Page 84 - Through the gate of the neoliberal academy • Herschberg

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defined and interpreted in a certain context (Dick & Nadin, 2006). The framework of gender practices will help to uncover gatekeepers’ gendered constructions of selection criteria in the recruitment and selection practices for non-tenured assistant professor positions.
4.4 Methods
Data
The research for this chapter is based on a qualitative study conducted in six higher education institutions involved in the GARCIA project. The national research reports written by the six research teams that comprise the primary data we used for our analysis are part of a larger data set collected during the course of the GARCIA project. Each research team wrote a research report that centred on formal and applied criteria in the recruitment and selection of early-career researchers for academic positions (Herschberg et al., 2015) and a report that centred on gender practices in the recruitment and selection of early-career researchers (Herschberg et al., 2016). Our analysis is mostly based on the research reports that focus on gender practices in recruitment and selection. In addition, every research team made summaries in English of all interviews and focus groups they had conducted. These summaries were written to provide the authors with primary data to strengthen the analysis.
The national research reports are based on various data sources. All data – that are comparable across institutions in the six countries – have been collected in one SSH and one STEM department per institution. Previous studies have shown how SSH and STEM subfields vary considerably with regard to the gender compositions of students and staff, career patterns, recruitment and selection practices (Van den Brink, 2010) as well as gender practices (Van den Brink & Benschop, 2012a). The data consisted of documents such as university policy documents, HR documents, job postings, and appointment reports, published in the period 2010 – 2014. All six research teams collected these documents, dependent on the availability in their institution. Furthermore, in 2014 every research team conducted semi-structured interviews and focus groups with selection committee members (hereafter: committee members). The interview and focus group participants were selected because they had taken part in a hiring committee that was involved in the recruitment and selection of at least one temporary (tenure-track) assistant professor in the period 2010 – 2014. To ensure comparability, every team used the same interview guide for the interviews. Interviews were based on three themes: selection criteria for assistant