Musselin, C. (2004), 'Towards a European Academic Labour Market? Some Lessons Drawn from Empirical Studies on Academic Mobility', Higher Education 48: 55-78
In Europe, academic mobility has a long tradition which began with the birth of the European universities in the middle ages. Recently, European policies were strongly oriented towards the promotion of student and academic mobility and the creation of research networks and projects within Europe. Nevertheless, academic labour markets in Europe remain highly national and many obstacles hinder the development of European careers and the europeanisation/internationalisation of academic recruitments.
Two different perspectives are developed in this paper. First we document the strong divergences among the national recruitment and careers processes within Europe and the problems raised by this situation.
Second, we draw on two empirical studies we conducted on academic mobility, the first one, led in 1995 in France, Germany and the UK and the second this year in France.
Both studies show that most post-docs conceived their foreign experience as a personal strategy and aimed at improving their chances for recruitment in their own country. Within Europe, foreign country careers are still an exception due to accidental opportunities. (© Musselin)
Musselin, C. (2005), 'European Academic Labor Markets in Transition', Higher Education 49: 135-54
Even if convergences are to be observed among the orientations adopted by higher education policies in European countries, they still are characterized by strong national features.
One of the most striking national patterns of each system is its academic labor market, salaries, status, recruitment procedures, workloads, career patterns, promotion rules, being very different from one country to another.
Nevertheless, specific national academic labor markets are experiencing a common evolution that can be summed up by the emergence of more regulated internal labor markets.
At the same time, the qualification of the academic production (knowledge) as a public good is questioned and academic activities rely less on individual autonomy than before.
Two main transformations can be mentioned: the development of individual assessment and incentive devices in universities, and the increasing role of higher education institutions in the issues previously in the domain of the academic profession. The paper relies on a limited number of cases and on empirical studies recently carried out in France and Germany.
The evolution engaged in the two countries is reviewedto show that they lead, in different ways, to more regulated 'internal labor markets’. It is also argued that this is a general trend.
In the last section, the implications linked to this evolution and the questions raised, the role of the academic profession, and the transformation of the status of scientific and pedagogical activities are discussed. (© Musselin)
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