctoral students. Like in France, students may take their time since there are mostly no significant student fees. (Attempts to introduce student-fee models in the 2000s failed). The doctorate and the habilitation can take around four to eight years each, which means the total time for a young academic to stay with a professor can be 15, 20 years or more. Such long-term relationships open up unique possibilities to develop and fine-tune theoretical projects and they also make possible epistemic traditions passed on over generations. Therefore, young German academics can become interested in academic questions early on in their studies, enter an intellectual milieu of like-minded students, find mentors (who do not need to be professors) and develop unique research interests. While professors can fill openings in their team quickly without going through complex procedures, professors themselves are recruited in famously long, demanding and unpredictable procedures. In Germany, the bottleneck is the professorship (and not non-professorial positions such as British Lecturer or French MCF) and job vacancies can attract more than 100 candidates from the field who are classified and ranked by a committee. Around six are auditioned and their teaching and research

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capacities are tested. All university instances need to agree to the shortlist, which is then submitted to external reviewers. As professors are normally permanent civil servants, the regional ministry will have the final say on the candidates selected by the university. The whole recruitment process takes years. More than in France and in the UK, the first appointment as professor on a W2 (formerly C3) level is an important life event for the German academic, and not only because of the ordeal of going through a long recruitment procedure. The academic will now enjoy job security, a good salary, a research budget, a prestigious title, the right to hire and she or he will be heard in university affairs. With the transition from C to W scales in 2002, professorial salaries became negotiable like in the UK. The W system sets a minimum salary and allows for extra payments which are often dependent on agreed targets such as third-party funding revenue. By being appointed as a professor, the academic passes from somebody who is employed, to somebody who employs (non-professorial) academics. The university indeed recruited the professor together with a potential team that he or she will start to appoint right away, and which are likely to be brought over if the professor moves to a second appointment in another university. By state (Land) statute, the German professor has a certain number of hours to teach and he or she will manage a team. And he or she is (supposed to be) an established representative of his or her disciplinary field. While the German professor enjoys a great deal of autonomy in how he or she realises the job, he or she will always have to carry out important teaching and management tasks. German professors at regular research universities are expected to show a strong research orientation. In Germany, academics are given full academic status after they have established their reputation and expertise in their community whereas in the French and the British system many young academics will gain the status and permanent positions before they have proven themselves and gained recognition in their discipline. The recognised expertise of professors in Germany can be a source of confidence when it comes to asserting themselves in the institution but also in the larger society. And their personal standing as intellectual authorities can trump the prestige of the institution. German higher education institutions are distinguished between regular research universities where professors usually have to teach between eight and ten hours a semester, and applied (teaching-focused) universities (Fachhochschulen) where the teaching load is often double. Teachingoriented universities are often more recent creations. They have been

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growing more quickly than research universities and nowadays they have obtained the right to train PhDs, too. Traditionally, there have been relatively few prestige hierarchies even though older universities (such as Göttingen, LMU München, Heidelberg, Tübingen, Humboldt University Berlin) have sounding names. Since 2005, federal programmes known as the Exzellenzinitiative have contributed to reinforcing an institutional pecking order with the idea of creating few “lighthouses” of international stature. Institutions have since been invited to apply for competitive funding for excellence projects, which has created an informal distinction between A and B universities in the 16 regional states, where A universities can count on extra support from regional ministries in order to boost their chances in federal excellence programmes. Whether such reforms and programmes that are supposed to make German universities more competitive change the way academics pursue their careers remains to be seen: Given the emphasis placed on the long-­ term development of authentic research orientations, German academics have always shown a decisively entrepreneurial spirit, committed to building up research teams and training future generations, develop projects and raise funding.

References Angermuller, J. (2015). Why There Is No Poststructuralism in France. The Making of an Intellectual Generation. Bloomsbury. Angermuller, J. (2017). Academic Careers and the Valuation of Academics. A Discursive Perspective on Status Categories and Academic Salaries in France as Compared to the U.S., Germany and Great Britain. Higher Education, 73, 963–980. Angermuller, J., & Wróblewska, M. (2023). ‘It’s Creative Stuff!’ The REF Impact Agenda and the Discursive (Re-)positioning of Academics. Educational Studies Review. Baker, M. (2012). Academic Careers and the Gender Gap. UBC Press. Ben-David, J. (1977). Centers of Learning. Britain, France, Germany, United States. McGraw-Hill. Bourdieu, P. (2018). L’histoire singulière de la raison scientifique. Zilsel, 4, 281–319. Brennan, J. (2010). Burton Clark’s The Higher Education System: Academic Organization in Cross-National Perspective. London Review of Education, 8(3), 229–237.

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Brennan, J., Locke, W., & Naidoo, R. (2007). United Kingdom: An Increasingly Differentiated Profession. In W.  Locke & U.  Teichler (Eds.), The Changing Conditions of Academic Work and Career in Selected Countries. INCHER. Chanphirun, S., & van der Sijde, P. (2014). Understanding the Concept of the Entrepreneurial University from the Perspective of Higher Education Models. Higher Education, 68(6), 891–908. Clark, B.  R. (1983). The Higher Education System: Academic Organization in Cross-National Perspective. University of California Press. Enders, J. (1996). Die wissenschaftlichen Mitarbeite. Ausbildung, Beschäftigung und Karriere der Nachwuchswissenschaftler und Mittelbauangehörigen an den Universitätenr. Campus. Frank, P. (1977). The Sociology of Science in France. In R. K. Merton & J. Gaston (Eds.), The Sociology of Science in Europe (pp.  258–282). Southern Illinois University Press. Goastellec, G. (2016). La mobilité internationale: Une qualité des carrières et des marchés académiques en Europe? Journal of International Mobility, 1(4), 171–188. Höhle, E. A., & Teichler, U. (2016). Career and Self-Understanding of Academics in Germany in Comparative Perspective. In J.  F. Galaz-Fontes, A.  Arimoto, U. Teichler, & J. Brennan (Eds.), Biographies and Careers throughout Academic Life (pp.  241–269). Springer. http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/ 978-­3-­319-­27493-­5 Kabla-Langlois, I. (2021). L’Etat de l’enseignement supérieur, de la recherche et de l’innovation en France (Ministère de l’Enseignement Supérieur, de la Recherche et de l’innovation). Kehm, B., Freeman, R., & Locke, W. (2018). Growth and Diversification of Doctoral Education in the United Kingdom: Convergence or Divergence in National Approaches? | Request PDF. In J. C. Shin, B. M. Kehm, & G. A. Jones (Eds.), Growth and Diversification of Doctoral Education in the United Kingdom (pp. 105–121). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­319-­89713-­4_7 Kwiek, M. (2013). From System Expansion to System Contraction: Access to Higher Education in Poland. Comparative Education Review, 57(3), 553–576. JSTOR. https://doi.org/10.1086/670662 Kwiek, M., & Antonowicz, D. (2015). The Changing Paths in Academic Careers in European Universities: Minor Steps and Major Milestones. In T. Fumasoli, G. Goastellec, & B. M. Kehm (Eds.), Academic Work and Careers in Europe: Trends, Challenges, Perspectives (pp. 41–68). Springer. Lörz, M., & Mühleck, K. (2019). Gender Differences in Higher Education from a Life Course Perspective: Transitions and Social Inequality Between Enrolment and First Post-Doc Position. Higher Education, 77, 381–402. Medina, L. R. (2014). Centers and Peripheries in Knowledge Production. Routledge. Musselin, C. (2004). The Long March of French Universities. RoutledgeFalmer.

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Musselin, C. (2005a). European Academic Labor Markets in Transition. Higher Education, 49, 135–154. Musselin, C. (2005b). Le marché des universitaires. France, Allemagne, Etats-Unis. Sciences Po. Paye, S. (2013). Différencier les pairs. Mise en gestion du travail universitaire et encastrement organisationnel des carrières académiques (Royaume-Uni 1970–2010) [Thesis]. Shin, J.  C., & Teichler, U. (2014). The Future of the University in the Post-­ massification Era: A Conceptual Framework [Electronic Resource]. In J. C. Shin & U.  Teichler (Eds.), The Future of the Post-Massified University at the Crossroads: Restructuring Systems and Functions (pp. 1–9). Springer. https:// doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­319-­01523-­1_8 Sokolov, M. (2019). The Sources of Academic Localism and Globalism in Russian Sociology. The Choice of Professional Ideologies and Occupational Niches Among Social Scientists. Current Sociology Review, 67(6), 818–837. Waaijer, C. J. F. (2015). The Coming of Age of the Academic Career: Differentiation and Professionalization of German Academic Positions from the 19th Century to the Present. Minerva, 53, 43–67.

CHAPTER 5

Two Disciplines: Linguistics and Sociology

Abstract  Disciplines organise academic knowledge and institutions. Professors belong to at least one discipline. They also contribute to sub-­ disciplinary specialisation and participate in transdisciplinary collaboration. The pioneers of linguistics and sociology laid the foundations of the two disciplines in the late nineteenth century. After the Second World War, both disciplines grew and consolidated. Today they can be seen as fairly fragmented spaces of specialised knowledge. Linguistics connects with philology, the social sciences and the natural sciences, and it is usually placed in a department which it shares with another field (such as literature). Sociology is often divided into theoretical and methodological schools with differences of identity between quantitative and qualitative currents. It usually sits in a department of its own but many sociologists work in other departments. Keywords  Disciplines • Linguistics • Sociology • Social sciences • History of disciplines • Subdisciplines

The Disciplinary Organisation of Academic Knowledge and Institutions Disciplines designate fields of expertise where members can make legitimate knowledge claims that specialised peers can respond to. Academics develop an identity as members of a disciplinary community and they © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Angermuller, P. Blanchard, Careers of the Professoriate, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25241-9_5

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often have a keen sense for the differences between disciplinary “tribes” (Becher & Trowler, 2001). They demonstrate their membership in the field through many activities, including through publications, journals, conferences that are known to be important to many other members. As academics enter a field, they are labelled and categorised in ways that make them visible, legitimate and relevant to other members of the community (or not). Many such categorising activities are informal, for example, by crossing and citing others at conferences and in publications. Informal categories constitute the disciplinary reputation of an academic. Other categories are more formal, for example, membership in an association, a gatekeeping role for a research organisation, a job in a department, qualifications, which point to their institutional career. Academics attract many such informal and formal categorisations the ensemble of which represents their profile, identity or subject position. If established academics are perceived as members of a discipline (or of more than one), their interests, questions and activities are typically centred on ever-more specialised sub-disciplinary groups (Abbott, 2001). But they also relate to and interact with members of other disciplines. Hence, the dynamics of disciplinary organisation are often characterised by two opposed but intertwined logics: a logic of breaking down into sub-­ disciplinary fields and a logic of joining together transdisciplinary fields. Disciplines, in other words, are a product of both specialisation and integration. The order of disciplines is reflected in certain ways in the institutional structure of universities. Academics are usually placed in a department that reflects a certain discipline. Departments are grouped together in faculties (also known as “schools” or “colleges” following local customs), which represent a wider transdisciplinary space. Sociology is often part of a faculty of social sciences, sometimes together with political sciences, which separated from sociology in the post-war era, or an adjacent discipline like geography, economics, education, history. In German universities, sociology can also be found in philosophy (i.e. humanities) faculties. In France and Germany, linguists are normally placed  in letters and philology faculties. In the UK, “pure” (theoretical) linguists tend to be in humanities faculties whereas applied linguists are likely to be found in social sciences faculties. In Europe, the oldest four disciplinary fields are theology, medicine, law and philosophy, which go back to antiquity. Theology opens up careers in the church whereas medicine and law are embedded in liberal professions. The prestige and function of philosophy and the “seven liberal arts”

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(grammar, rhetoric, logic, music, geometry, arithmetic and astronomy) was probably less certain for a long time. With the rise of European nation states, philosophy became the core discipline of the humanities, which train administrative and educational elites (i.e. civil servants and teachers). Until the nineteenth century, advances in most fields came from men of letters rich enough to spend their time on specialised research. By the early nineteenth century, the Leibnizian model of the “universal scholar” gave way to a more sectorial understanding of knowledge. During the nineteenth century, the Prussian university reforms strengthened the autonomy of universities that encouraged their members to train in specialised disciplinary areas and systematically pursue academic careers in view of stable appointments. Career academics then entered the scene who became the backbone of the emerging research universities in Europe. Until the late nineteenth century, higher education was still heavily focused on the teaching of Latin and Greek and committed to canonical traditions and authorities. By the early twentieth century, the contours of most disciplines were established, at least in the social sciences and humanities and linguistics and sociology are two examples (SSH). If the order of disciplines was cast at that point, major epistemic revolutions have since taken place and changed the state of knowledge (Stichweh, 2021). Treatises on social questions as well as grammars have been written for many centuries (e.g. Foucault, 1966). Some disciplines like philosophy have existed since antiquity and (Christian) theology since the Middle Ages. Other disciplines (political science, communication science, Cultural Studies) followed only after the Second World War. With the advent of research universities, the disciplinary space of philosophy and the seven liberal arts saw processes of consolidation and differentiation of knowledge areas: disciplines such as linguistics and sociology can be seen as core fields of the modern social sciences and humanities, which emerged during the rise of the European research university. The first pioneers of linguistics (e.g. Saussure) and sociology (e.g. Weber, Durkheim) published their major contributions around the turn of the century. Yet both fields did not take off until the 1960s, when European higher education saw a period of spectacular growth. It was the time when sociology was seen as the answer to governance problems after the Second World War and when linguistics experienced its apogee as science pilote in the French debates around structuralism. Both fields have since consolidated and have secured their place in universities around the world. Since the 1980s, both disciplines have seen small but mostly steady growth rates

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in European universities in line with other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. While Germany has seen an uptick in the number of professorships after the Great Financial Crisis (Statista), from which linguistics and sociology in particular have benefited (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2019, p. 21), France reports stable numbers of enseignant.e.s-chercheurs.ses in the social sciences between 2010/2011 and 2020/2021 and small declines in sciences du langage since 2017/2018 (dataESR). The numbers of professors in linguistics and sociology today are broadly comparable, as indicated in Table 5.1. The speed in which careers typically progress in these fields is likely in line with most other areas of the social sciences and humanities, in between the quickest and the slowest movers. Academics rise to professor fastest in growing fields such as business or management, where resources (students) are plentiful and non-academic careers are also an option (Maesse, 2022). They are significantly slower in stagnating fields such as in philosophy and some areas in literature where many applicants compete for few academic positions (Hamann, 2009). Most professors of linguistics can be found in Germany where major European languages and some non-European languages usually have departments of their own with linguists who are specialised for each language. Little overlap can be observed between their job markets: Johannes Angermuller is probably the only academic who held a professorial position in sociology in Germany before he was appointed to professorial positions in linguistics, in the UK.

Table 5.1  Professors in linguistics and sociology

France Germany United Kingdom Total

Linguistics

Sociology

Total

346 499 129 974

367 341 211 919

713 840 340 1893

Counts from our sample. See details about data collection in Chap. 7

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Linguistics Universities group disciplinary specialists usually together in departments (or in research centres and teaching departments in France). Such institutional units are defined by the epistemic area in which they recruit specialists. Yet departments (French research centres) and disciplines do not coincide, at least not entirely, and linguistics is a case in point. Linguists almost never work in a department that consists only of linguists. The few departments of “pure” linguistics are often together with philosophy, the archetypical one at Noam Chomsky’s department at MIT. Pure (theoretical) linguistics, which is interested in how grammatical sentences are formed, may enjoy the prestige as the small but exclusive core of the discipline. Yet, while theoretical linguistics has strongly influenced many linguists trained in the 1970s, as such, it has never carved out a clear institutional place in European universities. The larger numbers of linguists today identify with “applied” strands of linguistics and their representatives are typically found in departments of (foreign) languages and philology, education, psychology, anthropology. Broadly understood, the label of Applied Linguistics designates a range of orientations that deal with language as an object of empirical social research (sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, corpus analysis, conversation analysis, etc.), with language as a challenge for teaching and learning (including, assessment, language acquisition…) or with language studies in a social arena (workplace, criminology, business communication, etc.). Linguists typically share departments with literary scholars, especially in France and Germany. Germany, and to a lesser degree France, are known for disciplinary areas such as Germanistik, Anglistik, Romanistik, Slavistik and some non-European languages where linguists coexist with their counterparts in literature. Their relationship is typically fraught with tension: Not only can one observe a difference of intellectual styles (a more taxonomic or “clerical” one for linguistics versus an intellectual or “bohemian” one in the case of literature), but there are also conflicts over resources. Literature is often more popular with students while careers of literary critics are often slower and less predictable for a lack of academic jobs. On institutional webpages, most linguistics professors are shown as representatives of linguistique or sciences du langage (France) and linguistics (UK) and it is understood they will preferably work in either French or in English unless stated otherwise. However, their expertise can be specified and some are presented as professors of psycholinguistics,

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cognitive linguistics or computer linguistics to give just a few examples. German professors are almost never listed as linguists only since the language area will normally be mentioned (germanistisch, romanistisch, etc.) and many will flag up a sub-disciplinary expertise (such as Didaktik, Textlinguistik or Historische Sprachwissenschaft). Linguistics may not have secured their natural place in the university and linguistics normally does not exist on the departmental level. Yet since modern linguistics was founded by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), linguists have created a relatively stable space of exchange around a set of problems, questions and traditions. The core area of linguistics is differentiated into a number of subfields including syntax, typology, morphology, phonology, semantics, pragmatics. As a discipline, linguistics is split between a small core of “theoretical” linguists and a large periphery of “applied” orientations which are open to a broader interdisciplinary understanding as language studies and are often in explicit contradiction to “mainstream” theoretical linguistics à la Saussure and Chomsky. Applied orientations are more likely to draw inspiration from theoretical developments in the social sciences and humanities and they are sometimes prone to a certain eclecticism (especially applied linguistics in the UK). Linguists are embedded in educational practices and contexts more than sociology. They sometimes train teachers for the secondary system or teach academic writing or foreign languages to students from other departments. Linguistics has brought forth a number of critical strands that are sometimes informed by educationalists aiming at the training of good citizens. The controversy around structuralism and poststructuralism is an example for the leading interdisciplinary role linguistics played at some point in the wider intellectual space of the social sciences and humanities in France and elsewhere (Angermuller, 2015). It needs to be noted that when Saussure came to be an object of interdisciplinary interest during the 1970s and 1980s many linguists already started to turn towards alternatives such as pragmatics or cognitivism (Angermuller, 2014). In the space of transdisciplinary communication, linguistics tends to resonate with the following three orientations: (a) As a philological project, linguistics is interested in words, sentences and texts, centred around grammar, stylistics or typology. Formalist philological strands, including Saussure’s structuralism, had a strong base in France, where linguistics is normally integrated in letters faculties, and to some degree in Germany, where histori-

