Controlling the Future of Academe: Academic and Managerial Logics in Professorial Recruitment

Abstract

This thesis explores the dynamics between professional and managerial logics in professorial recruitment through historical institutional and neo-institutional perspectives. This dynamic is studied with a mixed methods approach that includes analysis of confidential recruitment reports from 66 recruitment processes in four disciplines at three Norwegian universities from 2000 to 2017, interviews, and crossnational survey data from five countries. This unique data set opens the black box of what happens inside these confidential processes, which are generally not open to public scrutiny. The thesis reveals how academic recruitment processes are primarily anchored in disciplinary evaluative cultures and are highly robust processes dominated by academic logic. At the same time, recruitment are increasingly influenced by managerial logic, however, only moderately. This shows that managerialism has reached the strongholds of professionalism which we least likely expected to adopt managerialism. At the same time the continuous dominance of the academic logic also say something of the limits of the proliferation of managerialism when faced with strong professions.