Abstract
This paper studies the different biographic pathways to an economics and business studies professor position between 1957 and 2000 on the specific case of Switzerland. It focuses on the accumulation and conversion of capitals during academic trajectories, and their relation to three types of resources: scientific reputation, network relations, and internationality. Based on an original biographical database of 411 professors and an innovative use of sequence analysis and multinomial logistic regression, it shows that the three main principles of career structuration divide them between (1) academic and extra-academic trajectories, (2) “standard” positions and executive positions in influent academic organizations, and (3) according to the timing of the accession to a professor position (“early” vs. “slower” appointments). It also shows that careers are increasingly academic between 1957 and 2000. Academic only and long full professor trajectories are linked to reputation in the scientific field (through citations in “prestigious” journals) and internationality of the professors’ profile, while an earlier appointment as professor is associated to developed scientific collaboration networks. Relatively long careers in executive positions in influent academic organizations are linked to important connections to economic, political, and administrative “elite” members (through the supervision of their PhD) as well as scientific expertise for the state, while extra-academic careers only lead to subordinate (associate) professor positions and no detention of other resources within economics and business studies whatsoever.
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Notes
Capitals are forms of resources involved in systemic processes allowing their garnering by those who possess them (Savage et al. 2005).
A field is a more or less autonomous space within the social space. Inside, agents struggle for its specific capital, which enables them to occupy a dominant position (Savage and Silva 2013).
A habitus is a system of embodied dispositions, which organizes the ways individuals act, think, feel, and perceive (Bourdieu 1990).
The space of the teachers in higher education institutions, mostly universities.
The scientific field corresponds to the field centered around a scientific discipline, sub-discipline, or transdisciplinary subject. It differs from the academic field, centered around universities.
The “Swiss Elite Database”, developed at the University of Lausanne by the Swiss Elite Observatory (https://www.unil.ch/obelis/en/home.html).
This project was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and was supervised by Felix Bühlmann, André Mach, and Thomas David.
Fifteen professors were removed in 1980 and 62 in 2000.
Nonetheless, we have run four logistic regressions with the same variables. The results of each of these four models point each time in the same direction as the multinomial model.
The youngest professor of the 2000 cohort was 50 in 2015 when the data were collected.
We use a substitution-cost matrix (with costs comprised between 0 and 4) following an academic hierarchy logic. To focus on the transitions between academic post-doctoral and professorial (as well as extra-academic) positions and not to over-evaluate full professor positions, which tend to be the longest through their duration, we set the insertion and deletion costs at 3 (see Abbott and Tsay 2000).
Other variables such as social background (parents’ occupation) and marital status were not available during the collection process. One could find quite curious that sex is rarely mentioned in this article. This responds to several logics. On the one hand, women are so underrepresented until 2000 (only 18 women—4% of the professors) that it is difficult to obtain robust results out of this small group. However, when looking at Table 3, we see that this “over-selected” group of women often detains more dominant resources than their male counterparts. Probably as a result of these logics, no gendered effect can be observed in the regression outputs. On the other hand, we are currently trying to disentangle these gendered dynamics on the more recent period after 2000, when more women have been appointed as professors. Very preliminary results can be found in Rossier (2019) and other publications will follow on the subject.
Since only less than 5% of the academic power positions (institutional capital) are not accompanied by a professor position, we consider these as such.
We have run a Hausman-McFadden independence of irrelevant alternatives test to evaluate if using four categories for the dependent variable instead of three is consistent. Since the dependent variable stems from a hierarchical clustering, we compared our multinomial model and a model with clusters 3 and 4 merged into one category, following the logic of the clustering tree (Fig. 2). The results are Chisq. = − 42.965, df = 28, p value = 1. This means that the solution with 4 clusters is more efficient.
Sixteen percent of the individuals of cluster 3 are part of the Swiss economic elites (see definition above), 14% of cluster 1, and 7% of both clusters 2 and 4. Ten percent of cluster 3 are part of the political or administrative elites, 6% of cluster 1, 2% of cluster 4, and 0% of cluster 2.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Pierre Benz for his help during all the writing process, as well as Felix Bühlmann, André Mach, and Thiago Dumont Oliveira for their comments on an earlier version of this paper, and Yves Gingras for his precious suggestions. Furthermore, I thank Matteo Antonini for his valuable help during the revision process, and also Amal Tawfik and Jacob Aagaard Lunding. Finally, I thank the three anonymous reviewers and the editors for their suggestions that improved this article significantly.
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Rossier, T. Accumulation and conversion of capitals in professorial careers. The importance of scientific reputation, network relations, and internationality in economics and business studies. High Educ 80, 1061–1080 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-020-00508-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-020-00508-3