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cal strands have a long tradition. Philological linguistics is the “purest” and oldest form of linguistics and is often considered as most representative of the discipline as a whole. (b) As a social science, linguistics deals with the empirical challenge of studying language as an important part of social life. Language is seen dynamically, as observable social practices taking place in a context. In the US, social sciences views of linguistics were established by the anthropologist Franz Boas at the beginning of the twentieth century, by sociolinguists and by interactionist and qualitative strands in sociology. Such socially minded interests entered European linguistic debates after the Second World War. For a lack of strong philological traditions, UK linguists have since been particularly receptive to social and pragmatic views on language, mostly in applied fields. North American pragmatism resonates with some theoretical debates around pragmatics originating in the UK, such as Austin’s speech act theory and Wittgenstein’s ordinary language philosophy. Since the 1970s, many French and German linguists have shifted towards the social sciences, too. The rise of new fields like discourse and conversation analysis has resulted from many linguists moving towards the social sciences since the 1970s. (c) As a natural science, linguistics takes inspiration from such fields as neurosciences, biology and physical anthropology. It is interested, for instance, in how human brains and bodies process linguistic signs or how the human species has evolved its linguistic capacities over time. In order to measure language-induced reactions and behaviours, it likes to rely on experimental methods in laboratory settings and use sophisticated recording and measuring devices. Empirical insights from the neurosciences have informed linguistic theory from Chomsky to more recent cognitive approaches to language. However, many linguists prefer to focus on the more theoretical side of research with the goal of improving the analytical models of linguistic phenomena. This is also true for cognitive linguistics which has become a new theoretical paradigm comprising both theoretical and applied perspectives on the natural and social world. Like sociology, linguistics is a highly fragmented discipline whose many subfields sometimes share little epistemological ground. And more than sociology, linguistics is often split into national traditions, at least in its more philological corners. Interestingly, linguistic terminology is often difficult to

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translate from one language to the other and different language areas tend to have brought forth different theoretical traditions. Both linguistics and sociology show a preference for “descriptive” understandings of their objects: linguists normally refrain from saying how people ought to speak. Likewise, most sociologists do not see it as their task to prescribe a certain idea of society.

Sociology Unlike most linguists, many sociologists are recruited in a department carrying the name of their discipline and the University of Bielefeld even boasts a Faculty of Sociology. Sociology is particularly strong in new universities that were founded during the unprecedented growth of higher education in Western Europe during the 1960s. There is a significant number of sociologists working in other departments across the social sciences, especially in political science, business schools (outside Germany), geography, anthropology, media and cultural studies, communication science, education. Medical sociologists can be found in faculties of medicine, criminologists in Law Schools and some sociologists of science have made their way into STEM faculties. Major research universities are expected to have a department of sociology and in some cases they share departments with other disciplines such as political science (e.g. Würzburg), social anthropology (e.g. SOAS) or social policy (Leeds). More than other social sciences (e.g. economics), sociology is a discipline that is divided into opposing theoretical and methodological strands, which testify to its richness and its intellectual productivity but also make it difficult for sociologists to agree on a common identity. A “standard” sociology department reflects these divisions by hosting specialists of various sub-disciplinary areas. Such areas typically include sociological theory, which can be represented within a department by a conceptually ambitious sociologist, a social philosopher or an intellectual historian of the discipline, quantitative social research (including social statistics and demography) and qualitative social research (e.g. ethnography, conversation analysis, qualitative interviews). These methodological divisions sometimes correlate with theoretical divisions between micro-sociological approaches focusing on meaningmaking actors or decision-makers and macro-sociological traditions interested in power, social inequality, and institutions. While many professorships cover a sub-disciplinary area, others represent expertise in a specific social arena, such as political or urban sociology, sociology of organisations, sociology of religion or of gender.

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Sociology is the fruit of rapid social change during the nineteenth century, of the rise of the nation state, industrialisation and democratisation. After the political Enlightenment of the eighteenth century (Rousseau, Locke...), early nineteenth-century intellectuals from reactionary philosophers (Burke, de Maistre) to writers of fiction (Balzac, Dickens) took an interest in society, the social laws, rules and constraints that orient human behaviour. While anthropology emerged from the encounter with the cultural other (i.e. with non-European societies), sociology has specialised in social and political concerns within the country as it were. Theorists from the Left and Right such as Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer articulated the emerging sociological imaginary and at the end of the century the first academic sociologists managed to become established in universities. The German Sociological Association was founded in 1909 by Rudolf Goldscheid, Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Weber and Georg Simmel, which reflected the lively state of sociological discussions in Germany at the turn of the century. In France, a cluster of sociologists formed around Emile Durkheim. While French sociology almost disappeared after Durkheim’s death for several decades, German sociologists continued despite the disaster of the First World War, the inflation of 1923, which wiped out their salaries, and Nazism, which forced many to emigrate (and allowed some to continue). The British Sociological Association was founded in 1951 in the context of post-war social policies that sociologists and Fabian socialists had been advocating. A new generation of French sociologists entered the scene in the 1960s, the most well-known being Pierre Bourdieu, who, just like Durkheim 70 years earlier, created an influential and defined school of followers. The French Sociological Association was founded only in 2002, just after Bourdieu’s death. In methodological terms, sociology relies on models from both the natural sciences (which are dominant in psychology and economics) and from the humanities (especially from history, philosophy and letters). Therefore, Lepenies (1985) characterises sociology as a third culture between science and literature. German sociologists in particular are divided into methodological tribes that prolong the division between natural sciences and humanities (Natur- und Geisteswissenschaften). The dispute over positivism (Adorno, 1976) is a reminder of a long conflict between critical humanistic theory and causalist social statistics. In French sociology, “positivism” resonates with progressive projects from Saint-­ Simon to Durkheim and Bourdieu. French and British sociology know qualitative as well as quantitative strands of social research but methodological divisions are less pronounced than in Germany. British sociology

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may have a more applied character and a stronger commitment to public policy. While it has little representation in traditional universities, it is strong among more recently founded universities, such as the London School of Economics—which was created under the auspices of Fabian socialists—and post-war creations such as Lancaster. Many sociologists are driven by the desire to make an impact in the society they study. While some work for institutions and in the corporate world, others participate in social struggles and movements. Post-Weberian sociologists insist on the difference between the scientist and the activist: if sociological expertise can never be neutral, it can strive to transcend political antagonisms. Linguists like to train cosmopolitan citizens through language education whereas sociologists educate reflexive minds for the higher administrative sector and creative freelancers in the flexible postmodern economy.

References Abbott, A. (2001). Chaos of disciplines. University of Chicago Press. Adorno, T.  W. (1976). The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology. Heinemann. http://hollis.harvard.edu/?itemid=%7Clibrary/m/aleph%7C000722697 Angermuller, J. (2014). Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis. Subjectivity in Enunciative Pragmatics. Palgrave Macmillan. Angermuller, J. (2015). Why There Is No Poststructuralism in France. The Making of an Intellectual Generation. Bloomsbury. Becher, T., & Trowler, P. R. (2001). Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Culture of Disciplines (2nd ed.). Open University Press. Foucault, M. (1966). Les Mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines. Gallimard. Hamann, J. (2009). Der Preis des Erfolges. Die ‘Krise der Geisteswissenschaften’ in feldtheoretischer Perspektive. Bamberg University Press. Lepenies, W. (1985). Die drei Kulturen. Hanser. Maesse, J. (2022). Building Size Among Economists: How Academic Career Trajectories Pave the Way to Symbolic Visibility. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 20(4), 435–449. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2021.1992750 Statistisches Bundesamt. (2019). Bildung und Kultur. Personal an Hochschulen 2018. Fachserie 11 Reihe 4.4. https://soziologie.de/aktuell/news/ stellungnahme-­d er-­d eutschen-­g esellschaft-­f uer-­s oziologie-­d gs-­z u-­ beschaeftigungsverhaeltnissen-­in-­der-­wissenschaft-­1 Stichweh, R. (2021). Disziplinarität, Interdisziplinarität, Transdisziplinarität— Strukturwandel des Wissenschaftssystems (1750–2020). In T.  Schmohl & T.  Philipp (Eds.), Handbuch Transdisziplinäre Didaktik (transcript, pp. 433–448). Transcript Verlag. https://www.transcript-­verlag.de/978-­3-­8376-­ 5565-­0/handbuch-­transdisziplinaere-­didaktik/?number=978-­3-­8376-­5565-­0

CHAPTER 6

Three Concepts for the Analysis of Professorial Careers

Abstract  We analyse professorial careers through three concepts: Speed, Mobility and Pathways. Speed designates the transition from one career step to another, especially from PhD to professorship. Mobility reflects how often one moves between statuses, institutions and national systems. Pathways describe types of academic careers and patterns of career events over the whole career. We hypothesise that to access professorships, academics are increasingly expected to follow standardised biographies. Keywords  Professorial careers • Speed • Mobility • Pathways • Career turning points • Career standards An academic career is a process of positioning, categorising and establishing an individual as a subject recognised by both a disciplinary community and higher education institutions. Over time, academics build up reputation in the disciplines and they secure certain positions within the institutions. Successful academics move up the ladder in both the discipline(s) and the institution(s) and sometimes they end up as a fully recognised professor. Our data reflects the institutional career points that one can normally find in academic CVs: educational diplomas, especially the PhD (with year, discipline and place), and institutional positions (with role, place, length, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Angermuller, P. Blanchard, Careers of the Professoriate, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25241-9_6

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where indicated). Most active professors nowadays share basic biographical information online which we could gather and code to account for most of the career points between PhD and first professorial appointment. Academic careers can be characterised through speed, mobility and pathways. Speed is key when it comes to becoming a professor. There are various material and immaterial incentives to speed up one’s career, observed in various proportions in the three countries: job security, salary, status, funding, leadership, autonomy, prestige, awards, reduced teaching or administrative load, etc. Ambitious junior academics prepare for intermediate steps towards professorship early on. Yet, they face challenging and sometimes contradictory expectations: collaborate and compete; stick to a plan and seize opportunities; follow traditions and innovate. Speed is key to academia as a self-managed performance system that governs individuals indirectly, by letting them decide freely while monitoring them from a distance. Being the “first” in research achievements can make a disproportionate difference in one’s career later on. Academics have long been under the publish-or-perish imperative, especially in Germany, where job security before the professorship has traditionally been low. The shift towards numerocratic subjectivation in higher education (Angermuller & Maeße, 2015) is reflected by national policies and programmes, fellowships and grants that are often explicitly directed to “early”, “mid” and “senior” career stages, and aim at supporting “rising stars”, “future leaders” or “springboard candidates”. A second concept is mobility, which is more crucial in the academic sector than many other sectors. Mobility accounts for how frequently candidates move institutionally and geographically. Some moves accelerate careers, others slow them down. Some moves are recommended, such as short postdoctoral contracts abroad within a national and disciplinary context that promotes international mobility (notably in Germany) (Goastellec, 2016). Other moves are less conducive to career advancement, such as leaving a prestigious university without a substantial promotion (in the UK). Mobility defines how actors synchronise scientific activities (more or less success in research, research funding, teaching, reach out, etc.), changing personal circumstances (family, health, finances, etc.) or a new institutional conjuncture. National career systems may be more (Germany) or less (France) conducive to changing institutions.

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Our third concept, pathways, is inspired from life course research (e.g. Bras et al., 2010). Pathways describe the ways academics move through complex systems of statuses and roles before reaching professorship. Pathways reflect an institutionalised career system in which tasks and roles, positions and degrees gain meaning. Pathways can be more or less structured: academics in France, for instance, can attain permanent positions early and then stay until retirement whereas academics in Germany can go through a great deal of junior positions before professorial appointment. Moreover, academics may follow a certain track. It has been found, for example, that while UK academics normally have contracts that include teaching and research at their first permanent appointment, their contracts before and after may focus on either teaching or research (Paye, 2013). We analyse the careers of our professors according to their speed, mobility and pathways. We hypothesise that no matter whether they are on the recruiter’s or on the recruitee’s side, academic actors are increasingly expected to evaluate and compare the career progression of academics coming from different systems and disciplines, that is, with a view to global standards. As a consequence, most professors are expected to have spent a similar time, around ten years, between PhD and first professorship with a full teaching and research contract. Reversely, we expect a relative loss of careers specific to particular institutions or national academic systems and a convergence of professorial careers across disciplines. The pressure to conform to the standard career pattern should also trump intersectional differences such as gender. We will therefore invite the readers to critically interrogate a career regime that has become a powerful mechanism of organisational control with a strong homogenising effect on individuals from different backgrounds. Indeed, one may wonder whether the race for the most conformist CV will foster unique and creative achievements of academics.

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References Angermuller, J., & Maeße, J. (2015). Regieren durch Leistung. Zur Verschulung des Sozialen in der Numerokratie. In A.  Schäfer & C.  Thompson (Eds.), Leistung (pp. 61–108). Schöningh. Bras, H., Liefbroer, A., & Elzinga, C. (2010). Standardization of Pathways to Adulthood? An Analysis of Dutch Cohorts Born Between 1850 and 1900. Demography, 47(4), 1013–1034. Goastellec, G. (2016). La mobilité internationale: Une qualité des carrières et des marchés académiques en Europe? Journal of International Mobility, 1(4), 171–188. Paye, S. (2013). Différencier les pairs. Mise en gestion du travail universitaire et encastrement organisationnel des carrières académiques (Royaume-Uni 1970–2010) [Thesis].

CHAPTER 7

Working with Online Biographical Data in Research on Academic Careers

Abstract  Our study relies on a systematic collection of publicly available career data from online CVs and other platforms. Web pages of academics often include a fairly standardised biographical presentation with key information on diplomas and institutional affiliations. This nearly exhaustive database allows for robust statistical analyses. We develop and apply a nomenclature that allows for cross-country comparisons of job titles and ranks. Keywords  Professorial careers • Online CVs • Diplomas • Academic affiliations • Academic ranks • Transnational taxonomies Our study complements previous comparative work on academic careers (Höhle & Teichler, 2013). Contrary to the Carnegie Study (1991–1993, Altbach, 1996; Boyer et al., 1994) and the Changing Academic Profession Study (2007–2008, Teichler et al., 2013), we do not use surveys. Surveys may be crucial for the study of perceptions, opinions and other subjective experiences. However, survey data are not as systematic as data collected offline or online. Also, surveys suffer from a variety of non-response and validity biases. Semi-directed qualitative interviews are another widely used source to gather information about academics. The ERC DISCONEX project, which collected the data for our study, also produced a large number of biographical interviews with professorial and non-professorial © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Angermuller, P. Blanchard, Careers of the Professoriate, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25241-9_7

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academics, which we do not use here. When prompted, academics did not easily talk about concrete aspects of their everyday lives and institutional contexts; they preferred to talk about abstract questions in their disciplines, the development of ideas in research and teaching and the many fine-grained distinctions between them and their peers. We also encountered a response bias: the response rate was generally higher in prestigious research universities and, interestingly, among those with management responsibilities. For the exhaustive study of professorial trajectories that include both the visible and the less visible members of their communities, our interviews therefore turned out to be of limited use. In line with research on academic mobility (Probst & Goastellec, 2013, p. 132), we chose to collect public online biographical information. We drew on curricula vitae published on web pages hosted and maintained by individuals or by their institution, complemented and cross-verified by all other relevant online sources, especially social media (mainly LinkedIn). We identified all professors (and equivalent positions, such as French directeurs.trices de recherche) in all higher education institutions. They had to have an active contract with a university or an equivalent research institution (such as the German Max Planck Institutes or CNRS in France) in spring/summer 2015 in order to be included in the sample. The academic activity of all individuals had to be in sociology or linguistics, which we assessed according to three concomitant criteria: their institutional title and/or their departmental affiliation had to mention sociology or linguistics; their PhD or their (sole-authored) publications had to be in journals affiliated to those disciplines; and their research had to be in sociology or linguistics. Since professors usually present themselves online, we are confident that with this approach we have captured more than 97% of the targeted population. University professors in the UK and Germany and most senior academics in France present themselves on their institution’s web pages according to a format that includes research interests, publications, a biographical sketch, and institutional titles and responsibilities. We also gathered information from personal web pages and pages we found by googling. Like CVs, online biographical presentations are used to apply for positions, attract research collaborations and PhD students, demonstrate visibility in the academic community in general, and reach out to extra-academic stakeholders, such as journalists and policy-makers (Macfarlane, 2020). Online biographical presentations are a highly constrained genre and even though they are normally written by the

