Abstract
While the studies of Early Career Researchers (ECRs) have contributed politically important insights into factors hindering ECRs, they have not yet achieved a theoretical understanding of the causal mechanisms that are at work in the transition from dependent to independent research. This paper positions the early career phase in a theoretical framework that combines approaches from the sociology of science and organisational sociology and emphasises the transitional process. In this framework, the early career phase is considered as containing a status passage from the apprentice to the colleague state of their career in their scientific communities. In order to capture the mechanisms underlying this transition, it is important to analyse the interactions of these careers as they unfold over time. The usefulness of this approach is demonstrated with a pilot study of Australian ECRs. We show (a) that misalignments of the three careers stretch the transition phase; (b) that the two major factors affecting the transition are a successful PhD and a research-intensive phase prior to normal academic employment; and (c) that the most important condition hindering the transition is the lack of time for research. It can be concluded that as a result of a ‘market failure’ of the university system, the transition from dependent to independent research is currently being relocated to a phase between the PhD and the first academic position.
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Notes
See Gläser et al. (2004) on the emergence and importance of ‘helper’ roles in a research organisation.
The lack of data is due to the character of the study as a secondary analysis. If we had ‘operationalised’ our criteria ex ante and focused part of the interviews on them, a categorisation would have been possible.
This composition cannot be taken as representative of ECRs because the selection of interviewees in the main project focused on staff in teaching and research positions. Since more than one fourth of the academic staff at Australian universities is in research-only positions (AVCC 2006), a bigger share of ECRs than represented in our sample can be expected to be in postdoctoral or other research-only positions.
One of those two was the postdoctoral fellow, the other a geologist who reported a relatively low teaching load of 7–8 contact hours.
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Laudel, G., Gläser, J. From apprentice to colleague: The metamorphosis of Early Career Researchers. High Educ 55, 387–406 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-007-9063-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-007-9063-7