The research cluster Academic Career Dynamics and Professorial Recruitment links different DZHW projects and departments. It aims to facilitate knowledge transfer between research projects within and outside DZHW in order to identify gaps in research and collaboration opportunities in this field.
Two working groups form the research cluster. One focuses on the dynamic development of academic careers from doctorate to professorship, examining the nexus of structure and agency. The second group focuses on recruitment of professors and its impact on strengthening universities’ profiles and their ability to renew themselves.
Working group: dynamic development of academic careers from doctorate to professorship examining the nexus between structure and agency
In researching academic careers, observation usually centres on researchers as agents of their own behaviour. However, research literature is increasingly sceptical of treating career decisions as intentional behaviour. Instead, the literature advocates linking agent-based, organisation-based and structure-based approaches to career analysis. Which theoretical approach can be applied to explain the academic career dynamics that emerge from the relationship between structure and agency? What methodological implications can be derived from this? What do these implications mean for (re)considering and (re)interpreting existing data?
Contact: Antje Wegner
Working group: Professorial Recruitment
Recruiting professors is one of the most important decisions at universities due to its structural influence. On the discipline level, the denomination and resource allocation to the professorship define the content. In the temporal dimension, a new appointment has a long-term, sustainable impact on a university’s teaching and research, since professors are lifetime civil servants. In the social dimension, a new professorship selection decisively influences which new contacts are brought into the university and what type of behaviour can be expected in the context of colleagues and university self-government. Against this background the working group examines how professorial appointment procedures are shaped today and what structural effects they exert on the universities.
Contact: Bernd Kleimann and Torger Möller
