Towards a European Academic Labour Market? Some Lessons Drawn from Empirical Studies on Academic Mobility

In Europe, academic mobility has a long tradition which began with the birth of the European universities in the middle ages. Recently, European policies were strongly oriented towards the promotion of student and academic mobility and the creation of research networks and projects within Europe. Nevertheless, academic labour markets in Europe remain highly national and many obstacles hinder the development of European careers and the europeanisation/internationalisation of academic recruitments. Two different perspectives will be developed in this paper. First we will document the strong divergences among the national recruitment and careers processes within Europe and the problems raised by this situation. Second, we will draw on two empirical studies we conducted on academic mobility, the first one, led in 1995 in France, Germany and the UK and the second this year in France. Both studies show that most post-docs conceived their foreign experience as a personal strategy and aimed at improving their chances for recruitment in their own country. Within Europe, foreign country careers still are an exception due to accidental opportunities.     

Diversity around the Profile of the `Good' Candidate within French and German Universities

Diversity may occur amonginstitutions that are considered to be similar.This is one of the arguments developed in thispaper through the empirical analysis of facultyrecruitments in history and mathematics withinGerman and French universities. This studyshows that the definition of what constitutes a`good candidate' varies greatly from onedepartment to another and affects the criteriato be taken into account and their respectiveweight in the decision. These variations are tobe explained by the internal dynamics of theparticular national academic labour market, thespecific situation of the department and alsoby its development strategy.     

The steering of higher education systems: a public management perspective

This article focuses on the steering of higher education systems in the light of political science and public management approaches. It first recalls that an important part of the existing literature on higher education is focused on public policies in terms of reforms and decision-making, while the other part is dedicated to discovering and understanding the policy network or the policy regimes producing these policies. Both perspectives tend to look at higher education as a specific field. By contrast, the authors state that the transformations experienced in higher education are similar to those experienced by other key public services, an can be understood as a redefinition of the role of the nation state in the public generally. They therefore suggest to look at the steering patterns in higher education by investigating the underlying ‘narratives’ of public management reform and their variation or combination from one European nation state to another. Three main narratives of public services reform are discussed: the New Public Management (NPM), the Network governance and the Neo-Weberian narrative. For each narrative, the authors try to predict some ‘signs and symptoms’ that should be observed in higher education. Drawing on this reflection, the authors finally suggest further research perspectives which could be developed.

Redefinition of the relationships between academics and their university

This paper primarily deals with the relationships between academics and their university in European countries. The aim of this paper is therefore not to produce new results but provide a synthesis of the main trends that can be identified from the literature and then suggest what can be borrowed from sociological theories to highlight the on-going evolutions. The first section of the paper reviews the main results to be drawn from previous research on this issue and focuses on the management of academic careers and the management of academic activities at the university level. The second section suggests alternative interpretative frameworks to be borrowed from sociological theory in order to complete the already existing research and develop new perspectives to explain and interpret these changes in the relationships between academics and their institutions. Four perspectives are successively explored particularly useful here: a sociology of work; a labor market perspective; an analysis in terms of careers and trajectories and finally considerations about the traditional tension between organizations and professions.     

European academic labor markets in transition

Even if convergences are to be observed among the orientations adopted by higher education policies in European countries, they still are characterized by strong national features. One of the most striking national patterns of each system is its academic labor market, salaries, status, recruitment procedures, workloads, career patterns, promotion rules, being very different from one country to another. Nevertheless, specific national academic labor markets are experiencing a common evolution that can be summed up by the emergence of more regulated internal labor markets. At the same time, the qualification of the academic production (knowledge) as a public good is questioned and academic activities rely less on individual autonomy than before. Two main transformations can be mentioned: the development of individual assessment and incentive devices in universities and the increasing role of higher education institutions in the issues previously in the domain of the academic profession. The paper relies on a limited number of cases and on empirical studies recently carried out in France and Germany. The evolution engaged in the two countries will be reviewed in order to show that they lead, in different ways, to more regulated ‘‘internal labor markets’’. It will also be argued that this is a general trend. In the last section, the implications linked to this evolution and the questions raised, the role of the academic profession, and the transformation of the status of scientific and pedagogical activities will be discussed.