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individuals, they often follow a web template designed by the institution. Given the public nature of these pages, and the level of cross-examination they receive from within the academic community, we can be confident that key factual information on jobs and research interests is no less reliable than in official CVs used in job applications. We homogenised the categorisations we found so as to make them commensurable. Data Annexes A and B make our coding choices explicit. Key notions for defining academic careers, such as PhD, many lower educational degrees, and full professorship, present no major challenge for translation and comparison. The large majority of full professors are permanent but in the UK they can theoretically be on probation and a small number of full professors can have fixed-term contracts in Germany. Pre-professorial positions are harder to gather and to compare. Academic systems apply a more specifically national nomenclature to early-­ career academics. Holding non-permanent early-career contracts may be regarded as a sign of a subordinate status; hence some may decide not to mention some or all the fixed-term contracts they have held, hence they are sometimes not mentioned online: a lecturer in the UK can be on probation for a few years and there is a small proportion (usually less than 5%) of Wissenschaftliche MitarbeiterInnen and Akademische RätInne to enjoy permanent contracts in Germany. One may also assume that periods of unemployment and non-academic activities may be hidden with an unpaid formal association without an underlying job (such as an honorary title given after a job loss). Non-professorial positions may be central to the academic unit but this is not clear from the job description. In Germany, in particular, it is difficult to assess how prestigious the positions are that are held by junior academics. They can be fixed-term but open up good perspectives in the long term. We registered only official categories: type of contract or position, degrees and basic biographical data (birth dates and nationality where they were available). The previous contracts we collected for each professor involve certain levels of job security, salary, autonomy, funding, administrative duties, supervisory responsibilities and real time spent on research, teaching and other tasks (Waaijer, 2015, p. 47), but other methods would be needed to measure those aspects (see, e.g. the EuroAC project: Fumasoli et al., 2015). We do not capture distinctions of professorial hierarchy not normally flagged up on webpages, such as salaries and bonuses (which can vary widely in the UK and Germany), grades (France: 2ème/1ère classe, classe d’excellence; Germany W2/W3, formerly C3/C4, some British

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universities classify professors in bands) or the nature of a contract as permanent, fixed-term or part-time. In the UK and Germany, part-time contracts are widely used, especially for non-professorial staff. In the UK, part-time contracts allow parallel work in more than one institution and beyond formal retirement (which is impossible for professors in Germany and France, who are civil servants). Nor is it always possible to distinguish honorary professorial titles from professorial positions. We discarded honorary professors in the UK and France but in some cases they appear as regular professors and we may have counted some. We included the German academics, mostly with permanent non-professorial contracts (such as Wissenschaftliche/r MitarbeiterIn or Akademische/r RätIn), who are granted professorial status by appointment (apl. Prof.). This is a sizable group who did not go through a competitive recruitment procedure and they can be expected to have more “local” CVs. It would be helpful to distinguish them from those who hold regular professorships but in many cases the public information given is not sufficiently clear. We could not reliably capture all of these aspects, without which it is difficult to assess the value and meaning of the position an academic occupies in the academic space in more depth. Online self-presentations usually do not reveal chains of short-term contracts within the same institution, which is typical for junior academics in Germany as well as for some teaching or research contracts in the UK. Some information is missing or incomplete, especially early-career positions of older academics. We kept incomplete presentations in our sample. We accounted for missingness in the analysis as a display of (missing) information but omitted some cases where trajectories were too incomplete. Given that our data comes from online sources, biases of some extent should be noted against four categories of individuals: older generations, who advertise less through the Internet, especially in France; senior professors, who do not actively look for other positions (professors can be headhunted in the UK and Germany); professors who are happy with the positions they have or have other reasons not to move anymore; and less career-oriented people with a lower motivation to present themselves online. On the other tail of the distribution, we are unable to make claims about academics who do not become full professors. Comparing those who reached professorship with those who remained (to date) in pre-­ professorial positions or left the field would bring additional light on the

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factors of professorial promotions. Investigating these would be a challenge, as the diversity of their trajectories would require much larger resources. Our data can shed light on the contrasts internal to the group of those who have ended up as professors, in terms of their progression, their trajectories and the factors of those contrasts. We analyse the data with the appropriate methods: speed will be treated with linear regression modelling, mobility with multiple longitudinal curves, and pathways with sequence analysis and multinomial regression modelling. The original sample consists of 1893 professors across the three countries and the two disciplines in 2015. However, the size for each treatment decreases to the number of cases with valid measures over all key variables in the said treatment. The larger the sub-samples, the more the results are likely to be representative of the full populations of professors in the respective countries and disciplines. We only present treatments whose sample sizes lead to reasonably trustworthy outcomes.

References Altbach, P. G. (1996). The International Academic Profession: Portraits of Fourteen Countries. Carnegie Foundation. Boyer, E., Altbach, P. G., & Whitelaw, M. J. (1994). The Academic Profession: An International Perspective. Carnegie Foundation. Fumasoli, T., Goastellec, G., & Kehm, B. (Eds.). (2015). Academic Work and Careers in Europe: Trends, Challenges, Perspectives. Springer. Höhle, E.  A., & Teichler, U. (2013). The Academic Profession in the Light of Comparative Surveys. In B.  M. Kehm & U.  Teichler (Eds.), The Academic Profession in Europe: New Tasks and New Challenges (pp.  23–38). Springer. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-­94-­007-­4614-­5_6 Macfarlane, B. (2020). The CV as a Symbol of the Changing Nature of Academic Life: Performativity, Prestige and Self-presentation. Studies in Higher Education, 45(4), 796–807. Probst, C., & Goastellec, G. (2013). Internationalisation and the Academic Labour Market. In B. Kehm & U. Teichler (Eds.), The Academic Profession in Europe: New Tasks and New Challenges (pp. 121–139). Springer. https://link. springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-­94-­007-­4614-­5_6 Teichler, U., Arimoto, A., & Cummings, W. K. (2013). The Changing Academic Profession. Major Findings of a Comparative Survey. Springer. http://link. springer.com/book/10.1007/978-­3-­319-­27493-­5 Waaijer, C. J. F. (2015). The Coming of Age of the Academic Career: Differentiation and Professionalization of German Academic Positions from the 19th Century to the Present. Minerva, 53, 43–67.

CHAPTER 8

Speed: How Fast Do Professors Reach Their Position?

Abstract  Speed is analysed by means of regression models. While Country makes a clear difference (Speed is higher in Germany and lower in France), Gender and Discipline, somehow surprisingly, do not impact Speed (except for a decelerating effect for sociologists in France). By contrast, higher levels of Status Mobility, Institutional Mobility and International Mobility all accelerate careers, as well as higher Age at PhD graduation. Further analysis of Speed by country reveals different kinds of effects of Mobility by countries. Cohort analysis corroborates a long-term trend of normalisation of academic careers. Keywords  Professorial careers • Career speed • PhD • Professorship • National academic systems • Academic generations • Academic mobility Academic careers are crucially defined by the period between the award of the PhD (as the entry ticket to the academic world) and first access to professorship (as a sign of major institutional recognition). What comes before and after are also important factors: the educational trajectory, cultural experiences, the family background shape what comes later and such factors can make a difference not only at the beginning but sometimes even much later in a career. Yet it is the years after the PhD that decide whether the person establishes himself or herself as an academic and ends up as a professor. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Angermuller, P. Blanchard, Careers of the Professoriate, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25241-9_8

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The PhD is a non-competitive degree based on an original piece of research (even though they can be honorary titles, which we do not count). PhD candidates are often regarded as both students and academics. In many cases, they are funded by stipends or they hold contracts in research and/or teaching (see, e.g. in Germany: Brechelmacher et  al., 2015, p. 15). The award of the PhD confirms them as qualified experts of a disciplinary area and it qualifies them for full positions in research and teaching. Like the professorship, the PhD (or equivalent degrees such as EdD) is a standard that is known across all academic systems. PhDs can differ in terms of format, length as well as supervision and examination procedures. PhDs from the UK, France and Germany are normally recognised as equivalent by institutions from the three countries. The length between PhD and professorship is both a simple and robust measure of career speed. Graph 8.1 visualises the distribution of the life course events birth, PhD graduation and (first) access to professorship, in our two countries and two disciplines. PhD-holders in our sample accede to professorship 100

Birth n=938

50 40

mean 1959

30 20 10 0 1940

1950

1960

data collection 2015-age 55

60

mean 2005-age 46

PhD graduation n=1690

70

mean 1993-age 34

Access to professorship n=1594

Number of 90 academics 80

Mean speed n=1463 12.1 1970

1980

1990

2000

2010

Graph 8.1  Historical distributions of career milestones: birth, PhD graduation and professorship. (Curves are smoothed out as 5-year moving averages. “n”s indicate non-missing values for each variable, out of a total sample size of 1893. These non-­missing values will condition the sample sizes in subsequent treatments. “Mean speed” materialises the dependent variable that will be used in subsequent regression treatments)

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between 0 and 38 years after gaining the doctorate, the mean length being 12 years. In 2015, the mean age of the professors was 55 years, the mean number of years since first professorial appointment was ten years, and since PhD, 22 years. Since the occurrences of each life course event spread over a half century, we will also examine birth and PhD cohorts separately and investigate historical evolutions of speed and mobility. Graph 8.2 presents the 12 groups defined by three key characteristics of professors: the country they work in in 2015, their discipline and their gender. The four groups of professors in Germany are noticeably the quickest. Speed in France and the UK are similar. Differences between disciplines are less clear-cut: only male linguists in France display higher Speed. These first results should be confirmed and refined by means of regression models.

Graph 8.2  Speed by groups of academics (n = 1463). (Each box summarises a group from our sample. Bold middle lines mark the median, that is, the case that splits the group in two equal subgroups. 25% of each group is inside the box on each side of the median and 25% in each extreme horizontal line. The width of each box is proportionate to the square root of the group’s size (n’s). The medians of two groups are significantly distinct from each other if the notches in the two boxes do not overlap)

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The Weight of National Academic Systems We took into account all the variables of sufficient quality that we managed to collect online, as discussed above. Preliminary statistical tests (correlations and variance inflation factors) confirm that all our variables may be integrated into multivariate linear models. Coefficients in Table  8.1 estimate the number of years before access to professorship of a given category, compared to the reference category indicated between parentheses, controlling for the effect of the other variables. Positive coefficients indicate slowing factors and the other way round. Among the covariates that do not vary over time, only Country, that is, the national academic system where professors are employed in 2015, makes a clear, significant difference to Speed. Gender and Discipline being kept constant, professors in Germany were first appointed 11 years after the doctorate, which is almost three years quicker than those in France and the UK.  This is not surprising given that the German academic system often does not offer permanent positions before professorship and incites academics to be quick. UK academics are made permanent when or a few years after they become lecturers (sometimes even before or without a PhD). The large majority of French academics, by contrast, will have been permanent civil servants for many years when they apply for professorial positions. Therefore, reaching the professorial status does not have the same meaning across the three academic systems: an existential bottleneck and survival event for German academics who want to stay in academia, the professorial appointment in the UK and France resembles a traditional promotion of those who will stay in academia anyway. Surprisingly, we find that Gender does not make a difference in Speed, controlling for Country and Discipline. This is at odds with the general tendency in the literature on gender inequalities in careers. One may surmise that Speed is a specific subsystem within the system of competition for access to professorship, which in turn is a subsystem of the competition for academic positions. In other words, the rules and practices that apply to the system of professorial recruitments are so different from those that apply to other academic recruitments, that the profiles recruited do not suffer from the same biases. It has been observed that gender discrimination does not apply across all biographical stages: “[G]ender differences are more pronounced at the beginning of the [educational and academic trajectories] and tend to fade out at later stages” (Lörz & Mühleck, 2019). If that is the case, the standard career regime for professors may not

0.10 0.09 1454

* *** ***

***

10.82 −0.24 −0.06 2.23 2.48 2.91

0.21 0.20 1325

14.90 −0.04 0.09 1.54 4.17 1.51 −6.39 −10.25 0.05 −11.86 −12.68 11.42

β

m2

*** *** ***

* *

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sig. 23.19 −0.48 0.76 0.96 2.64 0.66 −10.90 −22.80 21.49 −6.39 −11.36 10.12 −0.28 0.27 0.25 723

β

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**

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sig.

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1.67 2.40 0.16 −10.84 −22.57 21.01 −6.68 −12.02 10.00 −0.27 0.26 0.25 723

* *** ° ° *** ** ***

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sig.

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β

m4

Note: Linear modelling diagnostics indicate heavy right tails in the distribution of residuals. In other words, the slowest careers are less well represented by the models. As ordinary least square modelling over-represents large residuals, we tested an alternative calculation, M-estimation (Huber, 1964; Fox & Weisberg, 2018—outcomes not displayed here). M-estimation uses an iterative algorithm that determines a threshold residual value above which the weight of the residuals is reduced. However M-estimates happen to be very close to OLS residuals, which confirms the validity of the model above Dependent variable: number of years between PhD award and access to professorship a Two-tailed t-test significance thresholds: *** 0.1%; ** 1%; * 5%; ° 10% b Only second- and third-order interaction terms significant at 5% threshold are displayed c Proportion of years [0,1] until access to professorship with a change of country d Proportion of years [0,1] until access to professorship with a change of institution e Proportion of years [0,1] until access to professorship with a change of status f Sample size for m3 and m4 is reduced because birth years were unavailable for a number of professors. This probably results in type II statistical errors (false negatives). However, tested on m3 sample, m2 yields a similar hierarchy of effects, only in general less significant and less strong, so m3 is robust, and mainly used to reveal the impact of Age at PhD graduation

Intercept  Men (ref.: Women)  Sociology (ref.: Applied linguistics)  Sociology * France (ref.: Linguistics in Germany)b  France (ref.: Germany)  United Kingdom  Geographic mobility c  Institutional mobility d  (Institutional mobility)2 b  Institutional mobility * France  Status mobility e  (Status mobility)2 b  Age at PhD graduation R2 Adj. R2 N (number of cases) f

sig.a

m1 β

Table 8.1  Cross-country regression models of career speed

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discriminate between those who stick to its timetables. We should also take into account generational differences between older and younger women, whose historical experiences were very different. In other words, certain groups of academics may see waves of recruitment for some but not all career stages, and in certain historical periods only. Further testing by country and by cohort will be needed to account for gender-specific differences. There seems to be a strong normalising effect of the academic career regime on academic biographies, not only across countries but also across disciplines. Even though sociology and linguistics have been established disciplines with distinct epistemic traditions for well over 100 years, we register no significant differences in career patterns between sociologists and linguists. All interactions between the same three variables were tested in the first model (which we named “m1” in Table 8.1). The only distinctive career group we could distinguish is the one composed the sociologists in France, who need 1.8 more years than German linguists (our reference group) to reach professorship. It seems that this group had to struggle with a declining job market after the 1980s, when sociology became a popular field for doctoral studies again. At the same time, fewer professorial positions opened up during the 2000s, when the strong group of academics entering higher education in the 1970s still held professorships. A similar trend should be observed in Germany until the Great Financial Crisis, when the government increased its investment in higher education and sociology met with a high student demand again. Such demographic trends can translate into competitive pressures and lengthen (or shorten)  the time available to accumulate academic credentials. This analysis of fixed covariates (i.e. variables that do not vary over time) in m1 is a robust baseline for more elaborate modelling. We can build on it all the more if we consider the low model’s goodness-of-fit value (R2)1 in m1 (0.08, i.e. 8% of the variance explained). In the following, we refine the models by introducing more career-specific variables that will account for the internal dynamics of academic job markets and recruitments. The refined models will help us understand the race for

1  R2 is a measure of the adequacy of the model to the data. R2 varies between 0 and 1. If R2 is very low, such as below 0.05, it is weak, so it may be reformulated, or other data or variables may be used.

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professorship better, and what recruitment committees and the wider profession see as desirable professorial profiles.

Mobility and Age as Career Boosters Mobility is known to have a positive influence on job security, collaborations and productivity (for a review, see Probst & Goastellec, 2013, pp. 133–134). In model 2 (Table 8.1), we introduce three longitudinal variables that account for different aspects of academic mobility. The first one, national institutional mobility (IM), designates the proportion of years until professorship in which a move between two universities can be registered, which may be in the same or different city, but within the same country. National institutional mobility is a reliable indicator of the propensity and ability of candidates to navigate in the institutional space, which is structured by hierarchies of prestige and economic inequalities with important knock-off effects on the type of students institutions can attract, among others. International geographic mobility (GM) is the proportion of years in which a move happened between countries. It is a straightforward indicator of the propensity and ability to work across higher education systems, their organisational and epistemic cultures. Finally, status mobility (SM) is the proportion of years in which a change of academic status happened. SM measures the propensity and ability of academics to move from one kind of contract to another. IM, GM, SM are not mutually exclusive. They testify to the complex social processes that are intertwined in mobility events. We build the three mobility indicators from information displayed by academics on their online web pages. Academics rely on terms and categories that are not always standard in the sector. Status mobility, in particular, compounds a range of status changes, such as permanence after a successful probation or a move from a teaching contract to a research contract. Unfortunately, not all status changes that would be relevant are reflected in our material, including the moves between part-time and full-time contracts, between single and multiple simultaneous contracts, or changes of roles and tasks within the same formal work contract title. Therefore, status mobility should be read as a useful, yet imperfect indicator of moving through the status structure prior to professorship. Rather than indicating that the candidate is getting closer to the professorship (or further away from it), status mobility registers contractual and status moves of any kind.

