Page 41 - Through the gate of the neoliberal academy • Herschberg

2010 – 2014. The research reports written by the four research teams consisted of a total of 67 interviews.
For this chapter we used a subsample of 21 interviews with 11 men and 10 women principal investigators who took part in the recruitment and selection of postdocs. As the focus of this study is on the hiring of postdocs we did not include interviews with respondents who had solely been on committees involved in the hiring of assistant professors. Respondents held associate professor, full professor or senior lecturer positions. Their names were retrieved from appointment reports and job postings (if available) and with help from university administrators. Principal investigators that were interviewed had acquired external research funding mainly from national and international research funding institutions. In some cases, respondents had applied for (and received) project funding in a team of researchers. The number of interviews used in this chapter is equally divided over the participating countries and departments. To ensure comparability, every team used the same interview guide for the interviews, which consisted of three themes: selection criteria for postdocs, a selection process in which the respondent had taken part, and departments’ policies regarding recruitment and selection of early-career researchers. The majority of the interviews were conducted in the local languages of the various research teams and some interviews were conducted in English. Each interview lasted between one and two hours. Interviews were recorded with respondents’ permission and transcribed verbatim in order for the research teams to analyse the transcripts in depth and write the research reports.
Because most interviews were conducted in the local languages of the research teams, we could not draw on the original interview transcripts. Instead, every research team (except the team of which the authors are part) made summaries in English of all interviews they had conducted. These summaries were written to provide the authors with primary data to strengthen the analysis. We had prepared guidelines for the research teams on what to include in the summaries for consistency across countries. The summaries consisted of four themes: information about the respondent (sex, department), selection criteria considered important, organisation of the selection process, and gender policies in recruitment and selection. Finally, the research teams provided quotes they thought reflected the interview responses best. These quotes were in addition to the quotes provided in the research reports.
Data analysis
We conducted a qualitative conventional content analysis (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005). We first open coded the materials and focused on the excerpts involving
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