Abstract
Despite limited opportunities for tenured academic positions, the number of PhD graduates in Social Sciences has steadily risen in countries with developed research systems. The current ...literature predominantly portrays PhD graduates as victims, either of the higher education system or of their own optimism in pursuing an academic career. This paper takes an alternative stance by spotlighting the agency exhibited by PhD graduates in Social Sciences as they deftly navigate their career pathways amid the constrained academic job market. Specifically, we adopt an ecological perspective of agency to explore how PhD graduates in Social Sciences exercise their agency in navigating their career from the beginning of their PhD candidature until up to 5 years after graduation. We employ a narrative approach to delve into the employment journeys of twenty-three PhD graduates. Within this cohort, we select to report four participants from four Australian universities, each possessing distinct career trajectories. Our analysis highlights agency as the link between various personal and institutional factors that shape our participants’ career trajectories. Based on this finding, we offer recommendations for practice and policy changes that appreciate PhD graduates’ agency.
Abstract
This paper employs the notion of a “career script” as a conceptual basis to examine how age-based academic career norms are internalized, strategized, and reproduced among PhD students ...aspiring to become academics. It draws on interviews with 70 PhD students at leading universities in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau that were organized and explored using narrative inquiry. The findings suggest that the tournament-like, age-based career scripts are primarily shaped by institutional policies on recruitment and funding applications and reinforced through social interactions. Doctoral students internalize the established criteria for success defined by the career scripts and stigmatize those who lag behind in the attainment of institutionally predetermined milestones, thus discouraging any attempt to rescript career norms. While enacting successful career scripts, students experience age and temporal anxiety at a fairly young age, exacerbating ageism in the academic labor market.
Much of the scholarship on employment and career pathways of PhD graduates has examined the issues, including pre‐doctoral experiences, quality of doctoral education, networking and career choices ...across different sectors; however, contextual environmental factors have been generally overlooked. This study aims to explore the academic career choices and pathways of PhD graduates currently employed in universities in the Greater Bay Area (GBA) in China. The primary data sources include semi‐structured interviews with a group of 28 PhD graduates from 14 universities in Guangdong province and Hong Kong, government talent policy documents, and university documents regarding recruitment and tenure. The findings of this study revealed five strategic logics that the PhD graduates deployed in the dynamic decision‐making process for academic career choices and pathways in the GBA: (1) logic of academic alignment (matching degrees between academic competitiveness and academic job market, alignment in research/teaching agenda, alignment with future professional aspiration); (2) logic of financial concerns; (3) logic of academic network; (4) logic of risk mitigation; (5) logic of institutional culture. Implications for universities and policymakers on academic career support and talent management in the GBA are also provided.
This study aims to identify the relationship between social anxiety (SA) and internet addiction (IA) in a group of Chinese college students by controlling for the effects of physical exercise (PE), ...demographic, and academic variables. A sample of 4,677 students from five major regions of China participated in this survey. The findings revealed that: (1) SA had a direct effect on IA; (2) regular and active participation in physical exercise can relieve SA and IA effectively; (3) the level of SA and IA is strongly linked to sex; (4) the levels of SA and IA are different among students of different majors; (5) students in the middle phase of their academic career are more likely to have IA than those in the starting phase. The study is significant because few existing studies discuss the role of PE on SA and IA. Additionally, the study found that college students with more PE would have a lower level of SA and a lower probability of IA.
The famous Chinese scientist Professor Zeyuan Liu passed away on February 8, 2020, aged 80. He was a productive and influential scientist, both in quantitative and in qualitative studies. To cherish ...the memory of Professor Liu and in praise of his scientific thoughts and scientific spirit, we explored his academic career rhythm based on our rhythm indicator of science. The rhythm indicator is created based on a publication-citation matrix, eliminating the impact of length of citation windows, making citations comparable for different years. In Liu’s rhythm study the publication indicator and citation indicator are combined. Data were retrieved from China National Knowledge Infrastructure and WoS. The most important finding is that Liu’s academic career rhythm is totally different from that of two famous western scientists T. Braun and R. Rousseau. Because of the delayed scientific research by China’s Cultural Revolution, it was only in 1979 that Liu published his first scientific paper and launched his academic career. In the first 20 years he published 41 papers, mostly single-authored. Their research topics were scattered and mainly used qualitative methods. In 1999 Liu changed his research paradigm from qualitative to quantitative studies, focusing on scientometrics, citation analysis and knowledge mapping. New topics, new methods and multi-authored collaboration greatly increased his productivity (293 articles) and influence. The above exploration is based on both whole counting of publications/citations and fractional counting. Three problems, including the normalization of the
p
–
c
matrix, are discussed. The rhythm indicator of science is a contribution to the evaluation methodology for scientist-level and journal-level scientific impact.