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Therefore, for a comprehensive view of mobility, the three indicators should be read together. Once these additional variables are added to our baseline model, most display significant effects and R2 more than doubles up. Mobility in general is a crucial aspect of career speed. According to our dates (m2, Table 8.1), if someone moves between universities every three years until professorship (IM = 0.33), he or she reaches professorship three and a half years earlier than someone who has never moved institutionally or geographically (IM  =  0). If someone changed academic status every three years (SM = 0.33), he or she would succeed four years before someone who never changed (SM = 0). The absolute size of this effect is hypothetical as less than 10% of individuals reach IM = 0.3 or SM = 0.3. Yet, there is a clear tendency that career speed is higher for those who have a habit of moving. Mobility is a career booster because it helps academics deal with fixed-­ term contracts. But it also allows them to connect with colleagues and build up experience across the sector. Besides acquiring scholarly skills as a result of mobility (such as a foreign language in another country), academics benefit from developing their profiles. As a marker of intellectual autonomy, mobility allows them to stand apart from those who invest their efforts more exclusively in a single institution and its web of personal dependencies, who pursue long-term, ambitious teaching projects, or who are reluctant to take the risks and costs of migrating. For academics to take on senior roles, the display of intellectual independence is of great importance, especially in systems like the German one, where, with the first professorial appointment, they face a sudden transition from a subordinate to a superordinate position with significant leadership responsibilities over junior academics. It can be expected that independence (and mobility) is less important where a professorial appointment rewards local commitment. In France and in the UK, local academics can be promoted to professor to reward their achievements within the institution in terms of teaching, management or outreach. Locally promoted professors usually have to wait for the longest time and the salary increase is smallest. They remain the same people for their colleagues after all and often retain the same roles. In France, maîtres de conférences need to be qualified by a central gatekeeping committee, the Conseil National des Universités on the basis of their achievements in

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research and all other tasks before they can move on to a professorial position within their institution or elsewhere. Yet too much mobility may be a problem, too: Over-mobile academics may be perceived as unreliable elements that cannot be integrated into long-term networks and institutional cycles of academic work. Accordingly, we find that the square of status mobility and, to some extent, the square of institutional mobility have a decelerating effect, as if extreme mobility was detrimental to career progression. Moreover, it must be noted that combining international geographic or national institutional mobility with status mobility does not increase speed, as if both combined would cancel each other out. If they are two separate strategies, the former two increase academics’ value on the market for external recruitments, the latter increase their value on the internal market (i.e. promotions) (Musselin, 2005). Too much mobility can be a problem for the “branding” of the academic’s identity. And changing institutions and countries can come with costs in terms of the time and energy available for research. In model 3 (m3, Table 8.1), we included Age at PhD graduation so as to account for speed before PhD.  Against m2, m3 gains four points of goodness-of-fit at 24% of adjusted variance. In spite of missing data on birth dates, m3 is robust overall (see note e in Table 8.1) and suggests, somehow surprisingly, that Age at PhD graduation has an accelerating effect: For every year professors have taken more to prepare their PhD, the time between PhD and professorship is reduced by three months, irrespective of Gender, Discipline, Country and Mobility (this will be confirmed by models ge2, fr2 and uk2 in Table 8.2). It seems that successful academics use the additional time before or during doctoral studies for other activities that make a difference in the long term, such as publications, teaching experience, networking and additional qualifications. Early investments pay off in a career later on. This is an indication that a PhD as such is not sufficient to lead an academic to professorship. Instead, the PhD has a multiplier effect on the many academic activities whose value is realised in combination. Other than certifying original research, a PhD allows the academic to pull together various activities in the institutions and in the discipline(s) so as to construct a recognisable and visible profile. A final note should be made about our transnational models m1–4. If gender and discipline, not significant as first order variables (i.e. gender and discipline in general), are taken off, then the specificity of sociologists in France is confirmed. Whether members of this group are mobile or not, their access to professorship happens later than other groups. This

0.08 0.08 719

−10.51 −12.07 −3.51 1.02 *** ***

***

13.74 0.34 0.06 −10.34 −14.48 −5.07 2.84 −0.35 0.17 0.15 396

25.39 0.13 0.84

β

ge2

***

* ***

°

***

sig.

0.24 0.23 431

2.43 −18.93 −25.13 21.95

19.97 −0.88 1.84

β

fr1

*** *** ***

*** ° ***

sig.

fr2

1.70 −18.86 −21.96 19.76 −0.26 0.29 0.27 268

27.26 −0.95 1.77

β

France

*** *** ** ***

**

***

sig.

0.10 0.07 175

5.88 4.78 −43.04 39.39

17.53 1.05 −0.74

β

uk1

*** **

***

sig.

uk2

−11.15 2.85 −51.25 50.86 −0.20 0.21 0.10 61

25.23 1.46 0.35

β

UK

* *

***

sig.

Dependent variable: number of years between PhD graduation and access to professorship a Two-tailed t-test significance thresholds: *** 0.1%; ** 1%; * 5%; ° 10% b Sample sizes for some models, especially ge2, fr2 and uk2, are too small to avoid generating type II errors. However, similarly to Table 5.1, we tested models ge1, fr1 and uk1 on ge2, fr2 and uk2 samples, respectively; a similar hierarchy of effects emerges, just in general less significant and less strong. No major bias appears due to the limited availability of the Birth variable

Intercept  Men (ref.: Women)  Sociology (ref.: Applied linguistics)  Geographic mobility  Institutional mobility  Status mobility  (Status mobility)2  Age at PhD graduation R2 Adj. R2 Nb

sig.a

β

ge1

Germany

Table 8.2  Country-specific regression models of career speed

66  J. ANGERMULLER AND P. BLANCHARD

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67

indicates that the factors of this delay are structural, and resist the pressure to circulate between places and positions.

Mobilities Have Different Effects in Different Systems Country-specific models of Speed (Table  8.2) show that institutional mobility accelerates careers enormously in France and Germany. This is expected in Germany, where most candidates have to go through the external market of institutions in order to stay in academia, hence travel between universities. In France, the pressure on tenured French “junior” academics to move higher is much lower. Therefore, some prefer to stay in their institution until retirement if there is no prospect for an internal promotion, especially if the alternative is to, say, leave a prestigious Parisian institution for a small provincial town. However, we find that among those who manage to access professorship, those who had changed universities were quicker than those who stayed in the same place. Cross-country migration also facilitates access to professorship, but only for those who end up working in Germany. This country draws on a pool of young academics (mainly of German, Austrian or Swiss descent) who come back for professorial appointments after their postdoc stays in non-German-language countries. By contrast, in France, neither junior nor senior French academics are incentivised to leave their local and national networks, with the exception of early-career CNRS applicants. Additionally, foreign applicants are disadvantaged in disciplines that demand a near-native level command of French language and a strong familiarity with French culture. The two factors mutually reinforce each other: as French applicants mainly apply in France, competition is all the fiercer, at the expense of applicants from outside. The size of the UK subsample is limited, which partly explains the low power of models uk1 and uk2, as well as the lack of significance of coefficients. Nonetheless these follow the direction of cross-country models m1–4. In particular, being older at PhD graduation probably leaves more time to accumulate credentials, and obtain quicker access to professorship. The British academic system is known to be more open to international recruitment and to accommodate for institutional changes among permanent job holders than other academic systems. Internationals are often recruited to fill research positions, whereas local and national academics

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are more likely to take on teaching-oriented and especially management roles. The tendency for foreign applicants to enter another system through research rather than through teaching and management can also be observed in other systems albeit at a lower level (e.g. in the recruitment of international CNRS researchers as compared to researchers-teachers in French universities). Our data is not fine-grained enough, however, to distinguish between different tracks, as they are not always made explicit in academic CVs and online presentations. One also sees a strong effect of status mobility in France and in the UK. Academics need to move up the institutional ladder for financial reasons until they reach a permanent position. Yet status mobility also demonstrates that one is versatile, a knowledgeable colleague who knows and who is available to the wider academic community. In Germany, however, status mobility makes less of a difference. This is an effect of the way salary progression is organised: non-professorial academic staff in Germany belong to one status group (Mittelbau), that is, they are either a Wissenschaftliche MitarbeiterIn (employee) or a Wissenschaftliche RätIn (civil servant) where seniority leads to automatic salary increases. So status mobility in Germany will often not take place until the professorial appointment. Overall, models m1 to m3 (in Table 8.1) and ge1, ge2, fr1, fr2, uk1, uk2 (in Table 8.2) confirm that Gender has no influence on the relative speed between those reaching professorships. What is more, the differences between the two disciplines are generally weak, with the notable exception of French sociologists, as noted earlier. There are, however, strong differences between academic systems, with Germany allowing the fastest routes to professorship, France the slowest ones and the UK in between. The three types of mobility have an impact, but not the same in the three countries. However other factors are at play, which our data cannot account for, such as intersectional positions, extra-academic resources (a family supporting or discouraging the individual through difficult periods), personality traits, etc. Given the regularities and divergences in academic careers, we observe the contours of a standard academic career across disciplines. The academic pulling off a first professorship is usually around 12 years after their PhD, in Germany a few years before academics in France or the UK. And if they can show a history of moving between institutions or of changing status, they can expect to succeed earlier.

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Emergence of the Modern Academic Universities have undergone major changes over the last 50 years, such as massive growth (especially of administrative and other support services), marketisation, managerialisation and internationalisation (Becher & Trowler, 2001, pp. 1–22). As a social arena, academia has seen a great deal of historical variation, including in the norms and practices of participating in the academic job market. Generational differences and cohorts could not be introduced as independent variables in previous models because of likely biases due to statistical “left censorship”: The older the PhD cohorts, the more of its members are now retired and have dropped out from our sample. More importantly, a cohort variable in previous models would jeopardise them due to “right censorship”: among the younger cohorts, only the quickest ones have accessed professorship. So we are lacking a comparison with slower careers. In this section, we run cohort-specific models (Table  8.3) that account for historically evolving influences on career speed. Analysing cohort-based subsamples is a judicious strategy as the bias can be identified and limited to extreme cohorts. We divide our population into four cohorts (see Table  8.3) PhD1–4.1, with the additional variable Age at PhD in models PhD1–4.2. We would need both deeper and thinner investigations than can be done here, in order to account for the specific institutional and disciplinary contexts of each period and country. However, some of the factors explaining speed we identified previously appear as valid across PhD cohorts, such as slower careers in France (cohorts 1 to 4) due to the early bottleneck in permanent academic jobs in France (mostly between 32 and 38 years). The accelerating effect of a later PhD is confirmed (cohorts 1, 3). Sociology is clearly slower in cohorts 1 and 3, perhaps as a result of the remanence of the French Doctorat d’Etat, abolished in 1984, and also due to a glut of junior academics competing for professorships in the 1990s after having started to study sociology when it was a popular fad in the 1960s and 1970s. We can also confirm that earlier cohorts (1, 2, 3) saw quicker careers when they included institutional moves, while later cohorts (3, 4) were accelerated by academic moves, which may reflect policies that were implemented in view of accelerating careers of early-career academics and facilitating internal promotions (e.g. the Juniorprofessur in Germany and large grants for early-career researchers).

−12.50 −0.39 0.36 0.28 73

0.26 0.21 107

−28.68

0.31 3.96 8.22

30.67 0.45 3.80

−1.33

***

* **

3.85 5.33 −14.37

−29.38

***

18.24 −0.48 1.59

β

*

***

*

***

sig.

PhD1.2

0.20 0.18 343

−3.27

−20.52

2.94 0.77 −21.14

18.59 −1.38 0.31

β

***

***

***

*** *

sig.

PhD2.1

0.23 0.20 217

−1.26 −0.17

−23.08

1.59 −0.52 −26.39

23.93 −1.71 1.20

β

°

***

***

°

*** *

sig.

PhD2.2

PhD 1981–1990

0.13 0.12 616

−3.86

−7.64

2.08 −0.05 −0.36

12.99 −0.42 0.65

β

***

***

***

***

sig.

PhD3.1

0.21 0.19 324

−6.00 −0.13

−7.36

1.72 −0.12 −0.86

17.32 −0.84 1.36

β

*** **

**

***

**

***

sig.

PhD3.2

PhD 1991–2000

0.13 0.10 259

−2.80

−0.71

2.50 0.54 3.16

8.13 −0.52 0.41

β

*

***

***

sig.

PhD4.1

0.25 0.19 111

−1.64 −0.08

−4.52

3.19 2.14 1.61

10.94 −0.35 0.22

β

***

***

sig.

PhD4.2

PhD 2001–2012

Dependent variable: number of years between PhD and professorship a Cohorts are based on ten-year periods, extended further out for first and fourth cohorts so as to smooth out sample sizes b Two-tailed t-test significance thresholds: *** 0.1%; ** 1%; * 5%; ° 10% c Sample sizes for some models, especially PhD1.1, PhD1.2 and PhD4.2, are too small to avoid generating type II errors. However, similarly to Table 5.1, we tested models PhD1/2/3/4.2 on PhD1/2/3/4.1 samples, respectively; a similar hierarchy of effects emerges, just in general less significant and less strong. No major bias appears due to the limited availability of the Birth variable

Intercept  Men (ref.: Women)  Sociology (ref.: Applied linguistics)  France  United Kingdom  Geographic mobility  Institutional mobility  Status mobility  Age at PhD graduation R2 Adj. R2 Nc

sig.

b

β

PhD1.1

PhD 1964–1980a

Table 8.3  Cohort-specific regression models of career speed

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We identify other factors unique to a specific cohort such as quicker careers for men (2) and slower ones in the UK (1). The effect of international geographic moves on Speed is obvious only for those who have obtained their PhD in the 1980s (2) but not in the other cohorts—these are very small subsamples, however. Models that do not include Age at PhD graduation (PhD1–4.1) are complementary to models that include Age (PhD1–4.2). They reveal that the impact of national institutional moves has decreased regularly as national academic job markets have become more and more integrated and moving between universities has become a normal requirement for professorial candidates. Second, the effect of Age at PhD graduation has been decreasing steadily. In many ways, professorial careers extend patterns started during graduate studies and oftentimes those who are quicker before PhD graduation are quicker afterwards. As their age advances, they need to be careful to comply with timetables, career expectations and competition rules. In this process, the model of the wise, knowledgeable bearded professor gives way to the model of the young, ambitious, strategic professional who knows how to play the academic game. Another trend seems to be the evolution of R2 values over time: across the four models without Age, which rely on larger samples, R2 declines steadily (0.26, 0.20, 0.13, 0.13, adjusted 0.21, 0.18, 0.12, 0.10), as if over academic generations, the sociological, institutional and socioeconomic factors of career speed, which are central to our study, were losing ground to other factors, which our data does not cover, such as publishing, networking, being cited, etc. We may interpret this as a long-term normalisation of academic careers. As the academic sector progressively adopted a set of international managerial norms, with more explicit and more standardised recruitment criteria, trajectories have become more standard. If this is the case, academics have focused on academic skills that are more and more harmonised internationally. Overall, our models are quite effective in explaining career speed. Most account for 20–35% of the variance. Again, they disprove the ideas of substantial differences in professorial careers with respect to discipline and gender. They confirm, however, the importance of national factors, with speed increasing from France to the UK and Germany.

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References Becher, T., & Trowler, P. R. (2001). Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Culture of Disciplines (2nd ed.). Open University Press. Brechelmacher, A., Park, E., Ates, G., & Campbell, D. F. (2015). The Rocky Road to Tenure—Career Paths in Academia. In T.  Fumasoli, G.  Goastellec, & B. M. Kehm (Eds.), Academic Work and Careers in Europe: Trends, Challenges, Perspectives (pp. 13–40). Springer. Huber, Peter J. (2009). Robust Statistics (2nd ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons Inc. ISBN 978-0-470-12990-6 Lörz, M., & Mühleck, K. (2019). Gender Differences in Higher Education from a Life Course Perspective: Transitions and Social Inequality Between Enrolment and First Post-Doc Position. Higher Education, 77, 381–402. Musselin, C. (2005). Le marché des universitaires. France, Allemagne, Etats-Unis. Sciences Po. Probst, C., & Goastellec, G. (2013). Internationalisation and the Academic Labour Market. In B. Kehm & U. Teichler (Eds.), The Academic Profession in Europe: New Tasks and New Challenges (pp. 121–139). Springer. https://link. springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-­94-­007-­4614-­5_6

CHAPTER 9

Mobility: Moving Between Statuses, Institutions and Countries

Abstract  We use multiple-curve graphs to trace the evolution of mobility along the career cycle. Mobility distinctly peaks on the year of first professorial appointment, which is confirmed as a defining biographical moment. However, over their whole career, academics need to manage the alternance of fast and slow biographical times. In particular, mobility increases progressively in the final years before accessing professorship. Keywords  Professorial mobility • Status mobility • Institutional mobility • International geographic mobility • Career timing • Career sequencing Speed is a good indicator for types of professorial careers since it responds to widely shared standards in the sector. Both candidates, hiring academics and the wider academic community often rely on speed to evaluate career progression between PhD and professorship. Yet two trajectories with similar speed between PhD and professorship may differ substantially with respect to what happens in between. In particular, Speed alone does not tell us what, and how much, happens during this period, how intense and challenging it was. This is why it is necessary to account for mobility and its evolution before and after the first professorial appointment. Status mobility (a change of type of status  within an institution), national institutional mobility (a change of institution  within a country) and international geographic © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Angermuller, P. Blanchard, Careers of the Professoriate, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25241-9_9

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mobility (a change of country) have a major impact on career speed in regression models. However, if, in Chap. 8, we only seized mobility as an accumulation of career events over a 0–40-year-long period, that is, how frequently an individual moves on average between PhD and access to professorship we will now account for mobility year by year—the year being the obvious, standard scale of the academic cycle. It is all the more important to study the three kinds of mobilities jointly so that we can have a triangulated understanding of the concept of mobility. It needs to be stressed that our indicators of status mobility are imperfect since a declared status event may be a minor experience for the academics whereas some unmentioned status changes may be perceived to be more important and contribute significantly to Speed. We will compare the three mobilities, therefore, so as to understand what type of mobility makes a difference at what moment in the career and for whom.

