Page 50 - Through the gate of the neoliberal academy • Herschberg

48 CHAPTER 2
2.7 Discussion and conclusion
This study aimed at providing a better understanding of the recruitment and selection of precarious postdocs in the context of the neoliberalisation and projectification of academia.
The first contribution of this chapter is to the literature on academic staff evaluation in the neoliberal university, extending to the recruitment and selection of postdocs instead of senior academics (e.g., Nielsen, 2015; Van den Brink & Benschop, 2012b). Postdocs are a unique and understudied group, because they are hired for fixed-term projects rather than on more stable, senior academic positions. This study shows how recruitment for project-based temporary academic positions is organised in a hasty and informal manner and how selection criteria for postdoc positions are shaped in Natural Sciences (STEM) and Social Sciences (SSH) departments of universities in four European countries. We show that the ideal postdoc differs from the ideal academic, as the ideal postdoc is very much shaped by the need for a candidate who can successfully execute and complete a short-term project. Although academic fields vary in their core activities, financial resources, career patterns, epistemological issues and publishing strategies (Becher & Trowler, 2001), we found little variation between disciplines and countries in the construction of the ideal postdoc. This shows dominant patterns in the contemporary international academic system on the way postdocs are perceived and the role they (should) play in the academy. An explanation for the similarities across disciplines might be because “disciplinary differences have become increasingly blurred” (p. 8) as a result of the projectification in universities (Ylijoki, 2016).
Our second contribution to the literature consists of the identification of three manifestations of precarity and their effects for postdocs and the scientific landscape. For analytical purposes, we will disentangle three manifestations of precarity, but stress that this is an analytical distinction as in practice there is some overlap.
The first manifestation of precarity we distil from our findings relates to the control over projects. Our analysis shows that the academic system allows PIs exclusive control over recruitment and selection processes as project funding is considered their property. The lack of transparency and accountability in postdoc recruitment and selection raises questions about the fairness of these hiring practices as often no open competition is enabled. Because of the lack of interference from others, most of the postdoc hiring happens informally, with a strong reliance on network connections. Network-based recruitment is used for most academic appointments (e.g., Nielsen, 2015; Van den Brink & Benschop, 2014), but not to the same extent as