This dissertation investigates how key institutional actors work to influence the implementation of policies that aim to make early academic careers more secure, and how this shapes academic career structures in practice.
Various governments throughout Europe currently endeavor to make early academic careers more secure for researchers, because attractive academic careers are critical for the growth and maintenance of productive research sectors. However, policies to make early academic careers more secure have faced challenges upon implementation.
This dissertation examines two of these cases in which policies to make early academic careers more secure experience implementation challenges. Specifically, it investigates recent changes made to the Berlin Higher Education Act that will give qualified academics a pathway into permanent positions, in addition to the implementation of tenure-track postdoctoral positions in Norway.
Using institutional work theory, this dissertation aims to understand the role of various actors in these policy implementation processes, and how their institutional work shapes the early academic career structure. Through this comparative policy implementation analysis, this project will illuminate some of the commonalities behind the institutionalization of academic career structures in different national contexts, which in turn can contribute to a better understanding of how to implement policies to make academic career structures more secure.
Supervisor: Tone Alm Andreassen
Methods
This dissertation will accomplish its aims over the course of three research articles, which will utilize a combination of semi-structured interviews and document analysis as data. The first two articles will examine the Norwegian and German case studies. These articles will examine each policy’s formation, development and implementation through an institutional work lens. They will also contribute to theory by examining the relationship between actors’ agency and intentionality.
The final article will compare the German and Norwegian cases in order to illuminate trends in how different types of actors work to influence the early academic career structure. It will use a critical lens to examine the role of power in determining the consequences of different types of actors’ institutional work, particularly when the work of different actors conflicts.
Through these three articles, this dissertation will ultimately contribute to literature on academic career structures, policy implementation and institutional work.