Academic Hiring Networks and Institutional Prestige: A Case Study of Canadian Sociology

Abstract

This article examines the academic job market for Canadian sociology through its PhD exchange network. Using an original data set of employed faculty members in 2015 (N = 1,157), I map the hiring relationships between institutions and analyze the observed network structure. My findings show that institutional prestige is a likely organizing force within this network, reflective of a disproportionate number of faculty coming from a few centralized high‐status institutions, as well as predominantly downward flows in hiring patterns. However, further investigation is needed to understand the role of prestige in Canadian higher education, which has been previously characterized as having a flat social structure. This requires attention toward the interrelationships between institutional prestige, scholarly competence, and department size situated within a segmented academic field in Canada. Overall, this study aims to encourage collective self‐reflection and motivate discourse about status‐based inequalities in our own discipline.

Quantifying hierarchy and dynamics in US faculty hiring and retention

“…Prestige plays a central role in structuring the US professoriate. Analyses of faculty hiring networks, which map who hires whose graduates as faculty, show unambiguously in multiple fields that prestigious departments supply an outsized proportion of faculty, regardless of whether prestige is measured by an extrinsic ranking or reputation scheme [11][12][13] or derived from the structure of the faculty hiring network itself [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29] . Prestigious departments also exhibit 'social closure' 15 by excluding those who lack prestige, facilitated by relatively stable hierarchies over time, both empirically 17 and in mathematical models of self-reinforcing network dynamics 30,31 .…”

Working the Project: Research Proposals and Everyday Practices for Emerging Feminist Researchers

“…Conceptualizing universities as places of feminist struggle—dynamic sites of power, privilege, resistance, and struggle (Bannerji 1992), we hope our reflections contribute to ongoing, collective feminist efforts of valuing women's (academic) work and disrupting the ruling relations of academe. Following recent studies that explore how diverse students in diverse social locations navigate and resist the social relations of academe (Aubrecht 2012; Amell 2016; Chandler 2014; Grayson 2019; Hampton 2016; Nevin 2019), we hope our research and thinking—here and together—contributes to uncovering and transforming both the everyday work that we do and how academia “works.”…”

The Role of Early-Career University Prestige Stratification on the Future Academic Performance of Scholars

“…The main approaches for ranking universities by prestige are input-output (Debackere and Rappa, 1995;Chan et al, 2002;Kalaitzidakis et al, 2003;Oyer, 2008;Buela-Casal et al, 2012), survey (Abbott and Barlow, 1972;Cyrenne and Grant, 2009;Moodie, 2009;Olcay and Bulu, 2017), and network-based measures (Barnett et al, 2010;Cowan, and Rossello 2018;Zhu and Yan 2017;Nevin 2019). Some of the most popular input-output based measures use bibliometric indicators.…”