Page 74 - Through the gate of the neoliberal academy • Herschberg

72 CHAPTER 3
2010; Nielsen, 2016; Van den Brink & Benschop, 2012) by showing that committee members do not operate in a vacuum and that their actions are inseparably linked to the meso- and macro-context. The present study uncovered the dynamic interaction between macro-discourses, formal organisational policies and the actual practice of committee members in staff evaluation. Furthermore, because of the multi-level analysis, this study could show the complexities and tensions inherent in the selection of early-career researchers and the inequalities that arise in the application of criteria.
Three theoretical lessons can be drawn from the multi-level analysis contributing to the literature on academic staff evaluation. The first contribution is the identification of four inequalities that emerge in the application of criteria, where broad discourses materialise in specific criteria. The first inequality is related to (non-) valued international experience. The criterion of international work experience at university level is translated in the Natural Sciences department into obtaining one or multiple postdoc positions abroad. The formal criterion implies that international experience in general is required, but some committee members narrowed this criterion by constructing only a small selection of countries and institutions as relevant and valuable international experience. The findings corroborate Altbach (2004), who found that mainly major international English-speaking research- oriented universities in the North are valued. This excludes candidates who acquired postdoc experience in countries or institutions that are non-valued, without standing a chance of being assessed on their quality as researchers and teachers.
The second inequality concerns language (dis)advantage, resulting from the tension between university’s internationalisation policies and the application of those policies by committee members. The results show that mastering the academic lingua franca English is a formal criterion in policies, which is taken for granted by committee members. This study found that committee members in the Social Sciences department make inferences about applicants’ level of English, which can put applicants of certain nationalities at more of a disadvantage than others (Tietze & Dick, 2009). In addition, applicants’ level of Dutch is also at stake, as foreign assistant professors have to invest in learning Dutch, because of their duties in the teaching programme. This is in accordance with Nordic higher education, in which language policy prescribes adoption of “parallel language use”: the parallel use of several languages in the work of university staff (Airey et al., 2017, p. 568). Yet, it requires tenure- track assistant professors to strongly invest in learning the local language without the guarantee that they will get tenure. On the long-run, this creates an extensive period of precarity for early-career researchers. During recruitment and selection procedures, the language requirements can result in the exclusion of foreign applicants