Fast and Slow Biographical Time Graph 9.1 reveals major contrasts between the three types of mobility. At

Percent academics changing status, country, or institution each year

the pivotal time of access to professorship, all three curves peak, but at very different levels. By definition, 100% of academics  switch academic status when they become professors. However, only 12% of professors move to a new country when they reach professorship. In other words, the large majority of candidates do not apply beyond national institutions or they apply but do not to get recruited  elsewhere.  Moves to a new

20%

Status mobility (peak at 100%) Geographic mobility (peak at 12%) Institutional mobility (peak at 67%)

15% 10% 5% 0% -40

-30

-20

-10

Pr

+10

+20

+30

+40

Years apart access to professorship

Graph 9.1  Pre-professorial mobility (n = 864, three countries). (Note: Values at extremities of the curves (especially 30 years or more apart from access to professorship) may be potentially idiosyncratic due to the small numbers of academics accessing professorship very late in life (left-side distribution tail) and of those who became a professor early, have stayed with the professorial status for a long time and are close to retirement (right-side tail))

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institution within the country are frequent: two-thirds of professors are hired externally. National job markets may not be very open to many “foreign” candidates but they allow candidates to circulate within their system. The three pre-professorial curves have a similar shape. The overlap between status and institutional curves is particularly remarkable. At first, during a sharp growth until 10–11 years before professorial appointment, the professors-to-be navigate through a phase of increased status and institutional mobility. They learn to navigate the constraints and opportunities within their national job market. Subsequently, during an equally steep dip until 5 years before the appointment, they find some form of stability during which they either finish their PhD studies, or secure a postdoctoral or permanent, pre-professorial contract. During the final few years before the professorial move, they are busy with more specific aspects of their professorial application such as services to the community, networking and job interviews. Meanwhile, international geographic moves only grow slowly up to 4% a year before the appointment. Some candidates move for postdoctoral visits but most are not ready for international opportunities. “International” candidates, who include nationals having worked abroad, become attractive, and the number of them that are recruited suddenly triples, once they reach the level necessary for them to qualify as professors. Although in Sociology and Linguistics, only 12% crossed a border to get appointed, the large peak in the middle of the curve confirms that the professorship is an accepted transnational career standard on the international academic job market. After the first professorial appointment, international geographic moves are exceptional events. Status and institutional moves decrease jointly and regularly. A minority of professors obtain further professorial appointments, usually in other institutions. In any case, levels of mobility are far lower than before the first professorial appointment. Second or third professorial appointments mean high costs to institutions (which need to pay better salaries, at least in the UK and Germany) and also to academics (who live a settled personal life). Once they have reached full recognition, the candidates’ appetite for better positions is reduced drastically, as they settle in the new role, acquire new resources (teams, resources and visibility) and find a balance between the local context and international networks. Institutions will rely on their professors to lead research and teaching teams, head research centres or prepare large funding applications, which need long-term involvement.

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Generally speaking,  academics go through periods of fast and slow biographical time. They advance slowly over long periods but punctuations happen when there is a chance to move up to a higher status or out of academia: for example, from a bachelor’s and a (post)graduate student to a first postdoc contract, from the first full academic (and sometimes permanent) appointment to the first professorship, which may be followed by still other positions elsewhere and/or more senior. Each career step has a socially expected duration: four years for a BA, one to two for an MA, four to six for a PhD, two to three for a postdoc, six for a full pre-professorial position through external recruitment, or 10 to 15 through internal recruitment. Extending the duration of a position can have a negative consequence for the academic’s upward track and reducing it is not always positive either in terms of career progression since the individual may be perceived to be skipping important steps (and a longer pre-PhD duration allows for quicker progression later on).

How Female Professors Fit into Standardised Patterns of Mobility Do the identified mobility patterns over time vary by sociodemographic groups? As in the regression models, Discipline and Gender seem to have a limited influence on mobility. In terms of differences between the disciplines (Graphs 9.2a–c), candidates in linguistics are more mobile in general, and they move more between positions than sociology candidates. There are nearly twice as many linguists who cross national borders for their first appointment, which indicates a less inward, nation-centred orientation of their discipline. In terms of gender (Graphs 9.3a-c), we notice that the pre-professorial peak in status and institutional mobilities described above is slightly later and more pronounced for men than for women. This may reflect the lower commitment of men to family care and their higher availability for seizing professional opportunities. Yet gender should remain an important factor in careers across academic groups (Bagihole & White, 2013; Vincent-­ Lamarre et al., 2020; Zheng et al., 2022). The limited impact of gender on the mobility among professors may be an effect of gender filtering on lower academic ranks. Professorial appointments may then be a subsystem of the general competition for academic careers, with specific norms and

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Graphs 9.2a–c  Evolution of mobility by disciplines (n = 864). (In order to neutralise haphazard variations, 3-year moving averages are applied separately to the sections before and after access to professorship. Raw values are preserved for the year of first professorial appointment)

practices. This may explain why female professors are highly likely to be unmarried and childless whereas the converse is true for male professors (Baker, 2010). Once academics have entered the race for a professorship, all women (and men) who do not fit into the sequential structure have

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Graphs 9.3a–c  Evolution of mobility by genders (n = 864). (In order to neutralise haphazard variations, 3-year moving averages are applied separately to the sections before and after access to professorship. Raw values are preserved for the year of first professorial appointment)

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already dropped out and the remaining academics are already aligned to the academic standard career. Therefore, women who qualify for professorship and conform to the standard career do not seem to see more resistance to recruitment or promotion than men.

International Recruitments National contexts make a clear difference to Mobility (Graphs 9.4a-c). In the UK, many more professors are recruited from abroad than in Germany and France. This brain drain is facilitated by the wide use of English as a lingua franca in research, by transactional recruitment criteria, by the lack of personal loyalties, networks and schools as well as by a cosmopolitan culture in Anglophone academic contexts. Significant international mobility takes place in the UK: 22% of first professorial appointments are from outside the country. Yet apart from the arrival of international recruits, national institutional mobility is relatively limited in the UK. Also, the tightening of immigration rules and Brexit has since made it more difficult to recruit internationals. Germany also recruits professors directly from abroad (13% of all appointments), including many candidates from Austria, and for posts open to English-language teaching. France is far behind (5%), both for direct and earlier international hiring. Reversely, 60% of British professorships were promotions within the same department, while 80% of German and French professors came from another national institution, following a tradition of moving between institutions within national bounds. French academics show high mobility between 10 and 20 years before the professorship, when they face their bottleneck period and have to chase for one of the permanent posts of Maître de conférence offered on the nationwide job vacancy list. The trend in status mobility follows quite closely the trend in institutional mobility: professors in France move between posts early in their career, with a peak ten years before professorship, their colleagues in Germany around seven years before and the British are stable with lower levels of mobility. However, other studies point out that the mobility of younger generations seems to have increased, which may point to further convergence of academic careers along global standards (Lalé, 2012; Lyons et al., 2012).

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Graphs 9.4a–c  Evolution of mobility by countries (n = 864). (In order to neutralise haphazard variations, 3-year moving averages are applied separately to the sections before and after access to professorship. Raw values are preserved for the year of first professorial appointment)

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Mobility and Speed: How to Move at the Right Moments Graphs 9.5a-c show the evolution of mobility by levels of career speed, which

was used as a dependent variable in regression models. Across the three kinds of mobilities, there is a clear relationship between career speed and mobility. Slow career makers are most mobile up to 15 years before the professorship. This is a period in which they thrive to achieve some professional stability, inside or outside the University, stability that enables them in turn to compete for professorship more than twenty years later. Quick academics have the highest mobility from seven years until appointment. In order to get promoted early to professorship, these candidates show high mobility over time but they tend to start from a situation of relative stability prior to switching into “mobility mode”. Standard-speed individuals are the most mobile between 15 and eight years before appointment. No matter whether they reach the professorship over a short or a long time, academics rely on different strategies, contracts and resources. They engage in distinct publishing practices and in various types of collaborations inside and outside academia. Graphs 9.5a–d shows that speed also makes a difference to mobility after the first professorial appointment. Professors appointed early are the ones who remain the most mobile afterwards. This is hardly surprising given that professors appointed in their late 30s have many more years before them than those appointed in their late 50s: universities looking for external professors will have to think twice if the candidate is close to retirement. In Germany, the last university has to cover the professor’s pension, which is why there is an effective recruitment limit at age 52 beyond which professors can no longer change jobs or be recruited. Early recruits may receive more job offers because they are spotted as most successful initially. Mobility may be part of their academic habitus in contrast to more older academics rooted in their local environment. Our findings reveal a nexus between a period of relative stability academics enjoy in their student days and the mobility they experience decades later as professors. The transition from student to early-career academic is a challenge that most will not achieve without stable professional support. Students are more likely to embark on a quick, successful academic career if they are accompanied by a mentor. In France and in Germany, in particular, academic staff can invite their academically oriented BA and MA students to continue as their PhD students. Students who change institutions before their PhD may not have the local support

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Graphs 9.5a–d  Evolution of mobility by career speed levels (n = 864). (In order to neutralise haphazard variations, 3-year moving averages are applied separately to the sections before and after access to professorship. Raw values are preserved for the year of first professorial appointment)

and proximity that local students have built up over years. Such informal and local ties make a crucial difference when it comes to securing the first academic roles, paid or unpaid, including assistantships and contracts which can qualify for a PhD such as a Wissenschaftlicher MitarbeiterIn in Germany or an ATER in France. PhD students who miss out on those

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early opportunities because they were not at “the right place at the right time” are likely to start their careers with a step behind. If the academic is defined early on by the hard experience of not being sufficiently inside the institution, he or she may decide “to play it safe” at later career stages and opt for a more local and slower career. Another reason for why relative stability early on can have a strong effect on professorial appointments very much later on may reside in the dynamics of an institutional field that is characterised by asymmetrical relations between centre and periphery. The most central and prestigious institutions tend to attract the students who are already best prepared for an academic career (through the cultural capital they have). Not only do such institutions offer resources (such as scholarships) that allow students to stay for a longer time but they also offer other advantages that make ambitious students want to stay (think of a university in a big city or with a long tradition as opposed to a new foundation in a small provincial city). For these reasons, it can be more difficult for peripheral institutions to keep their most ambitious students unless they treat and fund them well over a long time. And students who started in central universities right from the beginning will have, and are likely to keep, a relative advantage over those trying to enter such institutions later on. Obviously, everybody does not have the same propensity to risk-taking and the example of the quickest professors lends credence to the idea that it often pays off to switch from stability to mobility (and back) at some point. That being said, the sense of when mobility is appropriate and when it is not should depend on the academic’s habitus. It will be easier for academics from academic families to take decisions in line with the opportunity structures of the field. The longitudinal study of career patterns demonstrates the importance of timing and sequencing. If mobility is a disadvantage initially (since it risks students’ stable personal support), it can turn into an advantage later on when academics, who have developed their personal support networks, need to show (some) mobility within and between institutions, which vouches for the academic’s recognised market value in the sector. Overall, stability tends to increase gradually throughout their careers and most academics consolidate their institutional positions over time, both before and after the professorial appointments. However, the speediest professors often “gear up” in terms of mobility in the years before their first professorial appointment. They switch on their mobility mode while other colleagues leave it turned off.

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References Bagihole, B., & White, K. (Eds.). (2013). Generation and Gender in Academia. Palgrave Macmillan. https://books.google.com/books/about/Generation_ and_Gender_in_Academia.html?hl=de&id=hVuYAAAAQBAJ Baker, M. (2010). Choices or Constraints? Family Responsibilities, Gender and Academic Career. Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 41(1), 1–18. https:// www.jstor.org/stable/41604335 Fox, J., & Weisberg, S. (2019). An R companion to applied regression, Third ed., SAGE, Los Angeles. Lalé, E. (2012). Trends in Occupational Mobility in France: 1982–2009. Labour Economics, 19(3), 373–387. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.labeco.2012.03.005 Lyons, S. T., Schweitzer, L., Ng, E. S. W., & Kuron, L. K. J. (2012). Comparing Apples to Apples: A Qualitative Investigation of Career Mobility Patterns Across Four Generations. Career Development International, 17(4), 333–357. https://doi.org/10.1108/13620431211255824 Vincent-Lamarre, P., Sugimoto, C.  R., & Larivière, V. (2020, May 19). The Decline of Women’s Research Production During the Coronavirus Pandemic. Nature Index. https://www.nature.com/nature-­index/news-­blog/decline-­ women-­scientist-­research-­publishing-­production-­coronavirus-­pandemic Zheng, X., Yuan, H., & Ni, C. (2022). The Gender Gap in Academic Career Achievements and the Mediation Effect of Work-Family Conflict and Partner Support. BioRxiv, 11, e78909. https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.03.23.485507

CHAPTER 10

Pathways: Three Career Models

Abstract  Optimal matching and clustering analysis are used to build a typology of professorial careers that reveals the diversity of pathways towards professorial positions. The large majority are type A careers, which are characterised by a phase of PhD-level teaching and research, short or long. Around 18% have had short or long research and teaching abroad (B careers). Research-only careers and teaching-only careers (type C) are rare. The analysis of Mobility shows that A professors are products of the universities of their academic system whereas B professors spend time in other countries and most C professors start their careers outside universities. A, B and C career types also impact on post-appointment trajectories. Keywords  Professorial careers • Career pathways • Sequence analysis • Academic statuses • Standard careers • Teaching and research • Inwardand outward-orientated careers • Academic mobility

Exploring Trajectories Biographical trajectories are characterised by at least three fundamental dimensions of time: timing, duration and order (Blanchard, 2019). Trajectories consist of stretches of time (years in our case, as the academic cycle is in years), with each stretch (characterised by educational level, academic status or university affiliation) impacted by previous stretches © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Angermuller, P. Blanchard, Careers of the Professoriate, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25241-9_10

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and influencing in turn subsequent stretches. In the following, we will extract sequential patterns and build a typology of careers. This will refine the analysis of periods between starting and end points (Speed and Mobility). Sequence analysis provides concepts and tools that represent, mine, compare and classify trajectories. It proves its effectiveness by making large, complex data visually readable and interpretable. With this method, we can extract representative profiles and quantify their size and evolution. It has been widely used in life course studies (Blanchard et  al., 2014; Ritschard & Studer, 2018), including studies of highly skilled workers such as managers (Biemann & Wolf, 2009), economists and engineers (Bühlmann, 2008), and bankers (Stovel et  al., 1996). However, so far, sequence analysis has been used only in few studies of academic careers, including one assessing the level of homogeneity in careers of elite economists and sociologists (Korom, 2020) and another dealing with the differentiation of teaching and research over time (Colombi & Paye, 2014). We model an academic career as the sequence of yearly formal academic positions held by academics since the start of their studies. We created an alphabet which groups academic positions in 20 states (see Graph 10.1) along five dimensions: employed in the higher education sector or elsewhere (high school, private organisation or public organisation); working in the country where the professorship is finally held or in another country; occupying a position that formally requires a qualification at the level of less than a MA degree, MA degree, PhD degree or habilitation or (full) professorship; engaged exclusively in research (“R”), exclusively in teaching (“T”) or in a combination of both (“dual”); holding one or successive professorial positions (“Prof1”, “Prof2”, etc.). Graph 10.1a (Gabadinho et al., 2011) shows that on the track towards professorship, the proportion of teaching/research positions requiring a PhD (PhD/Dual) grows regularly and becomes dominant in the last 12 years while non-­academic positions, which are never typical, almost disappear (from 20% at around −30 to 2% at year 0). This confirms two things: the closer candidates get to professorship, the more likely it is they hold an academic role broadly similar to a professorship, that is, a stable contract in research and teaching. After year 0 (first professorial position), changes are rare and the threshold of 30% of another professorial appointment is reached as late as 20 years later. Graph 10.1b represents the highest educational degree held in a given year. The time gap between MA and PhD graduations varies considerably

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Graphs 10.1  a–b Distribution of academic positions and degrees over time. (The horizontal axis measures time. Each year-column represents the proportion of respondents in each state. N  =  1743. Abbreviations: MA  =  Master’s degree; Res = research contract; Tea = teaching contract; Dual = Joint research and teaching contract; Hab  =  habilitation; Prof  =  professorial contract; HE =  higher education)

and it shows the range of careers: a very small group who still became professors 35–40 years after their master’s or PhD and a small group right after their PhD, master’s or even BA. Obligatory in France, still common in linguistics and in most areas of sociology in Germany but non-existent in the UK (where an equivalent would be a second book, a large project or some other major achievement), the habilitation is normally gained within ten years before professorship even though there is a small group of academics taking decades until the professorial appointment. Once appointed, professors will normally stay but after a few years, some will have second or third appointments. It is not uncommon to see the professorial title awarded as an end-of-career honorific title in the UK, where the lowest professorial salaries are just above the highest Senior Lecturer/Reader scales. In France, maître de conférences are sometimes appointed professors just before retirement and such latecomers have good economic reasons given that pensions of French civil servants are calculated on the basis of the last active year. In Germany, by contrast, it is difficult for academics to get professorial job offers after the age of 52,

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when the recruiting state governments (Länder) normally stop recruiting civil servants. This rule reduces the window for German academics looking for professorships. And some middle-aged professors have the opportunity to engage in a frantic race for the most job offers and highest increases in salaries and resources. Based on a much smaller and strictly ordered alphabet of mostly commensurable degrees, the trajectories of educational degrees are more standardised than the trajectories of academic positions. The PhD (doctorat in French, Promotion in German) is an almost universal requirement for any professorship (with a tiny fraction of mostly old professors holding just a master’s1). The habilitation exists only in France and Germany and all French and many German academics obtain the habilitation by their first professorial appointment. The habilitation has been gradually losing its importance since the introduction of Juniorprofessuren in Germany in 2002 (Zimmer, 2018) and university law reforms in France in 2007, which allow full professors from abroad to apply to French universities directly.

A Typology of Academic Pathways The previous analyses showed that academic careers follow expected paths allowing for a range of variations. We could perceive a standard career progression from PhD towards professorship which takes 12 years on average and typically includes a fixed-term postdoc position and/or a full and, in a few cases, permanent teaching-research contract. Our typology groups together trajectories that are similar in terms of contracts. Contracts are the backbone indicator of a career, and the other two dimensions (degrees and geographic/institutional mobility) will be mapped onto the typology. The optimal matching (OM) algorithm and the Ward hierarchical ascending clustering algorithm enable us to identify clusters that are characterised by both high internal homogeneity and high external heterogeneity. The homogeneity of clusters and their theoretical relevance are favoured over homogeneity of cluster sizes. The resulting typology (see Graphs 10.2 and 10.3) strikes a suitable balance between 1  The few non-doctors that we expect in our sample cannot be distinguished from missing values. More than 100 professors did not indicate the date of their PhD in their CV. So we cannot know if they have one or not. Graphs 4a & b both ignore these cases, as well as the cases that have too little information about positions to create a meaningful trajectory.

