Page 57 - Through the gate of the neoliberal academy • Herschberg
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SELECTING EARLY-CAREER RESEARCHERS 55
(Slaughter & Leslie, 1997), international mobility is more and more perceived as a crucial element of an academic career (Jepsen et al., 2014). Additionally, excellence seems to increase in importance as a criterion in staff selection decisions, gauged as a neutral and objective, merit-based measurement of productivity (Van den Brink & Benschop, 2012b).
The aim of this study is to examine how macro-discourses of inter- nationalisation and excellence shape formal and applied selection criteria for early- career researcher positions at the meso-organisational and micro-individual levels, demonstrating how tensions between the various levels produce inequalities in staff evaluation. The research question is how are academic selection criteria constructed at the meso- and micro-level in the context of macro-discourses of internationalisation and excellence? In this study, the focus is on selection criteria for early-career researchers, as in this phase, it is decided who are included or excluded from academic careers. The findings show that this is a particularly challenging task for evaluators, as the assessment of early-career researchers, and tenure-track assistant professors in particular, is based on potential, instead of the long track record of performance of senior researchers. The findings are based on two case studies of a Natural Sciences (STEM) and a Social Sciences (SSH) department of a university in the Netherlands. A qualitative content analysis was conducted, analysing university policies, recruitment and staff protocols, job postings and interviews and focus groups with selection committee members. The multi-level analysis has shown tensions between the articulations of the discourses of internationalisation and excellence at multiple levels and has identified four inequalities that are produced in the application of selection criteria.
3.2 Evaluating academic staff in the neoliberal university
Since mid-1980, Western higher education institutions have become subject to the growing role of market forces and commercial values (Washburn, 2005), resulting in the corporatisation and neoliberalisation of academia (Gill, 2009; Olssen & Peters, 2005). This transition has been fuelled by the growing hesitance of Western governments to spend public money on public services (De Boer, Enders, & Leisyte, 2007), which has led to decreasing direct investments in higher education among other effects. Furthermore, higher-education institutions are increasingly evaluated on their output, such as number and quality of publications and number of graduated students (De Boer et al., 2007; Teelken, 2012), which creates pressure to continuously
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