Constructions of success in academia: an early career perspective

Abstract

Expectations around success in academia vary, and early career academics often receive conflicting messages about what they should concentrate on to achieve promotion or tenure. Taking a social constructionist approach, this paper considers the constructs of objective and subjective career success in academia and shares the perspectives of early career academics in three countries in relation to these narratives. Key findings are that objective career success in academia dominates the literature but remains ill-defined in the minds of the early career academics to whom the measures are applied, and that subjective career success in academia needs both more research attention and more consideration in promotion, tenure, and workload deliberations and policies.

What makes academic careers less insecure? The role of individual-level antecedents

“…For instance, they should encourage and enable individuals to devote large amounts of time to research and networking activities. This implication resonates with previous research highlighting that stories of career success in academia should be made transparent to facilitate early-career researchers navigating their careers (Baruch 2013;Sutherland 2017). Further, university managers and other actors can enhance the willingness of individuals to be geographically mobile by assisting them in contacting researchers at other institutions, providing financial support for conference visits or temporary stays abroad, and/or by assisting them in managing family obligations.…”

“…Because research is recognised by the scientific community and crucial for academic careers (Drennan et al 2013;Sutherland 2017), we expect that dedicating high amounts of energy and time to research lessens academic insecurity.…”

“…According to this model, individuals preferably choose jobs characterised by high autonomy, understood as individual freedom to decide what tasks to do, and how and when to do them (Hall 2004). Workplace autonomy is an essential characteristic of the academic profession (Baruch and Hall 2004;Gappa et al 2007;Roach and Sauermann 2010;Sutherland 2017). …”

Perceived quality and self‐identity in scholarly publishing

“…This part of self-identity translates to, and can be defined as, fulfilling the role of a researcher successfully. Given that success in academia often includes the number of publications in highly ranked journals (for example, Sutherland, 2017), it is expected that researchers' concept of career-self will have the largest positive effect on the journal impact variable, while also significantly and positively contributing to both visibility and content quality. The premise of situation or context-specific identity salience is perhaps especially clear when considering career advancement within academia.…”

Corrigendum

“…1080/03075079.2016. 1221650 Since the publication of this article, it has been noted that the following paragraph (from page 1873) did not carry the appropriate quotation marks, and therefore did not properly reference the source material (Sutherland 2015).…”