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four aspects of the trajectories: the nature of the statuses experienced, the order in which they appear, the length of time spent in each status and the overall length of pre-professorial trajectories. The robustness of the typology is tested by means of clustering statistics. While the trajectories of each cluster display similar patterns, differences appear between any two clusters on one or more of the four above-mentioned aspects of the trajectories. Generally, trajectories tend to be determined by a small set of predominant positions and by the duration of the episodes that contain these positions. The clusters’ names reflect these predominant states. However, clusters also generally include a minority of diverging trajectories, with more various positions, and more frequent transitions between statuses. An eight-cluster typology allows us to represent the pathways that our academics take in more detail. Graph 10.2 is the exhaustive representation of all trajectories, year after year for each individual. Graph 10.3 aggregates the states experienced by all cases, year by year, in order to best visualise the evolution of numbers in each status. We also make use of the clusters’ statistical properties provided in Table 10.1. The large majority (851 out of 1391) of professors have pursued an A career, which is defined by at least one full-time teaching and research contract prior to their appointments as professor. Category A professors reflect the classical pathway, which is centred on relatively stable, teaching and research positions in the 10 years before the professorship. Category A careers can be divided into three subclusters. A1 represents the model career that academics follow in any of the three systems whereas others are rather typical for Germany (A2) and France and the UK (A3). A1—the model teacher-researcher (317 cases): The academics of A1 have had mostly full PhD-level research and teaching contracts over five to ten years before their professorial appointment. In many cases, pre-MA or MA-level research or teaching experience, extra-academic employment and a shorter postdoctoral research stay abroad served as a springboard to secure such a position (such as Wissenschaftlicher Assistant/Rat, maître de conférences or [Senior] Lecturer). A1 professors take 11 years on average to get from PhD to professorship, which makes A1 one of the faster and also more predictable pathways towards professorship. The professor with the ID number 2350 is a typical example of Cluster 1. She started out with a teacher’s degree (Staatsexamen), which is a full equivalent of a Master’s and common for many students of Germanistik. She then went

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Graph 10.2  Typology of status trajectories (N = 1391). (Individual plots based on the optimal matching analysis of trajectories)

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Graph 10.3  Typology of status trajectories (N = 1391). (There are white bands before at the left- and right-hand sides of the graphs to mark the absence of careers going so far out)

A2

A3

B1

B2

B3

C1

C2

D

1391 100 32 53 14 100 40 60 100 53 47 100 8 26 46 20 100 55.7 1993.1 2005.3 31.5 43.8 12.2 0.008 0.036 0.068

All

a = Average number of international moves per year of career; b = Average number of moves between institutions per year of career; c =Average number of status change per year of career

n 317 281 253 127 58 23 90 19 223 % 23 20 18 9 4 1.7 6.5 1.4 16.0 France 37 7 48 16 26 60.9 72 89 28 Germany 51 93 24 72 43 26 20 5 51 UK 11 0 28.5 13 31 13 7.8 5.3 21.1 All 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 Female 42 37 43 44 38 61 43 63 33 Male 58 63 57 56 62 39 57 37 67 All 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 Linguistics 58 52 43 70 76 65 33 74 47 Sociology 42 48 57 30 24 35 67 26 53 All 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 PhD1964.80 5 6 8 9 13 6 14 0 11 PhD1981.90 23 22 30 20 45 39 18 33 29 PhD1991.2000 50 41 52 38 41 50 54 50 43 PhD2001.12 21 31 10 34 2 6 13 17 17 All 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 Average age in 2015 55.5 54.0 56.2 55.0 58.9 60.9 54.4 63.0 56.9 Average year of PhD graduation 1993.9 1994.8 1991.6 1994.9 1989 1991.1 1992.1 1992.9 1992.1 Average year of 1st prof appointment 2004.4 2004.4 2007.5 2005.0 2006.7 2008.0 2005.8 2006.1 2004.5 Average age at PhD graduation 31.6 31.5 31.1 31.7 32.5 36.8 30.5 38.5 30.6 Average age at 1st prof appointment 42.6 41.4 47.1 41.9 48.7 51.5 44.9 51.8 43.2 Average time from PhD to Professorship 10.8 9.6 16.0 10.2 17.6 16.5 13.4 12.9 12.2 Geographic mobilitya 0.008 0.004 0.002 0.025 0.024 0.020 0.005 0.003 0.007 Institutional mobilityb 0.038 0.040 0.038 0.022 0.023 0.031 0.039 0.064 0.038 Status mobilityc 0.071 0.075 0.059 0.074 0.050 0.075 0.065 0.076 0.072

A1

Table 10.1  Characteristics of types of academic trajectories (N = 1391)

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abroad to work and do research. After her return to Germany, things went as expected and she got her first professorial job offer before she finished the habilitation, at age 44, still in time to receive and accept two more offers seven and nine years after the first one. ID 46 is another case in point. She is among the few sociologists who were trained in the German Democratic Republic and who continued their careers after the reunification. She obtained her Eastern German PhD early in life and one can imagine that the collapse of state socialism had a major impact on her life. Nonetheless, after a chain of fixed-term research contracts and stays at prestigious institutions abroad she managed to get a hold of a regular teaching and research position by moving to another university, and a professorial position four years after. She may not be a classic quick-mover but once on the right track she moved up quickly and even obtained a second professorial offer three years later. ID 1329 is a theoretical linguist who got a first degree from a prestigious British university. He then went to the US to obtain a doctorate from a renowned American university. He then worked for universities in the US and the UK before returning to the same British university as a professor.

A2: the teacher-researcher with MA-level contracts (281): A2 careers are dominated by long (3–15 years) periods of MA-level research and teaching contracts, followed by shorter or longer PhD-level contracts (1–8 years), also in research and teaching. Some of these individuals took advantage of doctoral or pre-doctoral contracts for teaching and research. These professors are more likely to be male and most are based in Germany, where many academics are recruited as Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiter for pre- and post-PhD teaching as well as research projects. They are appointed as professors already after nine or ten years after their PhD and they also tend to reach professorship at an earlier age than others. ID 203 is a sociology professor in Germany who quickly went through a number of positions, including postdoc stays abroad, because he could choose among many job offers before and after his first professorial appointment. Following the standard career model, he was propelled by public recognition for his prolific writing. ID 2368 is a linguistics professor in Germany who pioneered the entry of women into professorial ranks. She studied in France and the United States and then was on an MA-level research position in Germany for a short time before she was appointed as a full professor at a young age and then moved to another professorship ten years later.

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A3—the steady teacher-researcher (253): A3 is also strongly defined by teaching and research contracts but in this cluster they can go on for as many as 10–30 years. Many of these academics reach a full, permanent and non-professorial position early on and then take some time to develop their career, especially in France, where permanent positions are available right after the doctorate. More sociologists can be found in A3 than in A1 and A2, a sign that careers in sociology can be longer than in linguistics. A3 professors reach professorship 5–6 years later than their counterparts in A1 and A2 even though they were half a year younger when they obtained their PhD. ID 769 is a professor in France who stayed on a permanent MCF position for 14 years before finally reaching a professorship. The long time can be partly explained by his changing disciplines. He held CNU’s qualification for political science before obtaining the habilitation in sociology and being recruited as a professor. A number of political science doctors in France are trained to political sociology and able to apply in sociology. ID 1718 is a sociologist who obtained a doctorate at an early age from a prestigious university. He then joined a middle-ranked university where he worked for fifteen years and slowly rose up and finished as Reader. Having built up a long publication record, he was finally made professor at another university where he stayed for another 20 years. ID 2368 is a linguistics professor in Germany who pioneered the entry of women into professorial ranks. She studied in France and the United States and then was on an MA-level research position in Germany for a short time before she was appointed as a full professor at a young age and then moved to another professorship ten years later.

A3—the steady teacher-researcher (253): A3 is also strongly defined by teaching and research contracts but in this cluster they can reach back for as many as ten to 30 years. Many of these academics reach a full, permanent and non-professorial position early on and then take some time to develop their career, especially in France, where permanent positions are available right after the doctorate. More sociologists can be found in A3 than in A1 and A2, a sign that careers in sociology can be longer than in linguistics. A3 professors reach professorship 5–6 years later than their counterparts in A1 and A2 even though they were half a year younger when they obtained their PhD.

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ID 769 is a professor in France who stayed on a permanent MCF position for 14 years before finally reaching a professorship. This is a long time that can be partly explained by his changing disciplines. He held CNU’s qualification for political science before obtaining the habilitation in sociology and being recruited as a professor. A number of political science doctors in France are trained to political sociology and able to apply in sociology. ID 385 is a professor in Germany. While he was recruited on a regular research and teaching position early on, he could not pass on to a professorship directly after the initial six-year contract was over. He extended the contract on parenting time. For the next eight years, he was holding the habilitation, but had to go through a number of fixed-term research contracts and interim professorships before he was appointed as a full professor, not very long before the age limit (52 years) for recruiting civil servants in Germany.

We then identified “alternative” routes where significant time was spent in at least one other academic system (B careers, 208 cases) or significant parts of pre-professorial contracts were either teaching or research only (C careers, 109 cases). Our terminology (A, B, C careers) does not imply a hierarchy of prestige. What we can observe is a clear preponderance of A, the “classic” teacher-researcher trained and later recruited in the same academic system. There are four times as many A careers as compared to B careers and almost eight times more than C. B and C careers are not perceived as inferior: They tend to be more unique profiles and some professors, in B particular, enjoy high international recognition. B1: The returning academic (127): These academics have held short or medium-length positions abroad at some point and the large majority are nationals appointed after a stay abroad. B1 people are recruited quickly (within 10 years after the PhD), which testifies to their international experience as an accelerating factor. Some already had contracts in the country early on in their careers and others migrated to their present country of work. B4 is dominated by Germans, men and linguists, which reflects the strong numbers of foreign language specialists in Germany in comparison to France and the UK where linguists are more likely to work as “generalists” (i.e. in French and English only). The six professors in our sample who pass borders after their first professorial appointment are in this cluster. They bear witness to the value of internationally recognised academic profiles on the international higher education market, especially in Germany and to some degree in the UK.

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ID 874 is a linguistics professor in France. As a young engineer, he left France to get a PhD at a prestigious research university in the U.S. He then went on to work at an American university as an assistant professor but then left, probably still before having reached tenure, to take on a full professorship in France. This is an unusual move but not impossible since professorial appointments are no bottleneck events in France. It is  rather unusual that he later became a directeur de recherche at CNRS, which allowed him to reduce his teaching load and concentrate on his research. ID 58 is a sociology professor and she has pursued an equally unusual trajectory. As a young student, she left Germany to obtain her PhD at a renowned institution in the US. She continued as a postdoc in the US and was then hired directly as a full professor in Germany. While keeping her international connections, she has since occupied some of the most important leadership positions in the German social sciences, with good connections into regional and federal politics.

B2: The import academic (58). B2 professors spent at least ten years abroad before being appointed in one of the three countries at hand. We have little information about these pre-professorial positions. Some may have found opportunities abroad to overcome a blocked career in their home country. Others may have been motivated by extra-academic factors, such as following a partner’s professional migration. Such potentially complex transitions would explain the late access to professorship (17.6 years on average, 5.4 more than the sample average). We also note that B2 professors are awarded their PhD late in life. These professors may have struggled more to reach professorship, they may have occupied niches where careers do not advance as fast or they are driven by more than just academic interests. ID 715 is a sociology professor in France who spent his entire pre-professorial life in Switzerland (which has a Privatdozent system similar to the German one). As a French-language native, he could chase for permanent jobs on the French market, where the professorship does not constitute a bottleneck event like in Switzerland or Germany. He ended up in a regular university outside metropolitan areas. ID 1044 is a linguistics professor. She started her career with degrees and a PhD from a renowned university in the U.S. She held research contracts in the US. prior to moving to the UK. As a lecturer at a university in London, she was awarded a number of research projects from research organisations around the world before becoming a professor at a prestigious university in the UK.

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ID 1324 is a linguist who obtained her doctorate in Germany, worked in the Netherlands, where she moved up to professor, and was then recruited as a professor in the UK. A specialist of English language, she does not face language barriers between countries. In the UK, she built up a strong management profile which led her to a third professorial appointment.

B3: The latecoming academic with PhD  contracts from abroad (23): Members of B3 have stayed abroad. Some have gone through MA-level contracts. They may have had a PhD-level teacher researcher contract, an episode in the civil service or a career interruption. This is a small cluster, mostly French, with more female candidates. They obtained their PhD late in life (at 37 on average) and took 16.5 years to reach the professorship. B3 careers seem to have been slow because of non-strategic migration and extra-academic life events. Some professors of the B and C category enjoy high recognition, for example, some of the international careers and the research-only tracks. The low C numbers (research or teaching tracks) bear witness to the fact that professors are generally  expected to have a teaching and research background, especially in Germany and in the UK, where the overwhelming majority of professors are based in universities and where there are no research-only tracks. ID 856 lived in Haiti for many years, as a (white) expatriate, before her recruitment as an MCF in Paris, where she was promoted to professorship 15 years later. As a linguist, she could make a career and make use of her first-­ hand experience of language contact and creolisation outside France. ID 2686 is an émigrée from the Balkans and she spent almost two decades on an academic job in the Netherlands before obtaining first and second professorial positions in linguistics in Germany. For a long time, Germany has recruited international academics like her to occupy the large number of professorships covering the various languages and language families in Europe and beyond.

C1: the researcher (90): C1s have had PhD-level research contracts, which are preceded, in a few cases, by other types of contracts. C1 professors have often given priority to publishing, grant writing and research projects. Most of the C1s (72%) are directeurs/directrices de recherche at the French CNRS, which are the equivalent of research-only professors. They are usually quick to obtain their PhD. They will usually have been in a permanent and highly recognised research position (chargé de recherche)

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for many years and slowly worked their way up towards the equivalent of professorship. German research-only professors, by contrast, have typically worked on a few fixed-term research projects. While UK universities can offer fixed-term research-only (“postdoc”) contracts, permanent academic contracts in the UK before and after professorship have a flexible workload that allows departments to decide on the distribution of research and teaching tasks from year to year. Research-only academics may struggle to be seen as full academics if they have work for research institutes with a highly applied focus for a long time. ID 45 is an example of a research-only academic turned sociology professor in Germany. She obtained her PhD in one of the Max-Planck centres. These centres are often connected to a university through (temporary) connections with certain chairs. Her career orbits around chairs which are embedded like Göttingen and Freie Universität Berlin into the parallel world of German research centres (namely Soziologisches Forschungsinstitut, SOFI Göttingen and Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, WZB). ID 1136 is from Latin America and arrived in Paris to obtain a PhD in sociology from Ecole des Hautes Etudes (EHESS). He then passed the concours for CNRS to become a permanent researcher (chargé de recherches). CNRS applies quota for academics from outside France, which help internationals like him pursue a CNRS career in relation to MCF positions, which mostly go to candidates trained in France. Yet ID 1136 did not continue the research track. After ten years and getting the Habilitation, he chose to become a full professor in a regular university, with a life more centred around students.

C2: the teacher (19): In C2, we find academics with long periods in teaching in secondary education ending with PhD-level teaching and research contracts. In France, PRAG contracts lead to teaching positions in high schools while giving the possibility to prepare a PhD before accessing academic positions (Menger et al., 2017). Only a minority will reach a professorial position. C2 professors are appointed late in their careers (at 52 against 44 for the whole population). This group is more feminine and more of them are in linguistics, which has more affinity with teaching institutions than sociology has. While we could see no impact of Gender on Speed and Mobility, more women seem to pursue teaching-oriented careers, which take longer to reach a professorship. ID 1976 is a linguistics professor in France, who passed the degree for secondary teaching (CAPES) and started out as a secondary teacher after having tried to

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enter an elite track in the humanities (Ecole Normale Supérieure de la Rue d’Ulm). She worked in high schools for eight years. Yet she managed to prepare a doctoral thesis, which allowed her to be recruited as an MCF and then to move up the institutional ladder. ID 1259 is a similar case. After 15 years in French highschools he became a PRAG, a permanent teaching fellow in a university, which allowed him to finish his PhD. From there he passed on to a regular research and teaching position (MCF) and then moved up to professor.

We also came up with a residual group of 223 D professors who represent career types that were too small to justify a cluster. Some D professors are characterised by missing biographical information or career interruptions. These include academics who do not present themselves online in much detail, which we observed especially among some older French colleagues and internally appointed (außerplanmäßige) professors in Germany. Those who do not conform to certain standards are also more likely not to make certain phases of their biography public, such as work outside academia and short periods of unemployment. Childcare is mentioned in some cases. If we leave out the D professors, 73% of all professors have followed a type-A career in their country, characterised by a phase of PhD-level teaching and research, which can be short or long. Another 18% have had short or long research and teaching abroad (B). Research-only careers (C1, 7.7%) and teaching-only careers (C2, 1.6%) are rare and they may be seen as deficient in systems where professors are supposed to combine teaching and research (e.g. in Germany and in the UK). Many careers are too short to be singled out as a category of their own, such as those coming from the private sector. The three groups can be distinguished by the degree of proximity to and investment in their institution and their academic system: A professors are proper products of their academic system whereas B professors are set apart by the time they spent in institutions of other countries and most C professors start their careers outside universities. By relating the eight career types with status, institutional and geographic mobility (Graph 10.4), we can make two observations: First, A3 (and C2) are not only among the slowest groups but they also show very little geographic mobility, much less so than A1. It seems that in the A group, careers differentiate early on between inward- and outward-­ orientated academics. Second, among B professors, the geographically

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Graph 10.4  Average clusters’ Speed according Status, Institutional and Geographic Mobility (N = 1391). (Axes represent average Mobility indicators per cluster. The size of the bubbles represents average Speed per cluster)

most mobile group, some are characterised by higher (B1, B3), others (B2) by lower status mobility, the former reaching the professorship earlier than the latter. While we should refrain from a straightforward causal explanation for career speed, professorial positions can be reached, it seems, with an internal emphasis placed on the local context and often slower progress, or with an external emphasis on making an early career leap by changing institutions. These directions can be a matter of the academic’s free choice or of constraints or both at the same time. The progression before the first professorial appointment correlates with career progression thereafter in our sample. Professors can move on to other roles (e.g. into management), move up further and sometimes achieve significant salary hikes. Such moves are visible when they change institutions but many internal promotions remain invisible in our data,

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especially in France (see Chap. 7). German professors normally cannot improve their salaries or be promoted without job offers from another university. German professors have a short window until the age of 52, when they can still be recruited elsewhere. They compete for external job offers (Rufe) most openly, which they sometimes present as signs of their leverage on the market. It is hardly surprising that professors who are appointed at an early age have a higher chance of getting more offers thereafter. Therefore, quickness is a good predictor for professors moving further up. Conversely, professors from both a research-only and teaching-­ only track have low chances of progression both before and after the first professorial appointment and will normally experience lower speed. The professors appointed from abroad are not too likely to keep changing positions as a professor later (see Graph 10.2). Research achievements are easier to translate internationally whereas teaching or management are often embedded in the institutional ecology of an institution or a system. Therefore, international candidates are generally more successful for research-only positions, especially on the level of postdocs, French CNRS positions and research professors in the UK.

