The meaning-making of educational proficiency in academic hiring: a blind spot in the black box

Abstract

This article develops knowledge about the meaning and value ascribed to educational proficiency in the recruitment of full professors. Hiring processes reflect standards that organize academia and notions of academic scholarship, its value and quality, and agents involved have an institutional gate-keeping function. The empirical data, external peer review letters, is drawn from an old comprehensive research-intensive university, offering educational programmes within a broad range of scientific domains. Although a large variety of aspects are ascribed to educational proficiency, and variations do occur across scientific domains and reviewers, the main finding is a restricted notion. A special value is assigned to the scope of doctoral supervision and teacher training. Internal individual classroom performance is focused, while scholarly interaction is less emphasized. Reviewers primarily serve as gatekeepers of disciplinary research, not the education thereof, thus educational proficiency is no game changer in the context of academic scholarship.

Bibliometrics in Academic Recruitment: A Screening Tool Rather than a Game Changer

“…To understand the use of metrics in recruitment processes we must understand the context in which metrics are used. In this analysis we found stable and disciplinedependent evaluation cultures where the disciplines evaluated the candidates with their own criteria and notion of research quality, also addressed by other studies (Herschberg et al 2018;Levander et al 2019). These evaluation cultures reflected the disciplines' epistemic traditions (Lamont 2009), as, for instance, how economics as a methodologically quantitative oriented discipline placed emphasis more strongly on metrics (Hylmö 2018;Fourcade et al 2015), while sociology, as a more heterogeneous discipline comprising both qualitative and quantitative research traditions (Christensen and Klemsdal 2019), relied more strongly on quantitative research evaluations.…”

“…Additionally, the disciplinary-dependent spread of metrics offers a theoretical understanding of how travelling standards such as metrics are not diffused but rather translated to fit the local context resulting in context-dependent spread as suggested by translation scholars (Czarniawska and Sevón 1996). The disciplinary differences in recruitment processes have been addressed by prior studies (Herschberg et al 2018;Levander et al 2019;Van den Brink and Benschop 2011;Van den Brink et al 2006; Hammarfelt and Rushforth 2017), but not well covered and this study has contributed with important descriptions of the evaluation cultures in sociology, economics, physics and informatics.…”

“…Recruitment processes represent one of the fundamental peer review processes in academia where candidates are evaluated on multiple assessment criteria, such as their research output, teaching experience, language skills, administrative and leadership experience and social skills (Van den Brink and Benschop 2011; Herschberg et al 2018;Levander et al 2019). Of these, a candidate's research output has been identified as the most salient criterion (Van den Brink and Benschop 2011).…”

“…The disciplines educate and employ their own scholars, and at the University of Oslo as site for this study, recruitments are conducted within the disciplines and not at university level. Studies on recruitment processes have also addressed how disciplines evaluate candidates differently, for instance, how candidates' international experience and teaching experience were more valuable qualifications in the natural sciences than in social sciences (Herschberg et al 2018;Levander et al 2019). The use of metrics in research evaluations also strongly depends on the disciplines (Hammarfelt and Rushforth 2017;Wilsdon et al 2015).…”

Qualitative Meta-Analysis of Academic Culture in Higher Education

“…The finding of the study is compiled in Table 1 below: Table 1. Findings of the study Authors Thematic pattern Research method Bektas et al, (2015) Teaching culture and students achievement Meta-analysis research Godor (2016) Teaching culture in higher education: deep and surface dichotomy Q-methodology research design Komolthiti (2017) General culture and its impact on human behavior Qualitative meta-analysis research design Scager, Akkerman, Pilot, & Wubbels(2017) The challenges of teaching Reflective practice research design Downs & Downs (2017) Culture of valuation in higher education Conceptual review paper Arvaja (2018) Teaching and professional identity Qualitative dialogical approach Virtanen & Tynjälä (2018) University students experineces in teaching culture in higher education in particular teaching and learning of generic skills A confirmatory regression analysis Vrieling, Stijnen, & Bastiaens(2018) Successful teaching in higher education: balancing self-regulation with instructional planning Conceptual review paper Fredholm et al(2019) Teaching practice thresholds Hermeneutic narrative inquiry Levander, Forsberg, Elmgren, Levander, & Forsberg(2019) Teaching and meaning making Evaluative research inquiry From Table 1 above, the findings show that the majority of thematic patterns of the academic culture relates to teaching cultures. The teaching culture covers teaching practice, teaching policy, teaching planning, teaching experiences, teaching thresholds, and successful teaching cultures.…”