Page 36 - Through the gate of the neoliberal academy • Herschberg

34 CHAPTER 2
serious implications for the quality and type of research produced.
Our findings are based on a qualitative multiple-case study on recruitment and selection procedures and criteria in Natural Sciences (STEM) and Social Sciences (SSH) departments of universities in Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. This comparative study enables us to examine variations in the recruitment and selection of postdocs as well as the type of researchers that are preferred for such positions across national contexts. Furthermore, our critical analysis reveals three manifestations of precarity that the current academic system creates for postdocs,
related to control, contracts, and careers.
Next we will explore in more detail the changing institutional context
of higher education and the rise of postdocs. Thereafter we will elaborate on the construction of the ideal academic and the recruitment and selection of academics. We then describe our qualitative methodology, including the data collection and the analysis. Then will turn to the empirical analysis of our data. At the end of the chapter we will discuss our findings.
2.2 The rise of postdocs
Neoliberalisation has affected labour markets and employment relationships, resulting amongst others in “a decline in attachment to employers, an increase in long- term unemployment, growth in perceived and real job insecurity, [and] increasing nonstandard and contingent work” (Arnold & Bongiovi, 2013, p. 290). Low-skilled workers used to be most affected by contingent employment (Nollen, 1996), but precarious employment now also affects highly skilled workers (Armano & Murgia, 2013), such as academics. Precarious employment in academia most strongly affects early-career researchers (Wöhrer, 2014) among which postdocs.
Postdoc positions typically come into existence by externally funded research grants that finance fixed-term research projects (Ackers & Oliver, 2007), ranging from a few months up to a couple of years. These projects are either funded through someone else’s (usually a more senior researcher’s) grant or through personal postdoctoral fellowships (Åkerlind, 2005). Such projects usually give both money and prestige to the grant recipient (Ylijoki, 2016). In Western countries, this ‘projectification’ of academia caused a sharp increase in the number of postdocs, working on project-based research, over the past decades (Åkerlind, 2005; Rathenau Instituut, 2016; Ylijoki, 2016). Figures show that in 2010 in 23 countries in Europe the number of academics working in “the first post into which a newly qualified PhD