References Biemann, T., & Wolf, J. (2009). Career Patterns of Top Management Team Members in Five Countries: An Optimal Matching Analysis. International Journal of Human Resource Management, 20, 975–979. Blanchard, P. (2019). Sequence Analysis. In P.  A. Atkinson, R.  A. Williams, & A. Cernat (Eds.), Sage Research Methods Foundations. Sage. Blanchard, P., Bühlmann, F., & Gauthier, J.-A. (Eds.). (2014). Advances in Sequence Analysis: Methods. Springer. Bühlmann, F. (2008). The Corrosion of Career? Occupational Trajectories of Business Economists and Engineers in Switzerland. European Sociological Review, 24(5), 601–616. Colombi, D., & Paye, S. (2014). Synchronising Sequences. An Analytic Approach to Explore Relationships Between Events and Temporal Patterns. In P.  Blanchard, F.  Bühlmann, & J.-A.  Gauthier (Eds.), Advances in Sequence Analysis: Methods, Theories and Applications (pp. 249–264). Springer. Gabadinho, A., Ritschard, G., Müller, N. S., & Studer, M.(2011). Analyzing and Visualizing State Sequences in R with TraMineR. Journal of Statistical Software, 40(4), 1–37. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v040.i04

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Korom, P. (2020). How Do Academic Elites March Through Departments? A Comparison of the Most Eminent Economists and Sociologists’ Career Trajectories. Minerva, 58, 343–365. Menger, P.-M., Marchika, C., Paye, S., Renisio, Y., & Zamith, P. (2017). La contribution des enseignants du secondaire à l’enseignement supérieur en France. Effectifs, affectations, carrières (1984–2014). Revue Française de Sociologie, 58(4), 643–677. Ritschard, R., & Studer, M. (2018). Sequence Analysis and Related Approaches. Innovative Methods and Applications. Springer. Stovel, K., Savage, M., & Bearman, P. (1996). Ascription into Achievement: Models of Career Systems at Lloyds Bank, 1890–1970. American Journal of Sociology, 102(2), 358–399. Zimmer, L. M. (2018). Das Kapital der Juniorprofessur. Einflussfaktoren bei der Berufung von der Junior- auf die Lebenszeitprofessur, Dissertation. Springer.

CHAPTER 11

Conclusion: Academic Careers between Competition and Conformation

Abstract  Not all professors pursue the same model of academic “excellence”. Their orientations can be rather inward (toward their institution) or more outward (toward their disciplinary peers). They may value research, teaching and management in various proportions and at various moments of their career. However, many are subjected to increasingly convergent career standards. Timetables and templates define expected speed and turning points despite rules and norms, knowledges and practices that differ enormously between systems and disciplines. The standardisation of academic careers testifies to pressures on academics to conform with cultural models of “normal” subjects in academia. The residual, heterogeneous group of undefined professors (type D) reminds us how some academics advance and realise themselves without conforming to conventional career models. Keywords  Professorial careers • Teaching and research • Competition • Conformation • Career standardisation • Career timetables • Subjectification Academic careers hold out the promise of a fulfilling professional situation. Yet it takes a long time to reach a permanent academic job and even more to reach full institutional recognition. Many years of studying and a number of  diplomas are required before academics can move up the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Angermuller, P. Blanchard, Careers of the Professoriate, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25241-9_11

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institutional status ladder from student and non-professorial academic to professor. Many academics experience precarious situations during their PhD and postdoc time, and some, especially in Germany, reach a permanent position only with the professorship. Once they have secured a permanent position, some academics stay on while others keep rising in the institutional hierarchy and moving to other institutions. Landing a professorship in academia requires patience, perseverance in the face of perceived walls of resistance from management, colleagues and peers. Some invest a great deal to get little reward in return; others may just be lucky to obtain the support of a mentor or be at the right place at the right time. Some value safety, some others want top positions. Our study has revealed the career patterns of the professoriate. By studying the populations of professors across disciplines and countries, we have identified a standard academic career. On average, professors-to-be obtain their PhDs at the age of 31.5. The vast majority then go on with research and teaching contracts and they reach the professorship around 12 years later. Periods of fast biographical time, with quick transitions, alternate with periods of slow time, which bring stability. The 12-year interval from PhD to professorships constitutes the average career schedule of professors in the three countries but professorial careers allow for variety. A professors and B professors are the large group of professors on research and teaching contracts within the country and abroad. They accede to the professorial position quickly (within around 10 years, A1, A2, B1) or slowly (16 years or more on average, A3, B2, B3). While international careers can either be quicker or take longer, both teachingonly and research-only contracts (C professors) tend to go hand in hand with later professorial appointments. Most professors obtain their PhD between the age of 30.5 (C1) and 32.5 (B2). The two small groups of latecomer professors, by contrast, who come from abroad (B3) or in teaching (C2), finish their doctorate in their late 30s and still become professors. We find surprisingly few differences between the two disciplines. Differences can be mainly observed in the small group of C professors: Most of the few teaching professors (C2) can be found in linguistics whereas research professors (C1) are more likely to be in sociology. Linguistics tends to allow for more international careers (B), which can be explained by the facility for linguists to acquire a foreign language on academic levels. Other disciplines of the social sciences and humanities may well be in line with the general A, B, C patterns we have observed in linguistics and sociology but we assume that disciplines with high student demand (e.g. business) see quicker career progress than fields with low

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student demand (such as philosophy). Career patterns may also differ in fields with a focus on laboratory work or experimental equipment (Laudel & Bielick, 2019). Gender is another category that seems to make a surprisingly small difference: We find no significant differences between the careers of women professors in relation to their male counterparts. Overall, those who conform to the standard career schedule are almost as likely to be females as males. The gap has been closing over the last decades, due to gender equality policies within universities, encouragement by research funding bodies, and the rise of women in general. Nonetheless, we do not claim that gender no longer plays a role in academia. There are still more male (60%) than female professors (40%), with the highest numbers of males in French sociology (68%) and the lowest in French linguistics (52%). Women are also overrepresented among the teaching professors (C2) and in latecomer professors from abroad (B3). Even though these groups comprise only 3% of all professors, they should represent difficulties met by many other female academics who did not move up to the professorship: Stronger social norms constrain their acceptable life and work trajectories regarding the order and timing of life events. We observe surprisingly similar career patterns across the three countries. France stands out for offering parallel but distinct career tracks for teachers-researchers (at universities) and for researchers (mostly from CNRS). France is also the country where teachers from the secondary system have a chance to pass into academia. MA-level contracts (Wissenschaftlicher MitarbeiterInnen) are a specialty of Germany and pay and status differences with PhD-level contracts (Akademische RätInnen, formerly AssistentInnen) are not significant. The cross-national convergence of career schedules is among the most striking findings of our study given that laws, diplomas, institutional rules and hiring practices in these countries could hardly be more different. If French professors are slower and German professors quicker than average, it needs emphasising that almost all French professors but few German professors already hold permanent academic jobs before their first professorial appointments. The levels of job stability largely  account for these differences in speed. Professorial positions normally prolong careers based on contracts that combine research and teaching. The number of professors that had worked on research-only contracts prior to their appointment (C1) is small (7.7%) and the number of professors with a teaching-only background (C2, 1.6%)

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is tiny. Both these groups are concentrated in France, where academics can pursue research-only careers with CNRS and high school teachers can obtain a doctorate and then switch to the university. Outside France, C careers are an exception even though there are numerous institutions of applied research in Germany and in the UK. While C1 professors are among the youngest to obtain their PhD, research-only careers are slower than average. If universities like to recruit recognised research profiles, research generally pays off best (career-wise) in conjunction with a teaching profile. Academics need to combine research and teaching if they want to conform to the standard even though academics can show a propensity for either teaching or research. Our findings raise questions which are difficult to respond to within existing theoretical frameworks. Sociological research on higher education often likens academia to a space of transactions, a “market” where academics compete over prestige and resources. Hence, in this view, careers result from a more or less overt struggle of all against all. Academic mobility is seen as a computable function of academics’ achievements in teaching, management and research. By producing, performing, contributing to the field, academics boost their reputation, move up the institutional status ladder and secure a stable position, prestige and resources. The competition idea is implicitly or explicitly defended by many sociologists of higher education (see Chap. 2), including by some who criticise academic institutions for not being meritocratic enough, some who criticise the very idea of meritocracy in higher education, some who criticise the increasing role of market models in higher education, and some who ask how actors participate in the dynamics of organised power. The competition theory of academia is also a natural ideology for many academics: Those on the hiring side may present decision-making as the result of market forces while hired academics like to see their job as a natural reward for their hard work. The competition perspective can explain how actors are coordinated in a space of social inequality and how unequal positions are allocated to academics. Yet it does not account easily for the career patterns and models that we identified in this study. If academia is a market of competing academics, why do academics who become professors often follow an academic standard career? Why is their “performance” translated into the institutional hierarchy only at certain career points? Does the system reward the most creative, innovative and productive academics if they have to follow predictable career stages?

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The competition idea is not wrong. Yet, there is more to mobility in academia. Academics are rewarded with jobs for a variety of accomplishments, contributions and services. Competition is insufficient to explain the standardisation of academic careers. Does the academic career system reward the academics who contribute the most to the creation and dissemination of knowledge, or those who are most aligned with standardised career timetables? If we adopt the conformation perspective, academic careers are under pressure to conform to a model of subjecthood, understood in terms of assujettissement (Foucault), as the processes and practices that turn members of a population into visible, recognised, legitimate subjects in line with the ideas, norms and standards of what constitutes a normal subjectivity. Hence, academic careers designate more or less standardised trajectories of academics establishing themselves as subjects in the image of the “normal” subject model of the sector. The question, then, is how, through their careers, academics turn into subjects by appropriating a set of social labels and categories and by occupying a socially established position from where they can talk and act as visible and recognised members of their communities. From this point of view, academic careers converge because academics are compared and assessed at various moments in view of the sector’s cultural standards and norms. Academics are expected to build up a unique research and teaching profile, often in consonance with, or bolstered by, entrepreneurial discourses about academia as a “market”. Academics indeed engage in a range of activities with no immediate economic return. From the point of view of conformation, these practices enact cultural models of being a fully recognised subject in academia. Academic careers, therefore, are not only about establishing a specialised expertise and realising a unique achievement. They are about creating identities, establishing disciplinary unique profiles. The “cultural” concern of universities with normalising a certain type of subjectivity is not new. According to the Humboldtian narrative, the main function of higher education is to bring about autonomous, free subjects who know how to perform and conduct themselves. It is significant that today the emphasis on “personality” is embraced by the most elite institutions around the world, especially in British and American liberal arts traditions, whereas institutions with lower prestige place emphasis on “skills”. Not everybody has the resources, the energy and the motivation to stay on top of the academic career schedule. If academics fall behind the expected career progression, they are more likely to drop out. While older academics

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will find it difficult to catch up later on, the divergence from the standard career can also become a problem for those who are too fast. Students obtaining their doctorate before 28 years risk missing out on the academic job market as they may be seen as too young for a position on the level of assistant professor. Similar things can be said about professorial positions. The normal subjectivity expected for professorial positions used to evoke a mature figure of authority, perhaps an older man with a grey beard. Only 30 years ago, women represented just over 10% of professors in the social sciences in Germany with even fewer women in the higher category of C4 professors (Mau & Huschka, 2010). Over the last few decades, women have seen significant advances. According to our database (2015), the proportion of female sociology professors in Germany rose more than three times to 36%. Other social categories have seen less change. While our data tells us little about ethnicity and race, professorial positions in Europe remain associated with white nationals for the moment. However, with non-white students having entered European higher education en masse, another shift can be expected that will open the academic workforce to non-white academics and from non-European backgrounds. Other social categories such as age and socioeconomic class position may see less change. If academics have to fit into certain career structures, we may wonder: are academics recruited more for conventional CVs than for unconventional ideas? The career structures that we revealed in our study indeed put a question mark behind the idea of academics as free, creative and unique individuals. How can academics realise their potential if they cannot diverge too much from cultural standards of subjectification and rigid biographical timetables? How can academics respond to the various academic and non-academic challenges in their lives if they are under pressure to construct “flawless” academic CVs from the day they enter the higher education system? A number of programmes have been put into place to respond to these challenges. Diversity and equality, parenting support and research funding for junior academics have been introduced. These initiatives are typically designed to enable academics to fall in line with career norms. Yet helping them to get through one bottleneck can create promotion jams and exclusions elsewhere. Rather than enforcing a career norm that everybody has to follow, both actors and policy-makers would do well to critically interrogate the models and standards prevailing in the sector. The standard academic career model has emerged as a solution that the members of the sector fall back on when they deal with the transition from

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student to professor. As in many other areas of social life, academics intuitively evaluate their performance in terms of their career progression along an imagined standard trajectory. It is easy to compare academic CVs with ideas of career standards circulating in the sector and then pick the candidates that come close. This tendency can be rationalised by the promise of future performance (academics who stick to the deadlines and fulfil the tasks in time would work well). But it is difficult to see the intrinsic value of squeezing academics into rigid career schedules. Career standards make decisions more predictable and they keep workers from changing jobs fast. This comes with enormous costs as academics need to mobilise their resources to make their profiles consonant with the sector’s tacit ideas about the temporal organisation of academic subjectivity. The worldwide expansion of the higher education sector is typically justified by its supposed functions for and contributions to society: the training of new generations of citizens, the production of scientific knowledge, social and economic innovation. Such instrumentalist and productivist discourses are in contradiction with higher education as a system that imposes cultural standards and models of academic subjectification across the whole rather than just to some fields and disciplines. Institutions have no easy response to the problem: If academics are no longer evaluated by their compliance to the academic standard career, other criteria would need to be used in its place: publication intensity, teaching feedback, community engagement? This would raise thorny issues about how to define criteria and apply them to the protean outputs and activities of academics (UK evaluation increasingly goes down the route of putting numbers on all outputs). Alternatively, institutions might want to drop the criteria altogether and to make promotion a more or less automatic process, closer to how professorial promotions are run in France. Slow biographical time would increase and the frenzy of bottleneck decisions would be moved to earlier career points, as in France. What can a solution to the problems with academic mobility look like? Institutions like to operate with standards that can be applied to large academic groups. While standards are to ensure fairness and equality, they can create random exclusions and be blind to the diversity of backgrounds and experiences. Yet not all academic careers converge in one model. International careers (B) and late appointments (A3, B2, B3, C1, C2) may be more open to variation than fast, national careers. We also need to mention the residual group of D professors who do not fall in either of the other groups (Graph 11.1). Representing around 12% of all

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Graph 11.1  The undefined professor (n = 223). (D cluster from previous career typology (Figs. 10.2-10.3))

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professors, D professors are a heterogeneous group and they often resist categorization because they do not fit a model or do not want to put themselves on display. In many cases, they have left areas blank in their CVs and one can surmise these “gaps” are not always relevant from an academic point of view: family needs, a professional activity in the nonacademic sector, long trips, unemployment or simply some time off for themselves. The D group of undefined professors reminds us of the limits of standardising careers in the sector and not least of the limits of a standardising approach such as ours. Professorial careers may be highly structured but they are not entirely determined. In fact, some of the professors-to-be (and many of those who do not make the transition to a professorial position) manage to impose their own pace, playing with statuses, travelling between systems, moving in and out of academia. In a word, they follow different paths, take side roads and sometimes enter new terrains. Academics  do not only  deal with  abstract and theoretical matters but at times they also make practical use of their intelligence and game the academic career machine.

References Laudel, G., & Bielick, J. (2019). How Do Field-Specific Research Practices Affect Mobility Decisions of Early Career Researchers? Research Policy, 48(9), 103800. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2019.05.009 Mau, S., & Huschka, D. (2010). Die Sozialstruktur der Soziologie: Professorenschaft in Deutschland. WZB Discussion Paper, No. SP I 2010-204. WZB.



Appendix A

Table A1  Coding of diplomas Full Official Name

Acronym / Short Name (Optional)

Country

Cycle Level (Optional)

Diplôme d’Agrégation de l’enseignement du second degré Bachelor of Technology Bachelor of Arts (FH) Bachelor of Arts Bachelor of Education Bachelor of Engineering Bachelor of Philosophy Bachelor of Science Brevet de technicien supérieur Certificat d’aptitude au professorat de l’enseignement du second degré Certificat d’aptitude au professorat d’éducation physique et sportive

Agrégation du secondaire

FR

2

BTech BA (FH) BA BEd BEng BPhil BSc BTS

UK DE UK UK UK UK UK FR

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

CAPES

FR

2

CAPEPS

FR

2

Corresponding Diplomas (Optional)

(continued)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Angermuller, P. Blanchard, Careers of the Professoriate, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25241-9

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114 

APPENDIX A

Table A1 (continued) Full Official Name

Acronym / Short Name (Optional)

Country

Cycle Level (Optional)

Corresponding Diplomas (Optional)

Certificat d’aptitude au professorat de l’enseignement technique Certificat d’aptitude au professorat de lycée professionnel Certificate in Education Classe préparatoire aux grandes écoles Diplôme d’études approfondies Diploma in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages Diplôme d’études supérieures spécialisées Diplôme d’études universitaires générales Diplôme d’études universitaires scientifiques et techniques Diplom Diploma of Higher Education Diplôme d’état d’éducateur spécialisé Diplôme d’État d’Éducateur Technique Spécialisé Diplôme d’état d’éducateur de jeunes enfants Diplôme d’état de moniteur éducateur Diplôme de l’École Normale Supérieure Diplôme d’ingénieur

CAPET

FR

2

CAPLP

FR

2

Cert Ed Prepa

UK FR

– 1

–

DEA

FR

2

MA2

Delta

UK

–

–

DESS

FR

2

MA2

DEUG

FR

1

BA1

DEUST

FR

1

BA1

DipHE

DE UK

2 1

DEES

FR

1

DEETS

FR

1

DEEJE

FR

1

DEME

FR

–

DENS

FR

2

Dipl. ing.