In the article “Women’s Academic Careers – Entanglements and Inspirations”, I write about the significant problem of the specificity of female careers related to gender and its stereotypical ...perception. The purpose of the research was to analyse the individual stages of women’s academic careers in the academic field of pedagogy (humanities and social sciences) in 2013–2019, based on the latest research reports (E. Kulczycki Report and the ‘Science in Poland’Report). The study uses data about pedagogy as a feminized discipline, in which the majority of academic staff are female. The main research question was: How do the individual stages of women’s academic careers in social sciences (especially pedagogy) progress, and what factors determine them? The research method used in this study was what is often referred to in colloquial language as “desk research”, i.e. reviewing and analysing scientific literature, analysing data sources, compiling them and mutual verification. The interpretative background of this research was an analysis of the mechanisms of gender inequalities at universities (related to the mechanisms of the labour market).
This study is grounded on the idea that women academics could be experiencing significant challenges and injustices in the gender-blind, market-driven, and performative culture of the neoliberal ...academe. The study particularly explores the perceptions of Turkish academic women regarding their career experiences, and evaluates these perceptions in respect to their subjective well-being. The data was gathered through in-depth interviews with twenty-eight women academics from Turkish state universities. The analysis revealed that academic women who managed to achieve academic status and esteem seemed to have paid the price in their private lives and given in a lot in regard to their well-being. Implications were made to improve work conditions in the academe so that women do not have to pay such a penalty to make a successful academic career.
Doctorate level attainment has increased significantly in developed economies. In 2019, the average share of 25–64-year-olds with a doctorate across the OECD was around 1%. However, if current trends ...continue, 2.3% of today’s young adults will enter doctoral studies at some point in their life. This essay starts by describing the expansion of doctoral education. It then reflects on the causes of this growth and the consequences for the nature and purpose of the doctorate. This reflection is mostly based on published research in
Higher Education
in the last 50 years and the author’s work on policy analysis for the OECD on this topic. The paper finishes with a research agenda on doctoral education and the career of doctorate holders.
•We conceptualize and measure two forms of gendered knowledge in research language: gender referents (explicit references to sex and gender) and gender-associated terms (words that are implicitly ...associated with women or men researchers).•We analyze gendered knowledge in nearly one million dissertations published in U.S. institutions (1980–2010) with natural language processing techniques.•We find explicit references to women and females in dissertations increase chances of becoming a faculty advisor.•In contrast, doing research traditionally associated with women reduces chances of becoming a faculty advisor.•Our study implies implicit gender bias in the evaluation of research while modest progress in the valuation of research explicitly studying women and females.
Women and men often contribute differently to research knowledge. Do differences in these contributions partially explain disparities in academic career outcomes? We explore this by looking at how gender is embodied in research language, and then ascertain whether the adoption of more gendered research language affects career outcomes beyond the researcher's attributes. We identify different forms of gendered knowledge—gender referents (explicit references to sex and gender) and gender-associated terms (words that are implicitly associated with women or men researchers)—by applying natural language processing techniques to nearly one million doctoral dissertations published in the United States between 1980 and 2010. We then determine whether employing gender referents and gender-associated terms affects the course of PhDs’ ensuing careers. We find women researchers have lower chances of securing academic positions than men in every field; explicit references to women as research subjects are modestly rewarded in comparison to references to men; and more career opportunities are afforded to research knowledge associated with men. These results suggest that academia is slowly correcting the traditional and explicit bias of studying men at the exclusion of women. Still, there remains a stronger implicit bias against knowledge associated with women scholars. We discuss relative differences between humanities and social sciences versus natural sciences, technology, engineering, and math, as well as potential treatments for offsetting bias in those fields.
This interview with Dr. Joan V. Gallos, 2023 recipient of the David L. Bradford Outstanding Educator Award from the Management and Organizational Behavior Teaching Society (MOBTS), explores the four ...components of what Gallos considers the “soul of teaching”—insights she wished she had understood when she began her teaching career more than 50 years ago. Her four insights advise educators to: (1) work with what they’ve got—and own it!, (2) fail in the right way (think progress, not perfection), (3) dive into the magic at the heart of teaching and learning, and (4) relax and take your time: becoming the best educator you can be is a journey of never arriving. The interview is presented to encourage others to both find the soul of their teaching and guide their individual and collective discovery of the connection, authenticity, and magic at the heart of all teaching and learning.
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