Page 75 - Through the gate of the neoliberal academy • Herschberg
P. 75

SELECTING EARLY-CAREER RESEARCHERS 73
from the process, as some committee members perceive risks in hiring foreign applicants, anticipating communication problems and bad teaching evaluations. Thirdly, this study finds inequalities regarding mobility opportunities that derive from a tension between the selection criterion of international work experience and a person’s opportunity to acquire such experience. Policies and most committee members, particularly in the Natural Sciences department, portray international mobility as necessary for an academic career. The requirement of international work experience demands mobility across country borders of early-career researchers (Richardson, 2009), which assumes that researchers are able to travel. This means that the requirement of international work experience can be exclusionary to early- career researchers who face restrictions to their international mobility, for example due to physical, psychological, social, or financial reasons (Richardson & Zikic, 2007;
Sang, 2017).
The fourth inequality concerns unworkable excellence, stemming from
a tension between the university’s strive for excellence and committee members’ infeasibility of assessing excellence. Some committee members do not believe it is either possible or desirable to hire (just) excellent staff members. This study shows that the criterion of excellence becomes problematic in application, as excellence is subjective, as well as difficult to evaluate for young scholars, since committee members can only assess their potential instead of proven qualities. Not only is excellence a socially constructed criterion that disadvantages women and privileges men researchers (O’Connor & O’Hagan, 2015; Van den Brink & Benschop, 2012b), in the evaluation of potential, women are attributed lower potential than men (Van den Brink et al., 2016). Therefore, the application of excellence criteria can create inequalities related to gender and possibly other social categories too.
The second contribution of this chapter concerns disciplinary differences. The analysis has revealed the extent to which department policies and committee members are affected by macro-discourses. This study finds that in the Natural Sciences department, formal selection criteria regarding internationalisation are most aligned with university-level policies, and committee members here consent explicitly to formal selection criteria reinforcing the discourse of internationalisation. In the Social Sciences department, the macro-discourse of internationalisation and the university’s internationalisation policy have not (yet) shaped formal selection criteria. Following Richardson (2009), the amount of international experience that is required depends on the discipline, with more experience expected in the Natural Sciences than the Social Sciences. The results show that most committee members in the Social Sciences tend to consent with departmental selection criteria and,
 3




























































































   73   74   75   76   77