Page 177 - Through the gate of the neoliberal academy • Herschberg

of this approach for uncovering how practitioners practice in real time situations, the “qualities of practice – directionality, temporality, rapidity – [...] complicate the study of practicing” (Martin, 2003, p. 351). Practicing is “hard to observe” and “hard to capture in language” (Martin, 2003, p. 344). In my studies, I do not claim I have recognized all gendering practices in my data; some of them may have gone unnoticed. Gendering practices in recruitment and selection tend to be subtle and connected to multiple (non-)inequality-producing practices (Janssens & Steyaert, 2018).
Moreover, I am also part of the unequal social order of an organisation and therefore practice inequality myself as well. Also, doing research in my own organisation poses the risk of “becoming blind” to certain phenomena because I am part of the daily activities, which might prevent me from reflecting on what is happening (Skrutkowski, 2014, p. 114). What possibly limited the risk of blindness to inequality practices in recruitment and selection is that I have not been part of the activities myself (not before nor during the research) and I did not include my own research group in my studies.
For studying practicing, observational methods (possibly complemented by archival data and interviews) are generally considered the most appropriate method (Janssens & Steyaert, 2018; Poggio, 2006). Doing observations, however, requires specific attention to the role of the observer. In my observation study I strove to be as unobtrusive as possible, but my presence during the hiring processes could have unintentionally affected the behaviour of committee members (McKechnie, 2008). In some cases, a committee member made a comment about my presence, mostly that they were aware at some point during the procedure that I was there. In one case, committee members contacted me after the committee deliberations had ended about something that had happened in the procedure. At all times I have tried to keep a distance from the process and decisions while at the same time developing committee members’ trust in my reliability (Jeanes & Huzzard, 2014).
Future research
In this section, I will offer three potential avenues for future research.
First, in this dissertation I focus on single categories of social differences, such as gender, and did not study intersecting categories (e.g., gender and sexuality). I did find some examples, in which intersecting categories became salient, for example a woman candidate who was negatively evaluated because of her age. Also, I show how nationality could play a role in the evaluation of early-career researchers (ECRs) but not how this might possibly intersect with other social categories.
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