Page 19 - Through the gate of the neoliberal academy • Herschberg

GENERAL INTRODUCTION 17
can steer committee decisions, depending, for example, on the power networks to which committee members belong (Bozionelos, 2005). In contrast to grant review panel members who are not expected to be motivated by the achievement of personal goals (Van Arensbergen et al., 2014b), hiring committee members have something to gain from committee decisions as one candidate (or a small number of candidates) should be selected out of a pool of applicants, to become a member of their department or institution. Because academic hiring committees have the task to select their future colleague(s) whom they might cooperate with, they are more prone to being proself-motivated (Van Arensbergen et al., 2014b). As such, collective hiring processes involve power games in which various committee members possibly advance their own interests (Bozionelos, 2005).
Recruitment and selection in and of itself are practices designed to exclude people. Such exclusion should be based on individual merit. Yet, in these collective, power laden processes of recruitment and selection, inequalities can come to the fore that are based on categories of social differences. Recruitment and selection practices in academia are conflated with biases, nepotism and stereotypical beliefs, even though they are allegedly meritocratic (Nielsen, 2016; O’Connor & O’Hagan, 2015; Rivera, 2017; Van den Brink & Benschop, 2012b). As a result, the best qualified candidates do not always get selected and they can be rejected on unfair grounds (Bozionelos, 2005). As a result, talent might get lost. Previous research has shown that the way selection decisions in academia are organised can allow for emergent in addition to predefined selection criteria (Lasén, 2013), leaving latitude for the decision makers to base selection decisions on implicit assumptions, for example about gender (Van den Brink & Benschop, 2012b). In my dissertation I examine how committee members create inequalities and conduct power play in the collective processes of recruitment and selection for early-career academic positions.
1.2. Research context and design
This doctoral dissertation has been conducted against the backdrop of the EU FP7 project GARCIA: Gendering the Academy and Research: combating Career Instability and Asymmetries:
GARCIA is concerned with the implementation of actions in European Universities and research centres to promote a gender culture and combat gender stereotypes and discriminations. By taking into account the organisations, but also their broader national context, this project aims to develop and maintain
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