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Handling Multiple Institutional Logics in Professorial Recruitment

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Abstract

Traditionally, professorial recruitment has been controlled by scholars themselves selecting the best qualified candidates as new member of the academic community according to scientific criteria. Recent studies have, however, documented that recruitment has become increasingly influenced by managers and HR personnel who approach professorial recruitment as a strategic opportunity to satisfy organizational needs following a strategic organizational logic. Thus, today professorial recruitment is shaped by both an academic and an organisational logic. However, the complex interplay between these logics and how this complexity is handled remains unclear. Drawing on interviews and semi-confidential reports from professorial recruitment processes at Norwegian universities, we show that recruitment is a sequential decision-making process and that different logics dominate different phases of the process. Sequential decision-making eases tension, meaning that multiple logics can operate harmoniously if appropriately separated. However, we also document that the sequential problem-solving has altered the power balance between the logics, leading to a moderately increased reliance on organisational logic.

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Notes

  1. The selection criteria in the table are not ranked in order of importance.

  2. Norwegian universities primarily announce associate professor positions but not professor positions. Thus, most of the recruitments involved associate professor announcements; there were only a few announcements at the professorial level.

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Acknowledgements

The author is affiliated with the Centre for Research Quality and Policy Impact Studies (R-Quest) funded by the Research Council of Norway, Grant Number 256223. The paper has been presented at the NEON Conference 2020, EGOS Conference 2021, ECPR Conference 2021 and R-quest workshops. A special thanks to Taran Thune, Tobias Bach, Tom Christiansen, Siri B. Borlaug, Nicoline Frølich, and Lars Klemsdal for comments on the paper.

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  1. Oslo Metropolitan University, Oslo Business School, Oslo, Norway

    Ingvild Reymert

  2. Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Education (NIFU), Oslo, Norway

    Ingvild Reymert

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 4, 5 and 6.

Table 4 Overview of documents included in the analysis
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Table 5 Interview data. Respondents discipline and university affiliation.
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Table 6 Interview data. Respondents position.
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Reymert, I. Handling Multiple Institutional Logics in Professorial Recruitment. High Educ Policy 37, 89–115 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41307-022-00294-w

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