FR

2

Diplomingenieur

Dipl.-Ing.

DE

2

Diplôme d’institut d’études politiques

Diplôme d’IEP FR

2

–

Meng | Diplomingenieur Meng | Diplôme d’ingénieur MA (continued)

  APPENDIX A 

Full Official Name

Diplôme de docteur-ingénieur Diplôme de l’EHESS Diplôme universitaire Doctorat Doctorat 3e cycle Doctorat d’État Diplôme d’État de docteur en médecine Diplôme d’État de docteur en chirurgie dentaire Diplôme d’État de docteur en pharmacie Diplôme d’État de sage-femme Diplôme d’État de docteur vétérinaire Doctor of Philosophy Doctor of Philosophy Diplôme universitaire de technologie Habilitation Habilitation à diriger des recherches Licence Master of Laws Master of Education Master of Arts Master of Arts Magister/Magistra Artium Maîtrise universitaire Diplôme national de Master Master of Architecture Master Métiers de l’enseignement, de l’éducation et de la formation

Acronym / Short Name (Optional)

115

Country

Cycle Level (Optional)

Corresponding Diplomas (Optional)

FR

3

PhD

FR FR FR

2 – 3

FR FR FR

3 4 3

MA1 – PhD | Doctorat 3e cycle PhD | Doctorat Habilitation | HDR

FR

3

FR

3

FR

2

FR

3

DPhil Dr. phil. DUT

UK DE FR

3 3 1

PhD PhD –

DE FR

4 4

HDR

HDR

FR UK UK DE UK DE

1 2 2 2 2 2

Bachelor

LLM MEd MA MA M.A.

Master Master Master Master

Maîtrise DNM | Master

FR FR

2 2

MA1 Master

MArch MEEF

UK DE

2 2

Master Master

DU

(continued)

116 

APPENDIX A

Table A1 (continued) Full Official Name

Acronym / Short Name (Optional)

Country

Cycle Level (Optional)

Corresponding Diplomas (Optional)

Master of Business Administration Master of Engineering Master of Fine Arts Master of Philosophy Master of Science Doctorate

MBA

DE| FR | UK UK UK UK UK DE| FR | UK UK

2

Master

2 2 2 2 3 –

Master Master Master Master Doctorat | Doctorat 3e cycle –

DE DE UK

2 2 2

Master Master Master

UK

2

Master

UK

1

Postgraduate Certificate of Education Staatexamen 2 Staatsexamen Postgraduate diploma

Postgraduate Certificate

Graduate Diploma in Law

MEng | ME MFA MPhil MSc PhD PGCE

PGDip | PG Dip | PGD | PgD PGCert | PgCert | PG Cert | PGC | PgC GDL



Appendix B

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Angermuller, P. Blanchard, Careers of the Professoriate, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25241-9

117

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Appendix B

Table B1  Coding of positions Career points

Acronym

Other names (and old names)

English equivalent

Emeritus, Emerita

Directeur d’études

DE

Professeur émérite, Directeur de recherche émérite, Directeur d’études émérite, Professeure émérite, Directrice de recherche émérite, Directrice d’études émérite Directrice d’études, #Directeur d études

Directeur de recherche

DR

Directrice de recherche

Professeur

PR

Professeure, Professeur des universités, Professeure des universités, PR

Professor

Maître de conférences

MCF

Maîtresse de conférences, Maître-assistant, Maïtre-assistante Chargée de recherche Professeur Agrégé

Senior Lecturer None None

Professeur certifié affecté dans l’enseignement supérieur Ingénieure de recherche

None

Chargée de recherche contractuelle

Research Fellow None

Emérite

Chargé de recherche CR PRAG PRAG (Professeur Agrégé) PRCE (Professeur certifié) PRCE Ingénieur de recherche

IR

Chargé de recherche contractuel Ingénieur de recherche contractuel Postdoc ATER (Attaché temporaire ATER d’enseignement et de recherche) Doctorant contractuel

Doctorant CIFRE

Ingénieure de recherche contractuelle

Allocataire d’enseignement et de recherche, Allocataire d’enseignement supérieur Doctorante contractuelle, Allocataire moniteur, Allocataire monitrice, Allocataire moniteur normalien, Allocataire monitrice normalienne, Assistant, Assistante Doctorante CIFRE

Vacataire de recherche Chargée de cours

Assistant de recherche

Assistante de recherche

Professeur invité

Postdoc None

None

None None

Chargé de cours

Ingénieur d’études

None

IGE

Ingénieure d’études

Teaching Assistant Research Assistant None

Professeure invitée, Enseignant invité, Chercheur invité

Guest Professor

(continued)

  Appendix B 

Grade

Roles

Required level of education

Research

Temporary/ permanent position

Position level

Country

Permanent

12

France

DE2, DE1, DE classe exceptionnelle DECE DR2, DR1, DR classe exceptionnelle DRCE PR 2, PR 1, PR classe exceptionnelle CE1, PR classe exceptionnelle CE2 MCF Classe normale CN, MCF Hors classe CR2, CR1 PRAG classe normale, PRAG hors classe None

Research

Habilitation

Permanent

11

France

Research

Habilitation

Permanent

11

France

Teaching, Research

Habilitation

Permanent

11

France

Teaching, Research Research Teaching

PhD + qualification PhD Agrégation

Permanent

10

France

Permanent Permanent

10 9

France France

Teaching

CAPES

Permanent

8

France

IR 2e classe, IR 1re classe, IR hors classe None

Research Assistance Research

PhD

Permanent

8

France

PhD

Temporary

7

France

None

Research Assistance Research Teaching, Research

PhD

Temporary

7

France

PhD End and 1 year after PhD thesis Ongoing PhD thesis

Temporary Temporary

7 4

France France

Temporary

3

France

Ongoing PhD thesis Ongoing PhD thesis Ongoing PhD thesis MA

Temporary

3

France

Temporary

2

France

Temporary

2

France

Temporary

2

France

BA

Permanent

1

France

Temporary

0

France

None None

None

Teaching, Research

None

Research

None

Research

None

Teaching

None

Research Assistance Assistance

IGE 2e classe, IGE 1re classe, IGE hors classe

119

(continued)

120 

Appendix B

Table B1 (continued) Career points

Other names (and old names)

English equivalent

Dozent

Dozentin

Teacher

Emeritus

Emerita

Emeritus

Forschungsprofessor

Forschungsprofessorin

Professor

Universitätsprofessor, Universitätsprofessorin, Professorin Außerplanmäßiger Professor, Außerplanmäßiger Professorin

Research Professor Professor

Apl. Professor

Acronym

Adjunct Professor

Verwaltungsprofessor

Verwaltungsprofessorin, Vertretungsprofessor, Vertretungsprofessorin

Interim professor

Akademischer Oberrat

AOR, AkadOR, Akademische Oberrätin

Reader

Hochschullehrer

Hochschullehrerin

Senior Lecturer

Assistenzprofessor

Assistenzprofessorin

Senior Lecturer

Wissenschaftlicher Oberrat

Wissenschaftliche Oberrätin

Director/ Reader

Privatdozent

Privatdozentin, PD, P.D., Priv.-Doz.

Wissenschaftlicher Oberassistent

Wissenschaftliche Oberassistentin

Independant lecturer Reader

Juniorprofessor

Juniorprofessorin

Juniordozent

Juniordozentin

Akademischer Rat auf Zeit

Akademische Rätin auf Zeit

Akademischer Rat

AkadR, AR, Akademischer Rätin

Senior Lecturer

Hochschulassistent

Hochschuldozent, Juniordozent

Senior Lecturer

Wissenschaftlicher Assistent

Wissenschaftliche Assistentin

Postdoc

Senior Lecturer Senior Lecturer Junior Lecturer

(continued)

  Appendix B 

121

Grade

Roles

Required level of education

Temporary/ permanent position

Position level

Country

None

Teaching

BA

1–5

Germany

Habilitation

7

Germany

W2/W3

Teaching/ Research Research

Permanent, Temporary Permanent

Habilitation

Permanent

6

Germany

Teaching, Research Administration, Teaching, Research Administration, Teaching, Research Administration, Teaching, Research Administration, Teaching, Research Administration, Teaching, Research Administration, Teaching, Research Teaching

Habilitation

Permanent

6

Germany

PhD

Permanent

5

Germany

MA

Temporary

5

Germany

PhD

Permanent

5

Germany

Habilitation

Permanent, Temporary

5

Germany

PhD, Habilitation

Temporary

5

Germany

PhD

Permanent, Temporary

5

Germany

Habilitation

Temporary

5

Germany

Habilitation

Permanent, Temporary

4.6

Germany

PhD

Temporary

4.5

Germany

PhD

Temporary

4.5

Germany

PhD

Temporary

4

Germany

PhD

Permanent, Temporary

3.1

Germany

PhD

Temporary

3.1

Germany

PhD

Temporary

3.1

Germany

W2/W3 A13, BAT IIA, TVL 13 W2

A14

W1/W2

A14

None C2

W1 W1 A 13 / BAT C1

A13

C1

Administration, Teaching, Research Teaching, Research Teaching, Research Administration, Teaching, Research Administration, Teaching, Research Administration, Teaching, Research Administration, Teaching, Research

(continued)

122 

Appendix B

Table B1 (continued) Career points

Acronym

Other names (and old names)

English equivalent

Postdoc Oberstudienrat Studienrat Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter

Nachwuchswissenschaftler Oberstudienrätin Studienrätin Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin

Postdoc Lecturer Lecturer Assistant

Wissenschaftlicher Angestellter

Wissenschaftliche Angestellte

Assistant

Wissenschaftlicher Referent Mitarbeiter

Wissenschaftliche Referentin Mitarbeiterin

Wissenschaftliche Hilfskraft Lehrbeauftragter

Lehrbeauftragterin

Sprachlehrer

Language Instructor

Gastprofessor

Gastprofessorin

Gastwissenschaftler

Gastwissenschaftlerin

Emeritus Professor

Emerita, Emeritus Professor

Lecturer

Research Assistant Teaching Assistant Language Instructor Guest Professor Visiting Scholar

Reader Principal Lecturer Associate Professor Senior Lecturer

University Lecturer

Assistant Professor Lecturer Senior Researcher Assistant Lecturer Senior Research Fellow Senior Teaching Fellow Research Fellow

(continued)

  Appendix B 

Grade

TVL 13 / BAT IIA TVL 13 / BAT IIA TVL 13 / BAT IIA

TVL 13 / BAT IIA

TVL 13

Roles

Required level of education

Temporary/ permanent position

Position level

Country

Research Teaching Teaching Administration, Teaching, Research Administration, Teaching, Research Administration, Research Teaching, Research, Administration Teaching, Research Teaching

PhD MA MA MA

Temporary Permanent Permanent Permanent, Temporary

3 2.2 2.1 2.1

Germany Germany Germany Germany

MA

Permanent, Temporary

2.1

Germany

MA

Permanent, Temporary Permanent, Temporary

2.1

Germany

2.1

Germany

BA

Temporary

2

Germany

BA

Temporary

1

Germany

Permanent, Temporary Temporary

1

Germany

0

Germany

Temporary

0

Germany

PhD

Permanent Permanent

10 9

UK UK

PhD

Permanent

8

UK

MA

Permanent

7

UK

PhD

Permanent

6

UK

MA

Permanent

6

UK

PhD

Permanent

5

UK

MA

Permanent

5

UK

PhD MA

Permanent Permanent

4 4

UK UK

PhD MA

Temporary Temporary

4 4

UK UK

PhD

Temporary

3

BA

Teaching Teaching, Research Research

A, B

123

Research Teaching, Research Teaching, Research Teaching, Research Teaching, Research Teaching, Research Teaching, Research Teaching, Research Research Teaching, Research Research Teaching, Administration Research

UK

(continued)

124 

Appendix B

Table B1 (continued) Career points

Acronym

Other names (and old names)

Teaching Fellow Postdoc Research Associate Research Assistant Sessional Lecturer Teaching Assistant PGTA Language Instructor Visiting Assistant Professor Visiting Professor Visiting Scholar Guest Lecturer Guest Professor

Invited Lecturer

English equivalent

  Appendix B 

Grade

125

Roles

Required level of education

Temporary/ permanent position

Position level

Country

Teaching

MA

3

UK

Research Research Research Assistance Teaching Teaching Teaching Unknown Unknown Unknown Unknown Unknown

PhD BA MA

Temporary, Permanent Temporary Temporary Temporary

2 1 1

UK UK UK

BA BA Unknown Unknown Unknown Unknown Unknown Unknown

Temporary Temporary Temporary Temporary Temporary Temporary Temporary Temporary

1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0

UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK

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Index1

A Academic system, 3, 4, 15, 16, 20–22, 30, 49, 53, 58, 60–63, 67, 68, 95, 99 Akademische/r Rat/Rätin, 31, 54

D Department, 21–24, 26, 27, 29, 30, 38, 40–42, 44, 79, 98 Directeur (d’études/de recherches), 27, 29, 52, 96, 97

B Bottleneck, 31, 60, 69, 79, 96, 108, 109

F First appointment, 9, 32, 76 Foreign/international, 15, 20, 25, 33, 41, 42, 48, 63–65, 67, 68, 71, 73, 75, 79, 95–98, 101, 104, 109 France/French, 3, 4, 9, 12, 15, 17, 19–33, 38–43, 45, 48, 49, 52–54, 58–60, 62, 64, 65, 67–69, 71, 79, 81, 82, 87–89, 93–99, 101, 105, 106, 109

C (Career) speed, 58, 64, 66, 69–71, 74, 81, 82, 100 Chargé de recherches, 98 Clustering, 88, 89 Cohorts, 59, 62, 69, 71 CV(s), 4, 5, 8, 12, 47, 49, 52–54, 68, 88n1, 108, 109, 111

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Angermuller, P. Blanchard, Careers of the Professoriate, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25241-9

135

136 

INDEX

G Gender, 49, 59, 60, 65, 68, 71, 76–78, 98, 105 Germany/German, 3, 4, 9, 11, 12, 16, 19–33, 38, 40–45, 48, 49, 52–54, 58–60, 62, 64, 67–69, 71, 75, 79, 81, 82, 87–89, 93–99, 101, 104–106, 108 H Habilitation, 11, 30, 31, 86–88, 93–95, 98 Hierarchy, 8, 13, 14, 22, 25, 26, 29, 33, 53, 63, 95, 104, 106 L Lecturer, 4, 24, 53, 60, 96 Linguistic(s), 2, 4, 20, 21, 37–46, 52, 62, 75, 76, 87, 93, 94, 96–98, 104, 105 M Maître de conférences (MCF), 17, 26–28, 79, 87, 89, 94, 95, 97–99 Market, 9, 12–15, 22, 25, 40, 62, 65, 67, 69, 71, 75, 83, 95, 96, 101, 106–108 Mobility, 2, 3, 7, 15, 16, 20, 48, 49, 52, 55, 59, 63–68, 73–83, 86, 88, 98–100, 106, 107, 109 N Nationality, 53 P Pathways, 4, 48, 49, 55, 85–101

Permanent/fixed-term/part-time contract(s), 4, 9–12, 16, 24, 30–32, 49, 53, 54, 60, 64, 67–69, 75, 76, 79, 88, 93–99, 103–105 PhD, 7, 9, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22, 25, 30, 33, 47–49, 52, 53, 57–71, 73–76, 81, 82, 86–89, 88n1, 93–99, 104, 106 PhD graduation, 58, 65, 67, 71, 86 Professor, 1–4, 8–14, 16, 19–33, 40–42, 47–49, 52–55, 57–71, 74–79, 81, 83, 87–89, 88n1, 93–101, 104–111 Promotion, 4, 9, 14, 23, 24, 27, 28, 48, 55, 60, 65, 67, 69, 79, 100, 108, 109 Q Qualification(s)/diploma(s)/ degree(s), 4, 7, 9, 12, 16, 21–23, 27, 29, 31, 38, 41, 42, 47, 49, 53, 58, 65, 86–89, 93–96, 98, 99, 103, 105 R Reader, 4, 24, 26, 49, 87, 94 Regression, 55, 58, 59, 61, 66, 70, 74, 76, 81 Reputation, 8, 9, 12, 13, 16, 27, 32, 38, 47, 106 Retirement, 9, 28, 49, 54, 67, 74, 81, 87 S Salary, 13, 21, 22, 24, 26, 28, 32, 45, 48, 53, 64, 68, 75, 87, 88, 100, 101

 INDEX 

Secondary education, 98 Senior Lecturer, 24, 26, 87, 89 Sequence analysis, 5, 55, 86 Sociology/sociological, 2–4, 7, 14, 20, 37–46, 52, 62, 69, 71, 75, 76, 87, 93–96, 98, 104–106, 108 State, 22, 26, 32, 33, 39, 45, 86–89, 93 Status, 3, 4, 9, 12–16, 20, 22, 25–30, 32, 48, 49, 53, 54, 60, 63, 64, 68, 73–83, 85, 89–91, 99, 100, 104–106, 111 Student(s), 2, 3, 21, 23, 25, 28–31, 40–42, 52, 58, 62, 63, 76,

137

81–83, 89, 96, 98, 104, 105, 108, 109 U UK/British, 3, 4, 9, 12, 13, 19–33, 38, 40–43, 45, 48, 49, 52–54, 58–60, 64, 67, 68, 71, 75, 79, 87, 89, 93, 95–99, 101, 106, 107, 109 W Wissenschaftliche/r Mitarbeiter/In, 31, 53, 54, 68, 82, 93, 105